A wonderful encounter with "glowy things"

Bren and I were in Rochester, MA the other night to spend a couple of hours with our grandchildren, Jeremy and Amanda. It was wonderfully clear, they have a nice dark site, and so I brought along the Orion 6-inch Dobsonian to do a little observing.

It was great fun, but for me the highlight was when I asked Jere what he saw and he said something like: "And lots more of those glowy things."

Ahh- "glowy things!" To know why that pleases me so, read my comments recently about the problems of concepts in "Do you see what I see!". "Star" is a concept - "glowy things" is a wonderful, descriptive phrase as only a nine-year-old would see the world. From now on, as I do my observing, I'm going to remind myself that I'm looking at lots of "glowy things."

For the record - and to preserve several good links I might otherwise forget, here's my email report to them of the observing session.

Hi:

Great fun observing with both of you and Nanny Saturday night. Here’s a brief review of what we did and saw.

We used a 6-inch Newtonian Reflector on a Dobsonian mount. We used eyepieces that gave 30X and 96X magnification.

The first thing you looked at was M45 – the Pleiades – or, as the Japanese know it, Subaru! The great English poet, Lord Tennyson, wrote of these:

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of Fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

It is a wonderful little cluster of young stars – or as Jere so aptly put it, “glowy things<” - all held together by their common gravity. You can see a nice picture and read all about them here:

http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m045.html

Next we looked at M42, the Great Orion Nebula. Stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium, and that’s what you are looking at here – a big cloud of hydrogen and helium with some dust of heavier elements mixed in. The 4 stars near the center are the Trapezium. The brightest of those stars is the most powerful, and these stars have blown a hole in the gases, which is why they are so easily visible. Also, the energy from the new-born stars is causing the gases to glow, else we would not see them. It’s about 1,500 light years from us. Read more about this nebula here:

http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m042.html

(Oh – two things about the pictures you see of astronomical objects. First, they do not always look like your memory of what you saw because astronomical telescopes sometimes flip things from left to right and/or turn them upside down. The telescope we were using does both. But the picture you look at may be right side up. Second, pictures are taken with huge telescopes and exposed for a long time, so they show a lot more – especially more color. I find pictures very interesting – but nothing beats seeing something for real – and there are subtle ways your eyes can actually show you more than the camera does. )

We then looked at the planet Saturn, which is going to be especially pretty all spring. It is also the most spectacular planet to see in a small telescope because of its rings. You also saw one of Saturn’s moons, Titan. When Galileo looked at Saturn, his telescope wasn’t quite good enough to show the rings. He thought, instead, that there were two large moons on either side of the planet that never changed position! He would have loved to have seen what you saw ;-)

Here’s a good place to learn more about Saturn:

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Saturn

We also looked at two very nice double stars. A lot of stars have one or two companions that are linked together by gravity. The first double star you looked at was Gamma Andromedae, or Almach. The brightest star was yellow or white, the other one blue. It’s hard to see color in stars and people often disagree on the colors they do see. But it’s much easier to notice color when you get two stars of very different color very close together, which is why this is a fun double star to look at.

The second double we looked at was Gamma Arietis or Mesarthim. Both of these stars are white and almost exactly the same brightness. Some people call this double the “cat’s eye double.”

Finally, we looked at M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. It might have just looked like a little blurry blob, but just think – what we were seeing was an entire galaxy of about 300,000 million stars. The light from those stars has been traveling about 2.5 million years to reach us, which means we were actually seeing this galaxy as it appeared 2.5 million years ago! You can see some pictures and learn more about it here:

http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m045.html

Amanda and I stayed out longer. We also looked ar M35, another cluster, which has a wonderful cascade of stars in it. With the naked eye we also looked at the Hyades cluster in Taurus – 151 light years away, the Pleiades in Taurus – about 400 light years away – and mentally compared those to M35, about 2,800 light years away. All three clusters are roughly the same size, so by looking at all three we could get an idea of what a difference it makes to be either 151, 400, or 2,800 light years away. (Amanda – I think I told you it was about 1,500 light years away. My memory failed me. I should have said 2,800!)

Learn more about M35 here:

http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m035.html

We also looked at the North Star and Amanda correctly measured the distance from the horizon to it as about “four fists” or 40 degrees. (It is really about 41 degrees – which is also our latitude.) And we identified the “pointer stars” in the Big Dipper which point to the North Star and make it easy to find. There’s a real cool photo and diagram showing this here:

http://www.astropix.com/HTML/C_SPRING/URSAS.HTM

Be sure to move your cursor over the picture to see the “pointers,”

That’s it. Sure was fun. Hope you can come out to Driftway Observatory some nice clear night and use the 15-inch telescope to see much more. You might even bring Mom or Dad along ;-)