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 Make Some History with a Tele Vue
Telescope of Your Own!

Image courtesy of Don Bruns

Some Tele Vue

Telescopes have only

Illustration of the Tele Vue-NP101is
image identifying qualifying stars
used to measure positional deviation
due to the Sun’s gravity. I t took Dr. Don Bruns
two-and-a-half minutes
to create history with a Tele
a day to make

history, others have

Vue-NP101is. During totality of the 2017 total solar eclipse, he imaged a lifetime!
the star field around the Sun in an attempt to make the most accurate
optical measurement to date of Einstein’s prediction of starlight deflection. His goal was
to use off-the-shelf equipment available to any amateur astronomer. Hear Don present his
history-making results, and why he chose a Tele Vue telescope, at NEAF 2018; then stop by
the Tele Vue booth to see the scope, speak with Don, and choose a Tele Vue telescope of your
own! Whether you make family or scientific history with it, Tele Vue’s line of APO refractors
Booths 524-526
are heirloom-quality instruments, built in New York, to stand the test of time and challenges
of space! Follow our blog at Televue.com for Don’s and other Tele Vue owners’ stories.

Tele Vue ® 32 Elkay Dr., Chester, New York 10918 (845) 469-4551.
@televueoptics
televue.com
Vi s i o n a r y
 Online Content Code: ASY1805
Enter this code at: www.astronomy.com/code
to gain access to web-exclusive content
MAY 2018
VOL. 46, NO. 5

RON MILLER FOR ASTRONOMY

CONTENTS
ON THE COVER
30 For years, planetary scientists
thought our solar system formed
in a simple way. Now the picture
is more complex.
FEATURES
22 COVER STORY 38
New insights into how StarDome and
the solar system formed Path of the Planets COLUMNS
Recent observations reveal that RICHARD TALCOTT;
Strange Universe 10
chaos and mayhem ruled our ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROEN KELLY
BOB BERMAN
planetary system’s irst days.
JESSE EMSPAK 44 Secret Sky 14
Ask Astro 58 STEPHEN JAMES O’MEARA
28 Black hole jets. Observe Mars at its best For Your Consideration 16
An organically grown It’s been 15 years since the JEFF HESTER
planet definition 46 Red Planet was this close and
Should we really deine a word Why do galaxies align? this big. Set up your scope, and Binocular Universe 18
by voting? KIRBY D. RUNYON he matter in our universe take advantage of this apparition. PHIL HARRINGTON
AND S. ALAN STERN forms ilaments and threads like MICHAEL E. BAKICH Observing Basics 70
a grand cosmic web, tugging GLENN CHAPLE
30 galaxies and clusters into place 62
Seeking the unknown along the way. MICHAEL WEST Guide your camera QUANTUM GRAVITY
in cosmic data to great shots
In an era of large-scale surveys, 52 A variety of mounts and
Snapshot 8
citizen science projects, and new Leo’s exotic techniques can help you create Astro News 12
machine-learning techniques, deep-sky gems stunning images. Which one
unexpected discoveries should be Beyond the brightest galaxies, is for you? MIKE REYNOLDS IN EVERY ISSUE
expected. MARA JOHNSON-GROH the Lion contains many
challenging deep-sky targets. From the Editor 6
66
36 STEPHEN JAMES O’MEARA
Capture video with Astro Letters 11
Sky This Month this low-cost camera New Products 68
Jupiter shines brilliantly. Lots of accessories make the
MARTIN RATCLIFFE AND Advertiser Index 69
RunCam Night Eagle an easy
ALISTER LING
match for any telescope or Reader Gallery 72
camera lens. RICHARD P. WILDS Breakthrough 74

ONLINE Astronomy (ISSN 0091-6358, USPS 531-350) is

published monthly by Kalmbach Publishing

FAVORITES Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P. O. Box 1612,

Waukesha, WI 53187–1612. Periodicals post-
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with the staff of celestial events. photos from the science and
informative videos, and more. Astronomy. our readers. the hobby.

4 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 Black Holes, Tides,
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9. Nudge—Perturbations of Orbits
10. Resonance—Surprises in the Intricate Dance
11. The Million-Body Problem
12. The Billion-Year Battle
13. From Forces to Fields
14. The Falling Laboratory
15. Spacetime in Zero Gravity
16. Spacetime Tells Matter How to Move
17. Matter Tells Spacetime How to Curve
18. Light in Curved Spacetime
19. Gravitomagnetism and Gravitational Waves
20. Gravity’s Horizon—Anatomy of a Black Hole
21. Which Universe Is Ours?
22. Cosmic Antigravity—Inflation and Dark Energy
23. The Force of Creation
24. The Next Revolution

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FROM THE EDITOR
BY DAV I D J. E I C H E R
O
ne of the most
fundamental ques-
tions we innately
have as humans is
the simple notion
of where we came from. In
astronomy, that question
can be asked on a variety
of scales — where did we as
creatures come from? Where
did our solar system come
from? Our galaxy? he uni-
verse at large?
This month’s cover story
by science journalist Jesse
Emspak takes on the ques-
tion of the origin of the solar
system. For many years,
astronomers thought they
had a neat answer, with the
Sun and its retinue of planets
having coalesced from a
dusty disk, the debris clear-
ing out once our star began
nuclear fusion. From there, it
was a simple matter of Jupiter
dominating the gas giants, by
happenstance, and Earth
taking on the role as the most
massive of the terrestrial
planets by pure luck. They
also believed that our solar
system is typical, and that
most solar systems around us
ought to resemble ours.
Studies over the past
few years have upset the
apple cart of how our solar
system formed and its early
Follow the Dave’s Universe blog:
www.Astronomy.com/davesuniverse
Follow Dave Eicher on Twitter: @deicherstar
6 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
How our
solar system
formed
history. Emspak’s story tells
the sordid tale as it is now
shaping up for planetary
scientists.
The idea that our solar
system’s early history must be
very different from the con-
ventional notion came along
suddenly. Fueled by com-
puter modeling and by obser-
vations made by the Kepler
space telescope, the new view
of the solar system is radical
compared with the old.
Scientists now know that
protoplanets bounced around
the early solar system “like
billiard balls,” in Emspak’s
words, and that our solar
system is very different from
most others we see around
us. The so-called Late Heavy
Bombardment pummeled the
inner solar system, and we
can still see its effects on the
ancient surfaces of Mercury
and the Moon.
Compared with the mod-
els, the real Mars in our
solar system is far less mas-
sive than astronomers would
expect it to be. Scads of
small objects like asteroids
and Kuiper Belt objects have
been scattered into eccen-
tric, oddball orbits.
Something catastrophic or
extremely energetic had to
have pushed these bodies
into their weirdo orbits, and
planetary scientists now
believe that migration of
planets played a major role
in the early history of our
solar system.
Many planetary scientists
now believe that Jupiter
formed relatively close to the
Sun and pushed outward
early on, clearing a lane and
shoving material outward,
as it also left a “tail” of
debris in its wake. Saturn
then formed, and both plan-
ets moved inward in a kind
of spirograph wobble, fling-
ing other objects inward and
outward. After depleting
material near them, the two
largest planets made their
way outward once again.
The details of how we got
the solar system we have
today are incredible. These
are still ideas being worked
on, but they clearly show
that forming the solar sys-
tem was a far more compli-
cated task than anyone
imagined until just a few
years ago.
Yours truly,
David J. Eicher
Editor
Editor David J. Eicher
Art Director LuAnn Williams Belter
EDITORIAL
Managing Editor Kathi Kube
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ART
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Kruesi, Ray Jayawardhana, Alister Ling, Steve Nadis, Stephen
James O’Meara, Tom Polakis, Martin Ratcliffe, Mike D.
Reynolds, Sheldon Reynolds, Erika Rix, Raymond Shubinski
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Buzz Aldrin, Marcia Bartusiak, Timothy Ferris, Alex Filippenko,
Adam Frank, John S. Gallagher lll, Daniel W. E. Green, William K.
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May, S. Alan Stern, James Trefil
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AstronomyMag AstronomyMagazine +astronomymagazine
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Life on Mars
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David A. Weintraub

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and the moral issues confronting us as
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QG
HOT BYTES >>
TRENDING
TO THE TOP
LUNAR LAVA

near the Moon’s

QUANTUM
north pole may lead
to an underground
GRAVITY
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSE THIS MONTH . . .

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MAXED OUT
Non-rotating neutron
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EXTREME CLOSE-UP
A new radio image of
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SNAPSHOT

J. WILLIAM SCHOPF/UCLA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF EVOLUTION AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE; TOP FROM LEFT: NASA/LRO/SETI/MARS INSTITUTE/P. LEE; GOETHE
Life in the
universe
may be
common
New research from experts
in early life on Earth
points toward life in the
universe at large.

J. William Schopf is an old friend

of Astronomy magazine who has
consulted with us in the past.
He’s also one of the world’s
sharpest researchers on the ori-

UNIVERSITY/L. REZZOLLA; ANU/CSIRO

gin of life and the existence of
ancient microfossils. Recently,
Schopf and his team at UCLA,
along with scientists at the
University of Wisconsin, released
studies of early microfossils that
could shed light on how common
life is in the universe. This fossil microorganism from Western Australia is 3.465 billion years old and suggests that life may be spread throughout the cosmos.
The oldest known microfossils
on Earth come from Western gas, and two more used methane common throughout the cosmos. shown that there were sulfur
Australia and date to 3.465 bil- to build their cellular walls. “By 3.465 billion years ago,” users 3.4 billion years ago as well.”
lion years ago. In a study pub- In a world of growing under- said Schopf, “life was already To Schopf and his team, the
lished in December 2017 in the standing that early, primitive diverse on Earth; that’s clear — new evidence adds credence to
Proceedings of the National microbes on Earth were diverse, primitive photosynthesizers, the fact that life formed quickly
Academy of Sciences, Schopf and the team suggests that this diver- methane producers, methane on early Earth, and also under-
his team report that two species sity, coupled with the increasing users. These are the first data that scores that primitive life evolved
they studied appeared to undergo number of known exoplanets and show the very diverse organisms quickly into more advanced
a primitive form of photosynthe- the sheer number of stars in the at that time in Earth’s history, microorganisms.
sis, another produced methane universe, points toward life being and our previous research has — David J. Eicher

8 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
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 STRANGEUNIVERSE
BY BOB BERMAN
Apathy Now!
Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life
really change the world?
A
re you ready for some
exciting news about
apathy?
Back when Dan
Goldin was
administrator of NASA, his
sister was one of my students.
She thoughtfully told me he
totally loved Discover magazine
— especially my astronomy
page. Pleased to hear it, I fol-
lowed him closely after that,
which is why I vividly remem-
ber August 6, 1996, when he
called a press conference to
make a jaw-dropping
announcement: NASA’s analy-
sis of the Antarctic martian
meteorite ALH84001 revealed
the possibility of life. Life on
Mars! It finally happened!
I quickly turned to my long-
suffering wife and yelled: “Now
we’ll find out!”
I’d long suspected that the
endlessly repeated adage that
“everything will change if we
find extraterrestrial life” was
wrong, that it gave our apathetic
citizenry too much credit, that
people wouldn’t care if geeky
scientists found evidence of
some microscopic or plantlike
organisms in a distant place.
Even today, that adage is still
repeated like a mantra. Bill Nye’s
December 3 op-ed piece in The
New York Times said the same
thing: finding extraterrestrial life
would profoundly alter our
everyday attitudes.
Goldin’s announcement
wasn’t about some distant exo-
planet. This was Mars. It was
next door. So I figured, now
we’ll finally know how the pub-
lic reacts.
I don’t want to say I told you
so. Actually, that’s not true. I do
BROWSE THE “STRANGE UNIVERSE” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/Berman.
10 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
want to say that. Because as I
paid close attention the next
day, nobody talked about the
life-on-Mars discovery. People
didn’t care. (That Goldin’s
announcement later proved too
optimistic isn’t relevant here.) It
was one more sign our culture
is scientifically apathetic.
Fast forward to 2017.
Someone in Sweden posted
gorgeous Facebook photos of
atmospheric ice crystal phe-
nomena. They showed halos,
the upper tangent arc, the par-
helic circle, and other cool stuff.
Then I read the comments.
“Wake up, folks,” wrote the
first guy. “Here’s proof the gov-
ernment is releasing metals
into the atmosphere!”
The next commentator
agreed. “Absolutely! Fifteen
years ago I saw a ring around
the Sun for the first time. Now
Ignorance of science
seems only to be growing.
I often see rings. The govern-
ment is poisoning the air.”
“You’re wrong,” I said to her
in my mind. “Early on, you
never noticed rings —which are
called halos, by the way —
because you didn’t watch the
sky and don’t know about
refraction phenomena. Now
you’re aware of rings, so you
see them because they’re com-
mon. And, incidentally, metal-
lic particles can’t refract light
and wouldn’t resemble ice crys-
tal effects. They wouldn’t form
halos in the first place.”
It’s no use. Ignorance of sci-
ence seems only to be growing.
The meteorite ALH84001 is a 4.5 billion-year-old chunk of Mars’ crust that arrived
on Earth about 13,000 years ago. In 1996, NASA announced that the meteorite
might contain fossils of early martian life — a statement that didn’t have a major
impact on society or its view of science. NASA/JSC/STANFORD UNIVERSITY
When I was hired to run
astronomy programs at the big
2015 Wanderlust yoga festival
in Killington, Vermont, a staff
member met me at the office.
“Did you see the news?” she
asked. “The Earth is flat.”
“What? Earth isn’t flat.”
“Yes it is. They’ve proven it.
It’s all over the net.”
“You don’t have to believe
me,” I said. “Do you have any
friends in California?”
“Yes.”
“Then during the next sunset
here, phone your California
friends. They’ll tell you their
Sun is halfway up the sky. Yet
it’s on the horizon here. So
Earth can’t be flat.”
Her face had a “don’t bother
me” expression. I get the rea-
soning: Our government lies. So
if it insists Earth is a ball, it
means Earth is flat.
Call it fake science or any-
thing you want. It’s spreading.
Climate change is not real. We
never went to the Moon. White
lines in the sky are from gov-
ernment programs. A planet
named Nibiru is on a collision
course with Earth. Armageddon
is coming. Aliens are already
1 cm
here. Astronomers are keeping
everything secret.
The problem lies deeper than
the sad reality that fewer teen-
agers are participating in out-
door hands-on nature hobbies
like astronomy, bird-watching,
or canoeing. Nonetheless, many
are glued to screens with the
potential to believe the fakery.
Our response? We mustn’t
try to bring young people into
real science too quickly.
Instead, reality should be intro-
duced incrementally. The first
step is a return to the situation
a decade ago, which was mere
indifference. That’s an achiev-
able objective. To help, we’re
offering a new bumper sticker:
“Apathy Now!”
We’ve founded NAP — the
National Apathy Promotion.
Our goal is to get 1 million
teenagers a year to say, “Don’t
bother me with astronomy.” If
you donate, my friends, we can
replace the current insistence
that Mars is a secret alien mili-
tary base and that congressmen
are reptilians (no joke, Google
it) with a return to the NASA
glory years of “I don’t care.”
It’s a lofty goal. But with
your help, we can succeed.
Join me and Pulse of the Planet’s
Jim Metzner in my new podcast,
Astounding Universe, at
http://astoundinguniverse.com.
ASTROLETTERS
An authentic solar experience
I really enjoyed David Eicher’s November
2017 editor’s letter, “Making light of gal-
axies,” and the idea of viewing the real
thing through a telescope. I live where
there are fairly dark skies and sometimes
try to challenge myself by searching for
deep-sky objects, such as nebulae and
faint galaxies. It’s not always about how
bright and beautiful the object appears,
but rather knowing that you are looking
at a galaxy that could be 58 million light-
years away, although it only appears as a
faint smudge through the eyepiece. It can
sometimes be frustrating trying to locate
the fainter objects, but it’s so rewarding
when a deep-sky object is found.
With all the available technology and
access to online viewing, it’s refreshing to
read an article that embraces viewing the
night sky with your own telescope.
— Tom Bryant, Danville, KY
Lone velocity
Astronomy often writes about the velocity
of various bodies traveling through space,
but without indication of what that veloc-
ity is relative to. An assumption is often
possible, such as the Sun for the Voyager
spacecraft or the Milky Way for the
Andromeda Galaxy, but in the Ask Astro
section of the December issue, I read
that the Milky Way is traveling through
space at 1.3 million mph (580 km/s). This
doesn’t make sense unless the reader
knows what the velocity is relative to. In
the future, please encourage your writ-
ers to include a point of reference when
discussing the velocity of bodies moving
through space.
— John Patterson, Hollywood, MD
Astronomy responds
Sorry for any confusion. The speed we
were quoting is relative to the cosmic
background radiation, which serves as a
standard reference frame when consider-
ing the universe as a whole.
We welcome your comments at
Astronomy Letters, P. O. Box 1612,
Waukesha, WI 53187; or email to letters@
astronomy.com. Please include your
name, city, state, and country. Letters
may be edited for space and clarity.
ELLIOT PERLMAN
Stellar holiday décor
We saw the breathtaking totality in
McMinnville, Oregon, in 2017. The glass-
es made for great Christmas tree orna-
ments while we await the 2024 eclipse.
— Elliot Perlman, Providence, RI
From nothing to everything?
Most Christians I know believe in evolu-
tion and in a universe created by the Big
Bang. Because of this, it was with amuse-
ment that I read Mr. Hester’s responses
to criticism of “intelligent design.” The
spectacle of him sallying forth with pen-
nants unfurled to do battle with the straw
man of creationism will stick with me for
a while.
I would have been much more
impressed had he addressed the idea that
in a void without even space, where there
was no place or space for time to elapse in,
amid the infinite timeless nothingness, for
no reason, and at no particular time, tons
of energy exploded (and maybe six to
eight times more dark stuff and maybe 15
times more dark energy) to create a huge
amount of space. Randomly. Out of abso-
lutely nothing. And in such a fashion that
13 some billion years later, here we are
amid black holes and aardvarks and uni-
cycles and liberals and all sorts of other
unlikely phenomena.
Now I’m just a dumb old Iowa farm boy
and retired Army first sergeant, but it
seems to me that although Mr. Hester may
be every bit as clever as he thinks he is, the
rest of us are not nearly as lunkheaded as
he dearly seems to believe.
— Steven Imerman, Springfield, MO
Jeff Hester responds
I’m an Oklahoma boy who spent his teen-
age years sitting on a tractor. I’ve read
the Bible cover to cover. The reader and I
might know and respect some of the same
people. But I write for Astronomy as a
scientist, and think it’s important to do so
without dissimulation.
If only creationism were a straw man!
Many who “believe in” evolution and
the Big Bang accept the historical events
but insist on a Guiding Hand. The
thing is, adding teleology to the mix
rejects the very core of those theories.
Repackaging creationism as “intelligent
design” doesn’t change the leopard’s spots.
How did our universe give rise to tardi-
grades and Trump supporters and other
bizarre creatures? As I have discussed in
several columns, the Second Law of
Thermodynamics and Darwinian evolu-
tion get you there.
The reader raises related questions that
would make for fun conversation over a
beer. What caused the Big Bang? A coun-
terintuitive implication of quantum
mechanics is that events require no direct
cause. From eternal inflation to a collision
between string theory branes, most cred-
ible ideas describe the Big Bang as the
result of a quantum fluctuation. Why does
anything exist? Based on the general form
of field equations, theoretical physicists
argue that absolute nothingness is unsta-
ble. The reader also implicitly raises the
anthropic principle, but I’m out of space to
respond. Stay tuned.
Astronomy’s musical impact
A quick note to say that I really enjoyed
the article in the January issue, “The real
music of the spheres,” about music and
the continual influence and pull that
the heavenly bodies have had on artists
through the centuries. It featured great
information about musical and astronom-
ical history. Thank you!
— Mallory Duff, Hampstead, MD
Correction
The “Wonders of the Big Dog” article on
p. 68 of the January 2018 issue states that
Sirius and its white dwarf companion star,
Sirius B, are separated by 4". However,
they have a maximum separation of 11.2",
which will occur in 2025.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 11
 ASTRONEWS ORIGIN STORY. The first meteorites found to contain both liquid water and complex organic compounds may have
originated from a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, such as Ceres.

MASSIVE ICE DEPOSITS FOUND ON MARS

E
ven though Mars’ atmosphere is just
1 percent as dense as Earth’s, the
Red Planet’s surface still experiences
plenty of weathering and erosion. In
2008, researchers captured a full-
scale avalanche on Mars as material
plunged down a 2,300-foot (700 meters)
slope into a valley. These types of geological
events often expose structures beneath the
martian surface, revealing layers of rock,
dry (carbon dioxide) ice, and even water ice.
In a study published January 11 in
Science, researchers using the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter investigated eight
steep and eroded slopes, known as scarps, at
DEEP BLUE. In this color-enhanced image of an eroding cliff on Mars taken from above, water ice appears in
various sites across Mars. At each spot, they blue. The top third of the image shows the martian surface leading up to the cliff’s edge, while the bottom third
found thick shelves of relatively pure water is the valley below. NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA/USGS
ice as little as 3 feet (1 m) below the surface.
Some of these ice deposits were massive — weathered slopes, the researchers believe the valley below. Based on this, the
more than 330 feet (100 m) thick. the ice is “cohesive and strong.” The team researchers estimated the ice is retreating
Scientists have spotted frozen water on also found that the ice appears banded, horizontally at a rate of a few millimeters
Mars’ surface many times before, but this showing layered variations in its blue color. each year, likely because of exposed ice sub-
is the first time observations have revealed This suggests that the massive ice deposits limating (transforming directly from a solid
so much about its layering, thickness, are composed of many distinct layers that to a gas) as it contacts the thin martian air.
purity, and prevalence. have been squished together over time, pre- The discovery of these large reservoirs of
According to the paper, “the ice exposed serving a record of Mars’ climate history. pure water ice adds yet another piece of
by the scarps likely originated as snow that However, because there are few craters near evidence supporting the increasingly held
transformed into massive ice sheets, now these sites, the authors suggest the ice was theory that water ice not only remains on
preserved beneath less than one to two formed relatively recently, in the past mil- Mars, but also is surprisingly common.
[meters] of dry and ice-cemented dust or lion years or so. Although the ice sheets could obviously
regolith near ±55° latitude.” In 2008, the Although the deposits formed quickly serve as sources of water for future manned
Phoenix Mars lander discovered similar ice (geologically speaking), they also recede a missions to Mars, scientists still need to
deposits along martian scarps, but they tiny bit each summer, the researchers say. characterize them and estimate their size
were in regions much closer to the planet’s In one scarp, the team found that over the first. But with the Mars 2020 rover just a
north pole. course of only three martian years, multiple few years away, the discovery of eight more
Since the ice deposits highlighted in the meter-wide boulders had dislodged them- tantalizing sites ripe for investigation is still
study were found intact along the scarps’ selves from the ice deposits, tumbling into an exciting find. — Jake Parks

Stellar disks
can form rings
without planets
NO PLANET REQUIRED. Astronomers spot
disks of gas and dust around young stars by
placing a “mask” (the dark region in the image’s
center) over the star to block its light. This disk
around the star HD 141569A shows complex
structure; rings and other patterns are often used
as proxies for forming exoplanets, which are
thought to carve out lanes as they grow. But new
NASA/HUBBLE/KONISHI ET AL. 2016

simulations using NASA’s Discover supercomputing

2 arcseconds cluster show that planets are not needed for such
rings to arise. Instead, disk material can develop
structure as a result of exposure to ultraviolet
22 billion miles light from the star. The discovery was announced
(35 billion kilometers) January 11 at the American Astronomical Society
meeting in Washington, D.C. — Alison Klesman

12 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 ASTRONEWS MARTIAN METHANE. New measurements taken by the Curiosity rover indicate that atmospheric methane — a sign
of life on Earth — changes with the seasons on Mars.

A SINGLE BEACON.
QUICK TAKES Cepheid variable star V1 in M31 A Cepheid variable
identified by Edwin
STELLAR STROLL Hubble in the
Walking Among the Stars is a Andromeda Galaxy,
virtual reality project that lets designated V1, allowed
users explore the Cassiopeia A him to measure the
supernova remnant in 3-D. January 26, 2011 galaxy’s distance,
•
LIFE LAG
December 30, 2010 proving that it was not
a nebula inside the
Research suggests the presence December 21, 2010 Milky Way. Cepheid
of life can change a world’s variables change
atmosphere enough to alter brightness predictably
how quickly the planet spins. with time via a
•
TABBY’S BELT
December 17, 2010 relationship called
the Leavitt Law. NASA, ESA,
AND THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM
A circumstellar disk is the most
(STSCI/AURA)
likely explanation for the
periodic dimming of Tabby’s Star
— not an alien megastructure.
•
PULSAR PILOTING
Researchers proved that
spacecraft can navigate
autonomously with a GPS-like
system that tracks narrow
New surveys help calibrate a century-old law
A Cepheid variable star pulsates over Recent work to improve Cepheid vari- “When we looked at a star’s spec-
beams of radiation from pulsars.
•
SPACE SWEATS
hours or days. As its physical size
changes, its temperature, surface
able measurements was presented in
January at the 231st Meeting of the
trum across its entire pulsation cycle,
we found no significant differences
gravity, and brightness change as American Astronomical Society in in the results. … We’re getting reli-
Prolonged periods of
weightlessness cause persistent
well. In the early 1900s, Henrietta Washington, D.C. able results every time we look,” she
fevers in astronauts and Leavitt spotted a relationship Kate Hartman, an undergraduate said in a press release.
significantly increase body between a Cepheid’s brightness and from Pomona College working with That means APOGEE accurately
temperatures during exercise. the time period over which it varies. Rachael Beaton, the NASA Hubble measures the chemical composition
•
ASTROVIROLOGY
This relationship, called the Leavitt
Law, allows astronomers to calculate
and Carnegie-Princeton postdoctoral
fellow at Princeton University, exam-
of Cepheid variables, regardless of
where or when they’re seen. Now
A January paper in Astrobiology the star’s intrinsic brightness and ined Cepheid variables in the Sloan the catalog’s data can be confidently
calls on astronomers to broaden determine the distance to the star. Digital Sky Survey’s Apache Point paired with other up-and-coming
their search for life in the Cepheids remain vital distance indi- Galactic Evolution Experiment surveys, such as Gaia, which mea-
cosmos by also combing space cators and tracers of galactic evolu- (APOGEE) catalog to determine sures distances via parallax, to fur-
for viruses. tion, and it’s important to ensure these whether APOGEE produces reliable ther test and calibrate the Leavitt
•
FIRST LIGHT
stars are mapped and measured accu-
rately in large surveys, where a single
information about these unique stars.
Hartman studied several images of
Law so astronomers can reliably use
Cepheid variables of all compositions
The Keck Observatory’s newest image could catch the star at any ran- the same variable taken over time to to map and study our galaxy and
instrument, the Near-Infrared dom point during its pulsation period. measure the elements in the star. others nearby. — A.K.
Echellette Spectrometer, saw
first light with an image of the
planetary nebula NGC 7027.
•
CLAPPED IN IRON
WHAT’S IN A COMET? FAST
FACT
Kepler has revealed that iron-
rich stars are more likely to host MaS distribution of 67P BUILDING BLOCKS. Recent
shorter-period planets, while results from the Rosetta mission’s The comet 46P/
iron-poor stars tend to have COSIMA instrument team have Wirtanen was
longer-period planets. highlighted the “ingredients” Rosetta’s original
Minerals
•
CASTING CALL 55%
Organic
material
present in Comet 67P/Churyumov-
Gerasimenko, based on analysis of
target, but a
delay in launch
The first six hexagonal segments 45% dust grains emitted as the comet date led the team
of the Extremely Large neared the Sun. Researchers studied a
to select 67P as
Telescope’s 130-foot (39 meters) small subset of 30 grains (out of over
the spacecraft’s
main mirror have been 35,000 collected) that ranged from
0.01–1 millimeter in size, and found destination.
successfully cast.
•
UPPER LIMIT
they all have a similar composition,
revealing the makeup of the comet.
A Johns Hopkins University
Chemical composition of 67P About 45 percent of 67P is organic, making it one of the most
carbon-rich bodies currently known in our solar system. The
astrophysicist proposed a new
30% 30% 30% 5.5% 1.6% 0.6% 2.4% comet’s minerals are non-hydrated, meaning they lack water
upper boundary for the mass of
compounds. While the comet does of course include water,
a planet: between 4 and
scientists believe the fact that it is frozen as ice prevented the
Magnesium
Hydrogen

10 Jupiter masses.
• water from mixing with the minerals.
Oxygen
Carbon

Silicon

Other

67P’s material is considered “pristine,” left over from the

Iron

NOWHERE TO HIDE formation of our solar system. Studying the composition of

ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson 67P and other comets can help astronomers better piece
recently became the first person together the history of the solar system and of Earth, as comets
to collect unknown organisms are thought to have delivered a significant percentage of the
and sequence their DNA while materials that compose the planet — and paved the way for
in space. — J.P. life to form. — A.K.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 13
 SECRETSKY
BY STEPHEN JAMES O’MEARA
Snow White
and the seven
dwarfs
T
his month, I’m chal-
lenging you to go
after some diminu-
tive objects that
spice up the night
sky with their hidden beauty.
I have selected seven dwarf
objects you can search for.
First up is the white dwarf
central star of planetary nebula
IC 2149, in the northern part of
the constellation Auriga the
Charioteer. Lying just 40' west-
northwest of Pi (π) Aurigae,
IC 2149 is an “inside out” plan-
etary nebula. Visually, planetar-
ies usually appear as gaseous
rings or butterflies with nearly
impossible-to-spot central stars.
But IC 2149 is a planetary neb-
ula with a magnitude 11.3 cen-
tral star surrounded by a tiny
and almost inconspicuous neb-
ula 8.5" in extent.
You’ll find our next target,
newly designated dwarf planet
1 Ceres, in the northeastern
part of Cancer the Crab. Ceres
reached perihelion April 22,
when it shined at magnitude
7.8 and sailed about 1° north-
east of Iota (ι) Cancri. On
May 1, the minor world is
within 30' of the magnitude 6.7
star 70 Cancri. It then heads
southeast toward magnitude
4.5 Kappa (κ) Leonis on the
15th, and about 1° northwest of
magnitude 4.3 Lambda (λ)
Leonis on the 31st.
The dwarf spheroidal galaxy
Leo I appears as a magnitude
10 glow only 20' north of
Regulus (Alpha [α] Leonis), the
Lion’s brightest star. Glare
from the luminary hampers
BROWSE THE “SECRET SKY” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/OMeara.
14 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
Replace Happy and Doc with
the seven dwarfs of the sky.
The trick to observing Leo I (top)
is to move the brilliant blue star
Regulus just outside the field of view
of your eyepiece. BERNHARD HUBL
the view. Doubling the diffi-
culty, the galaxy’s light covers
an area measuring 12' by 9', so
a dark sky and moderate mag-
nification are required. At a
distance of 800,000 light-years,
Leo I may be the farthest satel-
lite system orbiting our galaxy.
We now proceed to an enig-
matic object: the dwarf nova
TV Corvi (Tombaugh’s star).
Lowell Observatory astrono-
mer and discoverer of Pluto
Clyde Tombaugh found this
star on plates he took in 1931,
during his trans-Neptunian
planet search. He considered it
a nova. Not until Astronomy
contributing editor David Levy
researched Tombaugh’s discov-
ery in 1989 did we learn that it
has repeated outbursts.
TV Corvi, in fact, appears to
be composed of two dwarf
objects: a white dwarf and a
substellar brown dwarf donor.
The variable is characterized
by the appearance of long and
bright “super-outbursts” that
can last weeks. At minimum,
TV Corvi lies dormant at 19th
magnitude before an outburst
brightens it 250 times to 13th
magnitude (or brighter) in
roughly two days, making it
visible in backyard telescopes.
You can plot a finder chart at
tinyurl.com/y8o8ee2y.
Our next target, magnitude
7.5 Lalande 21185 in
Ursa Major (R.A. 11h03m,
Dec. 35°58'), is the brightest
red dwarf star north of the
celestial equator and the third
brightest in the entire sky. A
mere 8.3 light-years distant, it
sails through the background
stars at nearly 5" a year.
Red dwarfs are the smallest
stars in our galaxy. Lalande
21185 possesses only about half
the Sun’s mass and spans only
about 40 percent of its diam-
eter. It appears red because the
star has a cool surface tempera-
ture of 6,400° Fahrenheit
(3,800 kelvins). In 2017, astron-
omers discovered an exoplanet
orbiting Lalande 21185. They
christened it Lalande 21185b. It
is several times larger than
Earth, but several times smaller
than Neptune.
Sailing northward along the
Milky Way into the constella-
tion Cepheus the King, we
encounter a cosmic rosebud,
NGC 7129 — a dwarf nebula
(with a diameter less than 10'
when photographed through a
blue filter) 2.6° northwest of
magnitude 4.5 Xi (ξ) Cephei,
the heart of the celestial king.
This evolved HII (star-form-
ing) region belongs to a com-
plex molecular cloud some
3,300 light-years distant that
skirts the upper regions of the
Cepheus Bubble — a giant dust
ring with an apparent diameter
of about 10°. NGC 7129 is itself
a little bubble of hot gas created
by the three B stars within its
cavity. Visually the 7'-by-7'
nebulosity centers on a trap-
ezoid of stars, which causes the
nebula to appear patchy.
As star expert Jim Kaler
tells us in his online column
The Small Cluster Nebula (NGC 7129)
combines a star cluster with three
nebulous regions. A 6-inch telescope
will reveal the cluster. To spot the
nebulae, move up to at least a 10-inch
scope. KEN CRAWFORD
Stars of the Week, “Rare is the
naked-eye star that has a lumi-
nosity and mass less than that
of the Sun.” But with a magni-
tude of 4.5, the yellow/orange
dwarf star Xi Boötis can be
spied under a dark sky without
effort. You’ll find it nearly a
fist-width due east of the
orange giant star Arcturus
(Alpha Boötis). I call it “yellow/
orange” because Xi is an easily
accessible double star (at a dis-
tance of about 22 light-years,
one of the closest to our Sun)
consisting of a magnitude 4.6
yellow dwarf and a magnitude
6.8 orange dwarf companion
some 7" away. So you get two
dwarfs for the price of one!
I’ll finish with Snow White.
Well, actually, you’ve probably
already seen her — the Milky
Way. Astronomers investigating
the color of our galaxy used
Sloan Digital Sky Survey data
collected on hundreds of galax-
ies resembling ours and found
its color resembles that of
freshly fallen snow seen about
an hour after dawn. So, it seems
the Milky Way is aptly named.
As always, let me know how
you fare by sending emails to
sjomeara31@gmail.com.
Stephen James O’Meara
is a globe-trotting observer
who is always looking for the
next great celestial event.
ASTRONEWS DIM DETECTIONS. By using Hubble to peer deep into the Orion Nebula, astronomers discovered the
largest population of brown dwarfs yet, identifying 20 small, failed stars.

New model links three types of energetic particles

Energetic cosmic rays, gamma
rays, and neutrinos emitted
from sources far across the
universe act as cosmic mes-
sengers, carrying information
to Earth about extreme objects
from beyond our galaxy.
Although the origins of these
particles remain mysterious,
their comparable energies have
led astronomers to wonder for
decades if they might all come
from a similar source.
Astronomers have posited
that active galactic nuclei (AGN)
— supermassive black holes
feeding at the centers of galax-
ies — may be responsible for
these three types of high-
energy emissions, but have
struggled to explain exactly
how or why. A new model
based on highly detailed
numerical calculations and
published January 22 in Nature
Physics bolsters the case for
exactly this origin.
The work, by Ke Fang at the
Pennsylvania State University
and Kohta Murase at the
University of Maryland, shows
TRIPLE PLAY. The supermassive black hole in the center of the Cygnus A
galaxy produces bright jets. Astronomers believe such jets could generate
energetic cosmic rays, gamma rays, and neutrinos. COURTESY OF NRAO/AUI
how all three particles can
result when cosmic rays are
accelerated within the powerful
jets emitted from the region
around active supermassive
black holes.
According to the model,
such acceleration boosts the
energy of these cosmic rays
into the “ultrahigh” range,
above about 1017 electron volts.
When these cosmic rays collide
with the gas that permeates the
galaxy clusters where many
AGN reside, they produce the
high-energy neutrinos and
gamma rays we observe.
“This model paves a way to
further attempts to establish a
grand-unified model of how all
three of these cosmic messen-
gers are physically connected
to each other by the same class
of astrophysical sources,”
Murase said in a press release.
Both authors hope their model
will prompt further studies of
active galaxies in clusters and
groups to confirm or disprove
their predictions. — A.K.
PACKED IN. The Kepler-11 system has six
planets of similar mass orbiting their sun with
relatively even spacing. The entire system could
fit inside the orbit of Venus. NASA/TIM PYLE
Extrasolar
systems are
neater than ours
As our catalog of extrasolar systems
grows, so does astronomers’ ability to
pick out patterns that reveal the secrets
of planet formation. One such pattern
presents further evidence that our solar
system may be an outlier: Extrasolar
planets in other systems often share
similar masses and circle their suns in

200
regularly spaced orbits.
The number of graphics processing units in the new ARTS super- The finding, published January 3 in
computer, which aims to discover one fast radio burst per week. The Astronomical Journal, is based on 909
planets in 355 systems discovered by the
Kepler telescope. Two major patterns
arose when astronomers examined the
data statistically. First, neighboring exo-
planets tend to have similar masses.
Second, their orbits are regularly spaced
from one planet to the next. By compari-
son, our solar system’s inner planets have
mismatched sizes and are widely spaced.
“These patterns would not occur if the
planet sizes or spacings were drawn at
random,” said study leader Lauren Weiss
of the Université de Montréal in a press
release. That indicates the planets in the
systems surveyed — and possibly most
extrasolar systems — remain relatively
undisturbed since their formation from a
disk of debris around their young star.
Based on current models of planet for-
mation, planets should easily form in such
a disk with a compact configuration that
leaves them similarly sized and at regular
intervals. Astronomers believe our solar
system appears different because Jupiter
and Saturn moved inward to disrupt any
TIM SCHOON

existing structure before retreating to

their current positions.
Additional data on more planetary
AR sandbox helps users visualize gravity systems will help pin down how common
it is for either disruption or undisturbed
GRASPING GRAVITY. Undergraduates at the University of Iowa designed and built an augmented reality (AR) planet formation to occur. Weiss is now
sandbox, dubbed Gravbox, that helps users visualize how variations in gravity influence an object’s motion. Although working on a study to look for extrasolar
similar AR sandboxes exist, Gravbox is the first to simulate the effects of gravity in real time. How does it work? The systems with planets like Jupiter to learn
user sculpts an environment from sand, then a computer projects a moving particle onto the terrain. The projection more about its role in our own solar sys-
simulates how an object, such as a comet or space probe, would travel through the imagined landscape. — J.P. tem’s history. — A.K.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 15
 FORYOURCONSIDERATION
BY JEFF HESTER
Gifts
to the
future
Amateur astronomy
can change lives.
Y
ou amateur astrono-
mers out there are an
odd lot. (I get to say
that because I started
out as an amateur
myself.) Think about it. You
dump tons of time and money
into telescopes, cameras, and
the like. Every chance you get,
you head off into the hinterland
where you sit up all night, freez-
ing your keister, and stare into
an eyepiece to catch a glance of
some ghostly apparition. Your
family thinks you are nuts.
Aren’t the spectacular pictures
on Google Images enough?
Of course they aren’t!
Astronomy is a passion, and that
Messier collection means some-
thing. I understand that. But
where did your passion come
from? What got you hooked?
I’m going to hazard a guess that
it didn’t have much to do with a
classroom sage on a stage. Don’t
get me wrong, classrooms are
important. After a quarter-
century of teaching, at least I
hope they are. But as a student,
my own attitudes and interests
had more impact on what I got
out of a class than anything a
teacher or professor said.
Experiences are what matter.
Since time immemorial, uni-
versity faculty members have
bemoaned the “sorry state of
affairs with today’s students.”
How is it possible, we astronomy
professors ask, that after years
of math classes, students can’t
figure out a simple inverse-
square law? I’m going to go out
BROWSE THE “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/Hester.
16 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
A beautiful deep-sky object like the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), viewed at a star paty with a moderate-size telescope, can spark people
to see the universe in a new way. Just one telescopic look has altered the future of many young folks. BOB FERA
on a limb and say that maybe
those thousand hours or so sit-
ting in math classrooms could
have been better spent. Granted,
if you don’t own a tool, you can’t
use it. But if you don’t need a
tool for something you care
about, why bother to pick it up?
None of this surprises teach-
ers who are worth their salt.
When counseling undergradu-
ates, I made it a point to discuss
what college is about: “You
aren’t really here to get a job or
even a degree. You certainly
aren’t here to collect A’s, or at
least I hope not. What you are
here for is to start becoming
who you will be for the rest of
your life!” To quote Plutarch
(a.d. 46–120): “The mind is not
a vessel that needs filling, but
wood that needs igniting.”
What is new is a growing
understanding of what’s going
on behind the curtain as we
learn, deep inside our brains.
The sum total of your life’s
experiences blends together into
your own unique internal
model of the world, different
from that of any other person.
Your brain uses that ever-
changing internal model to
construct the predictions and
simulations that become your
conscious reality. That internal
model is what largely makes
you you.
It’s good that we are coming
to better understand this stuff,
because the times, they are
a-changing. Watch an IBM
Watson commercial, catch a
self-driving cab, or read a news
story written by a computer.
Day after day, more and more
jobs are being taken over by new
and rapidly evolving technolo-
gies. Today’s student won’t have
a single career; she will likely
have dozens of job titles, most of
which have yet to be invented.
The future doesn’t need workers
who have been trained to put
nut B on bolt A. The future
needs interesting, capable, cre-
ative, curious individuals
shaped by diverse and wide-
ranging experiences.
Schools are beginning to
catch up with this need. “Project
Based Learning” is fancy jargon
for curriculum that is built not
around chapters in textbooks,
but around authentic, engaging,
and complex questions, prob-
lems, and challenges. It is messy,
creative, collaborative, draws on
individual strengths, and always
produces something to show for
the effort. More than just
another fad, Project Based
Learning is a real world
approach to education that
works with rather than against
how our brains are wired.
This is where you come in.
I’ve known many amateur
astronomers and spoken to
countless clubs and gatherings
over the years. You are an
interesting and passionate lot
with a great deal to offer. Cool
science, hands-on hardware,
recording and working with
data, star parties, questions
that have intrigued humankind
for millennia — your hobby is
tailor-made for Project Based
Learning. Places like the Buck
Institute for Education and
Edutopia (the George Lucas
Educational Foundation) have
what you need to get started.
Your chance to help shape the
future might be as close as a
phone call from your club to a
nearby school.
You are the sorts of people
whose passion inspires. I know,
because when I was a kid, you
inspired me. Very few of the
students you work with will go
on to become astronomers. But
what you share will become a
part of who those students are,
how they think, and what they
do for the rest of their lives.
They might just change the
way that you experience the
world, too.
Jeff Hester is a keynote speaker,
coach, and astrophysicist.
Follow his thoughts at
jeff-hester.com.
ASTRONEWS VIEWING THE INVISIBLE. The April 2017 campaign to image the supermassive black hole in the heart
of the Milky Way is expected to release its results later this year.

This meteorite’s Webb to take

origin is mysterious on brown
dwarfs
ODD BEGINNING. The Hypatia
stone, discovered by geologist
Aly Barakat in 1996, contains a Researchers have been try-
combination of chemicals and
ing to unlock the mysteries
minerals that doesn’t match our
of brown dwarfs ever since
early solar system. MARIO DI MARTINO/INAF
OSSERVATORIO ASTROFISICO DI TORINO
their existence was confirmed
in 1995. Observations of
these distant, dim objects
from Earth are limited, but
multiple researchers plan
to use NASA’s upcoming
James Webb Space Telescope
(JWST) to eliminate some of
Researchers at the uncertainty surrounding
the University of brown dwarfs. Plans to study
Johannesburg recently their atmospheres and gain
conducted a mineral analysis of the Hypatia insight into their formation
stone, an extraterrestrial rock fragment discov- are in the works, with the end
ered in Egypt in 1996. Their analysis found that goal of better understanding
the stone’s mineral makeup is unlike any other the dividing line between
known object in our solar system. stars and planets.
The meteorite contains unusually high Researchers at the
amounts of carbon and low amounts of silicon, Université de Montréal will use
a chemical composition opposite to that of JWST to study SIMP0136, a
Earth, which has high amounts of silicon and brown dwarf with a cloudy TINY LIGHTS. NGC 1333 is just one of many targets planned for
low amounts of carbon. Additionally, the grains atmosphere. Brown dwarfs’ the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. The young star cluster
within Hypatia’s matrix (the stone inside which atmospheres are best viewed associated with this nebula contains numerous brown dwarfs; Webb’s
dust grains are embedded) also have a unique in infrared light, but because infrared capabilities will allow astronomers to study these hard-to-see
blend of phosphorus, nickel, and minute Earth’s atmosphere absorbs failed stars in greater detail. NASA/CXC/JPL
amounts of iron. Because the ratio of elements this light, studying SIMP0136
inside the grains differs from any other rocky from the ground has proven constellation Perseus. dwarfs in much finer detail
body in the solar system, researchers think the difficult. Webb’s space-based NGC 1333 is a hotbed for than current ground
grains were formed prior to the solar nebula instruments will enable brown dwarfs, including instruments.
that birthed our planets. researchers to study the those weighing only about 5 Webb’s ability to detect
Astronomers believe the solar nebula, a clouds’ chemical composition to 6 Jupiter masses. (They are atmospheric molecules will
massive cloud of dust and gas, produced the without obstruction. usually much larger, tens of not only assist in identifying
Sun and the planets in our solar system. Planet Aleks Scholz, an astrono- times more massive than common compounds among
formation likely began as the nebula’s dust mer at the University of Jupiter.) Webb’s infrared brown dwarfs, but also could
began to clump together, a process long St. Andrews in Scotland, plans viewing capabilities will help pinpoint whether these
believed to be homogenous. However, to use Webb to study enable Scholz to study these worlds hold the elements
Hypatia’s bizarre chemical composition and the NGC 1333, a nebula in the rare, dim, low-mass brown needed to support life. — A.J.
lack of silicate minerals in its matrix — which
are dominant in the compositions of Earth,
Venus, Mars, and most known meteorites —
cast doubt on this theory. VENUS AT DUSK
If Hypatia’s matrix is pre-solar, the question
of where it came from remains. And if it instead Ecliptic in early June
formed from the same nebula that created the 20° Ecliptic in mid-August
planets, its never-before-seen makeup contra- 18 June 3
dicts the homogenous theory, leaving astrono- July 3 19
15°
mers to re-evaluate the distribution of 18
Altitude

May 4
elements inside the nebula that formed our Aug. 2
solar system. — Amber Jorgenson 10° 19
ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

17
Sept. 1 April 4
5°

$350
16 20
March 5
MILLION 0°

Azimuth West
The upper cost of a THE “EVENING STAR.” Even at its dimmest, Venus shines nine times
new earth science mission line brighter than the night sky’s brightest star, Sirius. But Venus stands out even From 40° north FAST
more when it lies far from the Sun. This chart plots the planet’s positions latitude, Venus FACT
recommended to NASA by the for an observer at 40° north latitude an hour after sunset. Notice that Venus
reaches its peak altitude in late May and early June, more than two months
peaks at an
altitude of 16°
National Academies of Sciences, before its August 17 greatest elongation. That’s because the ecliptic — the in early June.
apparent path of the Sun and planets across our sky — makes a steeper
Engineering, and Medicine. angle to the western horizon in springtime. — Richard Talcott

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 17
 BINOCULARUNIVERSE
BY P H I L H A R R I N G TO N
A great glob
under the radar
The cluster M5 lies in an interesting neighborhood.
I
f you were asked to name
the greatest visual observer
of all time, whom would
you choose? There are
many worthy candidates,
but my vote would have to go to
the 18th-century astronomer
William Herschel. He had quite
a track record, including the
discovery of the planet Uranus
as well as thousands of deep-sky
objects. That’s a pretty good run.
Herschel did more than just
look at the sky, however. He also
tried to understand what he was
looking at. Based on his studies
of how stars appear distributed
along the hazy band of the
Milky Way, Herschel concluded
that the Milky Way is shaped
like a flattened disk. We know
today that he was exactly right.
When it came time to know-
ing his place in the Milky Way,
however, Herschel was way off.
He noticed how stars appeared
α twice the distance along a
ε
The author describes this asterism near cluster M5 as the “Serpent’s Sailboat.” It’s an
easy binocular target. TONY HALLAS
18 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
to be evenly distributed along
the Milky Way. From this, he
reasoned that the Sun must be
in the very center. Of course,
that isn’t correct. That’s
because, unbeknownst to him,
cosmic dust blocked his view
(as well as ours) along the plane
of the galaxy beyond about
6,000 light-years.
It would be another century
and a half before Harlow
Shapley discovered our solar
system’s true position in the
Milky Way. By studying the
distances to globular star clus-
ters, Shapley found that most
seemed to be distributed in a
spherical volume centered not
on the Sun, but instead on a
distant point in the direction of
the constellation Sagittarius. He
concluded that globular clusters
must hover around the core of
the Milky Way — a conclusion
we know today to be correct.
M5
5 right triangle of stars. The tri-
Sail
M5 in Serpens is one of the most brilliant globular clusters in the northern sky, and an
attractive target for binoculars. ADAM BLOCK/MOUNT LEMMON SKYCENTER/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
While most of the Milky
Way’s globular clusters are
clumped in Sagittarius,
Scorpius, and Ophiuchus, a few
renegades are out there. This
month, let’s examine a loner
found in western Serpens. M5
may be off the beaten path, but
this recluse is one of the most
magnificent globulars any-
where in the sky.
Gottfried Kirch discovered
M5 on May 5, 1702, from
Berlin, Germany. His notes
described it as a “nebulous star.”
Although Kirch was Germany’s
first Astronomer Royal at the
time, those notes remained
unpublished until after Charles
Messier independently found
M5 on May 23, 1764. Messier
described it as a “beautiful neb-
ula; it does not contain any
star.” It was only after Herschel
viewed it through a larger tele-
scope 27 years later that its true
nature became clear.
To find M5, cast off from
Arcturus and slide southeast-
ward to 4th-magnitude Zeta (ζ)
Boötis. Continue from there
slightly more easterly course
until you come to a not-quite
angle’s brightest star, positioned
at the not-quite right angle, is
3rd-magnitude Unukalhai
[pronounced oo-NOO-kul-hi
and also known as Alpha (α)
Serpentis]. Next, turn southwest
toward the 5th-magnitude star
5 Serpentis. M5 will be just to
its north-northwest. Through
binoculars, it looks like a fuzzy
star, just as Kirch described.
Estimates say that M5 is
24,500 light-years away and
may contain as many as
500,000 stars crammed into a
space about 165 light-years
across. By contrast, M13 —
summer’s Hercules Cluster,
which we visited in this col-
umn in July 2016 — holds
about 300,000 stars.
Before we bid farewell to this
month’s binocular universe,
let’s take a look at an asterism
drawn among several stars to
the south and east of M5.
Added together, they remind
me of a sailboat. The boat’s bow
is marked by 5 Serpentis, while
6 and 8 Serpentis symbolize the
deck. The hull extends to
4 Serpentis and SAO 140444,
the faintest star in the pattern.
Finally, the sails’ mast extends
east-northeast from 6 to 10
Serpentis. The sailboat looks
capsized in the evening sky, but
if you happen to pull an all-
nighter this month, come back
just before the onset of morn-
ing twilight. That’s when the
Serpent’s Sailboat asterism
will be most apparent, as it
approaches the western
horizon.
If you have a favorite bin-
ocular target that you’d like
to share with the rest of us,
I’d love to feature it in a
future column. Drop me a
line through my website,
philharrington.net. Until next
time, don’t forget that two eyes
are better than one!
Phil Harrington is a longtime
contributor to Astronomy and
the author of many books.
ASTRONEWS LESS LOSS. Direct observations of the ozone hole over the past 20 years show that there is now 20 percent less
ozone depletion each Antarctic winter than there was in 2005.

DID THE SOLAR SYSTEM FORM

IN A BUBBLE?
Molecular
Time cloud Time
1.27 Myr 2.49 Myr

Wind Ionized
bubble region

ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY AFTER V. DWARKADAS/D. ROSENBERG

X-RAY: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. HESTER ET AL.; OPTICAL: NASA/HST/ASU/J. HESTER ET AL.

Dense
shell

Time Time
4.58 Myr 4.38 Myr
1 Myr = 1,000,000 years

BUBBLE BIRTH. University of Chicago researchers are suggesting the solar

system may have formed in a densely shelled bubble within a giant Wolf-Rayet
star. According to their theory, as the dying star shed its outer layers — a normal
end-of-life process for massive stars — strong stellar winds plowed through the
loosely held cloak of material, forming bubbles packed with gas and dust. Such
bubbles are ideal for birthing stars, the researchers say; they estimate this process STRANGE NEIGHBORHOOD. New results show that the fast radio burst
could account for the formation of 1 to 16 percent of all Sun-like stars. — J.P. FRB 121102 comes from an extreme environment with highly magnetized, dense
plasma. One possibility is a magnetized nebula around or near a pulsar, such as
the one around the Crab Pulsar, pictured here in X-rays and optical light.

3 MILLION BILLION
The mass contained in the “El Gordo”
galaxy cluster, in solar masses.
FRB resides near a
strong magnetic field
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief
but powerful blasts of radio ener-
gy thought to come from neutron
stars. The sole repeating FRB,
FRB 121102, has already allowed
astronomers to pinpoint its loca-
tion in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion
light-years away. Now, new
measurements showing that the
bursts are influenced by a nearby
strong magnetic field are helping
astronomers further narrow down
its location within the galaxy.
The results come from a study
ESO/L. CALÇADA/SPACEENGINE.ORG
Faraday rotation ever observed
from an FRB, indicating its source
must sit in a highly magnetized,
plasma-rich region of space.
“This sort of enormous Faraday
rotation is extremely rare. … We
realized it was a huge clue about
where this bizarre source resides,”
said team member Victoria Kaspi of
McGill University in a press release.
Astronomers now have two
theories for the environment
around FRB 121102: Either its
source is near the galaxy’s central

conducted with the Arecibo supermassive black hole, or it is

Observatory in Puerto Rico and
the Green Bank Telescope in West
Virginia. In the study, published
January 11 in Nature, astronomers
measured the polarization of the
bursts coming from FRB 121102.
Polarization measures the
A globular cluster’s silent black hole degree of alignment between the
magnetic and electric fields of
ODD ORBIT. Using ESO’s MUSE instrument on the Very Large Telescope in
light (in this case, radio emission).
Chile, astronomers discovered a star zipping around the heart of the globular
cluster NGC 3201. By analyzing the star’s exceptionally bizarre orbital motion, When polarized emission passes
they determined that an inactive (not actively accreting material) stellar-mass through or near a strong mag-
black hole lurks within the cluster, imagined in this artist’s concept. This is netic field, its alignment can
the first inactive black hole discovered in a globular cluster, and the first become twisted, a process called
detection of a stellar-mass black hole made purely by measuring its gravitational Faraday rotation. Bursts from
influence on other stars. — J.P. FRB 121102 show the strongest
sitting inside a nebula magne-
tized by winds from a powerful
pulsar, such as a scaled-up ver-
sion of the Crab Nebula.
The new findings leave astron-
omers wondering whether FRBs
could be a product of their envi-
ronment. “If you have an extreme
object in an extreme environ-
ment, is that just a coincidence?
FRBs have these huge explosions
in radio waves, and we don’t
know why that occurs. Maybe this
is a clue to the mechanism that
produces these explosions,” said
Kaspi. — A.K.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 19
 ASTRONEWS NEIGHBORLY BEHAVIOR. Nearby star Tau Ceti may host two potentially habitable worlds slightly larger than Earth,
as well as two other planets with temperatures too extreme for life.

GIGANTIC STARS AREN’T SO RARE HEAVENLY

HEAVYWEIGHTS.
Astronomers have
discovered an
excess of high-
mass stars in the
Tarantula Nebula.
This suggests that
massive stars are
much more common
throughout the
universe than
astronomers
previously thought,
potentially changing
our understanding
of the cosmos.
NASA/ESA/STSCI/E. SABBI

T
he universe is teeming with many more “We were astonished when we realized that

massive stars than previously believed,
according to a study published January 5
in Science. Since massive stars play a cru-
cial role in shaping our universe —
through stellar winds, supernova explosions, and
the production of heavy elements — an excess of
heavyweights has far-reaching implications.
Researchers discovered the surplus of massive
stars in the Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus), some
160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic
Cloud. This region only began producing stars
about 8 million years ago, so it serves as a perfect
laboratory to study young, massive stars.
The team used ESO’s Very Large Telescope,
part of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula
Survey (VFTS), to gather detailed
spectroscopic observations of nearly Massive
1,000 massive stars in the region. By
meticulously analyzing 247 of these
stars play a
stars (with masses between 15 and crucial role
200 solar masses), the team deter-
mined the mass distribution of stars in shaping
born in the nebulous nursery. They
translated this catalog of stellar
our universe.
birth weights into an initial mass
function (IMF), which mathematically describes
the expected distribution of masses within a
population of stars. An IMF gives astronomers
an idea of how many stars of a particular mass
will likely form in a certain population, such as
inside a star cluster or throughout a galaxy.
Astronomers once believed that massive stars
were relatively rare in the universe, with less
than 1 percent of all stars born with masses
greater than 10 times the mass of the Sun. But
this assumption was based on older IMFs cre-
ated using plenty of data from low-mass stars,
and little data from high-mass stars.
The new study fills out the high-mass portion
of the IMF, suggesting that massive stars are
much more common than prior IMFs indicated.
30 Doradus has formed many more massive
stars than expected,” Fabian Schneider, a Hintze
research fellow in the Department of Physics at
the University of Oxford and lead author of the
study, said in a press release.
Chris Evans, the principal investigator of
VFTS and co-author of the study, added: “In
fact, our results suggest that most of the stellar
mass is actually no longer in low-mass stars, but
a significant fraction is in high-mass stars.”
The researchers were not only surprised by
the number of massive stars they found, but also
that stars with masses up to 200 solar masses
were common, said co-author Hugues Sana
from the University of Leuven in
Belgium. Only recently have astron-
omers reached the consensus that
200-solar-mass stars exist at all, and
this study clearly shows such stars
200 to 300 times the mass of the Sun
can be born.
Although the study examined
only behemoth stars in one particu-
lar region, the researchers hope to
expand their study soon to deter-
mine how universal their findings are. If the
overabundance of massive stars in the Tarantula
Nebula is not a fluke, astronomers will need to
re-evaluate many of their basic assumptions
about the universe.
“Our results have far-reaching consequences
for the understanding of our cosmos. There
might be 70 percent more supernovae, a tripling
of the chemical yields, and toward four times the
ionizing radiation from massive star popula-
tions,” said Schneider. “Also, the formation rate
of black holes might be increased by 180 percent,
directly translating into a corresponding
increase of binary black hole mergers that have
recently been detected via their gravitational
wave signals.” — J.P.
NASA/JPL/MSSS
GOING, GOING, GONE. In 2001,
NASA’s Mars Orbiter Camera captured
the top photo during a period of little
atmospheric activity. A month later
(bottom photo), a global dust storm
had shrouded the Red Planet’s surface.
Global dust
storms on Mars
may allow gas
to escape
Mars is occasionally enveloped
by intense storms that kick up
dust and haze, hiding large
swaths of the surface from view.
A January 22 study in Nature
Astronomy, using data collected
by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter, links dust storm activity
on the Red Planet with the escape
of gas from its atmosphere.
The study found that during
mild storms, water vapor rises
along with the air being pushed
upward by the storm, leading to
subtle hydrogen loss from the
upper atmosphere. Bigger storms
likely mean more loss. This pro-
cess may have helped transform
Mars into an arid planet.
The last global dust storm in
2007 caused more than a hun-
dredfold increase in water vapor,
recent reanalysis of the data has
shown. Astronomers are now
preparing for a global dust
storm expected later this year.
Observing such a storm with
more advanced technology could
corroborate the study’s initial
findings. — A.J.

20 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 ASTRONEWS SINK IN. The surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa may be so porous
that visiting spacecraft would sink into the world.

Black hole lets out a double burp

Astronomers believe that
supermassive black holes at X-ray & optical
the centers of galaxies “flicker”

X-RAY NASA/CXC/UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO/J. COMERFORD ET AL.; OPTICAL: NASA/STSCI

on and off, alternately gob-
bling up material, “burping”
out bubbles of hot gas, and
“napping” between meals. But
while spotting a single out-
burst isn’t rare, identifying the
remnants of two past meals
has never occurred until now.
A team led by researchers at New
the University of Colorado burp
Boulder published such a find
in The Astrophysical Journal
November 6, identifying two
separate burps emitted by the
galaxy SDSS J1354+1327 (or Old burp
J1354, for short): one ancient
and on the verge of dissipat-
ing, and one hinting at a more BAD MANNERS. Astronomers imaged the galaxy J1354, about
recent meal. 800 million light-years away, in X-rays and optical light. They saw the
Because burps dissipate over remnants of one ancient (blue-green emission) and one more recent
time, they become increasingly (blue arc) burp. A nearby companion galaxy hints at a galactic collision
difficult to see. “We happened that funneled material in toward the supermassive black hole, providing
to observe this galaxy at a time the meals that prompted those burps.
when we could clearly see evi-
dence for both events,” said from the black hole about once again, which theory had
study leader Julie Comerford of 100,000 years ago. Above the predicted,” said Comerford.
CU Boulder in a press release. bulge, they saw a shock wave That theory also applies to
The researchers spotted a 3,000 light-years away from the the Milky Way. “Our galaxy’s
large, diffuse cone of gas black hole, associated with a supermassive black hole is now
extending 30,000 light-years second, more recent meal. napping after a big meal, just
below the galaxy’s bulge, where Between the two events, like J1354’s black hole has in the
the supermassive black hole is the black hole was likely much past. So we also expect our mas-
located. The atoms in the gas more dormant. “We are seeing sive black hole to feast again,
were stripped of their electrons this object feast, burp, and just as J1354’s has,” said Scott
by a huge burst of radiation nap, and then feast and burp Barrows of CU Boulder. — A.K.

DEATH’S HOT/COLD TOUCH

Earth Mars Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury Venus

71.4 years 2 minutes Uranus, and 30 seconds 1 to 2 seconds
(average) Neptune
1 minute
© YANSOLO | DREAMSTIME.COM

The four outer planets have PLANETARY BODY. Science fiction movies sometimes show bad
FAST no solid surfaces. If you things happening to spacesuits. Indeed, films like The Martian and Total
FACT started at the top of their Recall attempt to visualize what would happen if a suit depressurized.
But how long could an astronaut last without that first level of
atmospheres, you’d fall for
protection? Here are some rough estimates. — Michael E. Bakich
about a minute (choking all
the way) before the intense
atmospheric pressure
crushed you.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 21
 New insights into
HOW THE
SOLAR
SYSTEM
FORMED
Recent observations reveal
that chaos and mayhem
ruled our planetary system’s
first days. by Jesse Emspak

The early solar system was rife with

tiny planetesimals, seen here filling
the sky above a young Jupiter. The
giant planet itself likely formed some
3.5 astronomical units (AU) from the
Sun, migrated inward to 1.5 AU, and
then tacked outward again to its
current location. RON MILLER FOR ASTRONOMY

22 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
N
NOT LONG AGO, THE ORIGIN OF THE SOLAR
SYSTEM SEEMED AN ORDERLY AFFAIR. A cloud
of dust and gas coalesced around a nascent Sun. Close to the newborn
star, volatile substances that vaporize at relatively low temperatures,
like water and other ices, turned into gas and left behind the rocky
planets. Farther out, gas giants formed beyond the “snow line,” where
these volatiles condensed. Earth became the most massive rocky planet
by happenstance, and Jupiter the accidental ruler among the giants.

Shortly after the planets had formed,

a 300 million-year pummeling known as
the Late Heavy Bombardment gave us the
pockmarked faces of the Moon, Mercury,
and other airless worlds. When that ended
some 3.8 billion years ago, all was quiet
save for the odd comet or asteroid that
might sail through the inner system and
one and 10 times Earth’s radius with peri-
ods of 120 days or less. Multiplanet systems
tend to have lots of “super-Earths” — rocky
planets bigger than our own, but no more
than about 17 Earth masses (approximately
the mass of Neptune). Super-Earths are the
most common species among the more
than 3,700 exoplanets discovered so far
hit Earth — like the one that killed the — and yet, none exist in our solar system.
dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Planetary Another type of planet that shows up
scientists thought other solar systems consistently, though much less often, is the
would look roughly like ours; after all, the hot Jupiter. These are gas giants that lie
Copernican principle tells us we’re not spe- close to their stars. When astronomers dis-
cial, and our system likely is average. covered 51 Pegasi b — the first planet found
Astronomers now know that these for- around a Sun-like star — in 1995, it turned
mation scenarios are spectacularly wrong. out to be a hot Jupiter. Now known as
Planets probably bounced around our Sun Dimidium, the planet is half Jupiter’s mass
like billiard balls before settling into their and circles its star in 4.2 days at an average
current stately dance. And two decades’ distance of 4.8 million miles (7.8 million
worth of observing planets around other kilometers). In contrast, Mercury takes
stars shows that our solar system actually is 88 days to orbit the Sun and gets no closer
quite the oddball. But that leaves the ques- than 29 million miles (46 million km).
tion: How did it get this way? Then-current models had no sensible way
to make a Jupiter-sized planet so close to
It’s not you, it’s me its star. Dimidium must have moved.
Exoplanets were among the first signs that “The standard model, the one everyone
something was amiss with our solar sys- had in their heads, was that the inner disk
tem. Much of this evidence came from was dry and volatile-poor, with planets like
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which fixes on Mercury, which is iron rich and dense. In
stars and looks for planets the outer system, you’d get
transiting across their faces. colder, and have lower densi-
Such transits reveal a planet’s ties,” says David Minton of
size and period. When Kepler Planets probably Purdue University, who
launched in 2009, the num- bounced around studies planet bombard-
ber of confirmed exoplanet ments and formation. “The
systems was in the low hun- our Sun like Kepler mission turned that
dreds. Kepler has since
pushed that number into
billiard balls on its head.”
It’s possible that detection
the thousands. before settling bias has played a role in
If you plot the periods of
confirmed planets against
into their current these results. Planet-finding
methods favor worlds with
their radii, most fall between stately dance. short periods and high
Jupiter
largely
controlled
the solar
system’s early
evolution. Its inward
migration limited the amount of material available
to form terrestrial planets. Its subsequent outward
migration moved the giant worlds. NASA/JPL/SSI
masses. Scientists have discovered most
exoplanets via Kepler’s transit method, or
by using spectroscopy to observe small
changes in a star’s velocity along the line of
sight. But an alien astronomer looking at
our solar system with a Kepler-like tele-
scope would have to wait at least 24 years
to see two Jupiter orbits, the minimum
needed to confirm its existence.
Still, even accounting for this bias, the
existence of super-Earths and hot Jupiters
showed that models of planet formation at
the very least needed work.
Missing mass and Mars
Besides the exoplanets, other clues showed
up closer to home. When planetary scien-
tists tried building solar systems with
increasingly sophisticated computer
simulations, they kept getting a Mars
that was five to 10 times as massive as
the one we have.
In addition, models of the disk from
which the planets formed assume it had
a relatively uniform density. Astronomer
Alessandro Morbidelli at the Observatoire
de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, has
made a career of modeling planet dynam-
ics. He says a uniform density would point
to at least an Earth’s mass of material in
the current asteroid belt. But the actual
mass of the whole thing is only a few

24 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
ten-thousandths of our planet. All that
material had to go somewhere.
Then, there’s the debris one would
expect around stars still early in their
planet-forming stages. The problem is
simple: The collisions that build planets
also break things apart. “When things
crash into one another, they produce a
lot of debris,” says Alan Jackson at the
Center for Planetary Sciences in Toronto.
And that debris should hang around for
millions of years.
So, if the collision models are correct,
you’d expect to find a lot more of this rubble
around other stars. It’s easier to see this
material than to see planets, says Jackson,
because the small fragments have much
more surface area than planets. “It’s why
we’ve known about the debris disk around
Beta Pictoris since the 1980s,” he says. “How
many have debris? Nowhere near enough.”
Scott Kenyon, an astrophysicist at
the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, wrote a paper in August 2016
that suggests terrestrial planet formation
actually might be “quick and neat.” In this
scenario, planets form in a few hundred
thousand years, with less gas drag and less
dust generation from the planets getting hit
with leftover rocks. Something similar
might have happened here — though that
still doesn’t explain Mars’ low mass.
Smoking guns
Beyond the cleared-out inner solar system,
the asteroid belt and its more distant cous-
in, the Kuiper Belt, apparently were dis-
rupted. Both belts have groups of worldlets
whose orbits incline steeply to those of the
planets. The only way that could have hap-
pened is if something scattered them. In the
The ice giant Neptune currently lies 30 AU from
the Sun, but it likely was born only a quarter as
far out. Jupiter’s massive gravity captured both
it and its cousin, Uranus, in resonance and forced
them outward. NASA/JPL
Kuiper Belt, Pluto is a good example. “The
very existence of Pluto in the orbit we see
today means it had to be pushed into that
place,” says Michele Bannister, a planetary
astronomer at Queens University in Belfast.
In the asteroid belt, Ceres stands out.
NASA’s Dawn mission revealed that Ceres
looks different from many of its brethren
— it is richer in volatiles than one would
expect. “Ceres didn’t form where it is,” says
Morbidelli. He thinks it may be a refugee
from farther out, beyond the snow line.
Other asteroids show signs of violence.
Minton works with a team studying class C
asteroids, the type that give birth to carbo-
naceous chondrite meteorites. Such mete-
orites show evidence of high-temperature
processes: They have structures inside
them that look like metal droplets. “The
material looks like it was vaporized and
recondensed. It takes a lot of energy to do
that,” says Minton. “We think the mecha-
nism was extremely high-velocity impacts.”
The evidence points to migrating planets
as the culprits. And the first to move was
Jupiter, which fell into the inner system
according to a model called the Grand Tack.
Moving giants
The Grand Tack was first outlined in a
2011 Nature paper by Kevin Walsh of the
Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,
Colorado; Sean Raymond of the University
of Bordeaux, France; David O’Brien of the
Planetary Science Institute in Tucson,
Arizona; Avi Mandell of NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center; and Morbidelli. The
theory covers the period soon after the
protoplanets took shape, before the solar
system was more than a few million years
old. Instead of the planets forming roughly
simultaneously, the Grand Tack says
Jupiter developed first, followed by Saturn
and the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.
If the solar system arose
in an orderly way from
a relatively uniform
disk, Mars should be
five to 10 times bigger
than it is. Astronomers
think Jupiter put the
Red Planet on a diet
by removing much of
the gas in its vicinity.
ESA/MPS/OSIRIS TEAM
NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Ceres is the biggest object in the asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter. The dwarf planet
appears richer in volatile substances than it
should be, hinting that it formed farther from
the Sun and moved inward.
In this theory, Jupiter formed about
3.5 astronomical units (AU; one AU is the
average Earth-Sun distance) from the Sun.
The essentially fully formed planet cleared
out a “lane” in the protostellar disk while
also drawing material in ahead of it and a
huge “tail” behind it. The mass of this sur-
rounding material exerted a strong torque
on the planet.
Because the gas-dominated disk had
a large mass — much bigger than Jupiter
and the other early planets combined — it
began to siphon away Jupiter’s momentum,
causing it to spiral inward. Meanwhile,
Saturn formed soon after Jupiter, at about
4.5 AU. Experiencing torques like its larger
cousin, the future ringed planet also spi-
raled inward. When Jupiter reached 1.5 AU,
about where Mars is now, the migration
stopped. Jupiter and Saturn entered what
is called a mean motion resonance, with
Saturn making two orbits for every three of
Jupiter’s. The resonance created a kind of
braking effect. The migration took perhaps
100,000 years, a geological blink of an eye.
As Jupiter and Saturn approached the
inner system, they flung other objects into
the Sun or out of the solar system entirely.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 25

The movements of the giant planets
disrupted the distant Kuiper Belt and its most
prominent member, Pluto. There couldn’t have
been enough material in the outer solar system
to create Pluto in place. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
This cleared out the area that one day
would be the asteroid belt, and left less
material in the region for Mars to grow.
Basically, Jupiter’s presence removed a lot
of the matter that could have gone into
planet-building.
Orbiting the Sun faster than Jupiter
itself, the remaining gas and dust inside
Jupiter’s orbit exerted an outward force,
and the two giant planets started to retreat.
“It’s a tidal effect,” says Morbidelli. “It’s the
same as the Earth which, rotating faster
than the Moon, pushes the Moon out.
So the still massive inner disk wins —
Jupiter moves out and drags Saturn with
it, thanks to the fact that Saturn is locked
in resonance.”
Fortunately for us, Jupiter did “tack,”
migrating out again, and the remaining
planetesimals formed a ring around the
Sun centered in the region between where
Earth and Venus are now. Mars, on the
outer edge of that ring, was never able to
grow large. As the two giant worlds moved
ever outward, they scattered material back
into the future asteroid belt.
The Grand Tack explains why Mars is
relatively small, the lack of super-Earths,
and the dearth of mass in the asteroid
belt. It also can help solve the problem of
Earth’s water. Many planetary scientists
think asteroids delivered the water. With
Jupiter and Saturn scattering objects from
the current asteroid belt region, it’s plau-
sible that lots of water-rich objects would
smack into Earth.
One version of the Grand Tack model,
proposed by Konstantin Batygin at Caltech
and Greg Laughlin at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, posits the existence
26 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
The battered lunar highlands testify to an
intense period of bombardment that lasted some
300 million years. The migration of the giant
planets likely caused the barrage by jostling the
distant Kuiper Belt. CONSOLIDATED LUNAR ATLAS/UA/LPL
of super-Earths in the early solar system.
But Jupiter and Saturn caused such a dis-
ruption in the inner system that the super-
Earths spiraled into the Sun.
As Jupiter and Saturn tacked back to
the outer part of the solar system, they cap-
tured Uranus and Neptune in resonance,
keeping other large bodies from wandering
into the inner solar system. “Without
Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune would be
inside Mercury’s orbit,” says Morbidelli.
“Maybe there wouldn’t have been enough
mass left to create terrestrial planets.”
Nice ice, baby
Getting the solar system to its current con-
figuration requires a bit more rearrange-
ment, however. In a series of papers pub-
lished in Nature in 2005, Kleomenis
Tsiganis, then at the Observatoire de la
Côte d’Azur; Rodney Gomes of Brazil’s
National Observatory in Rio de Janeiro;
80°
Telltale
orbits
The orbits of many Kuiper
Belt objects (KBOs) tip
significantly to that
of the major planets.
Astronomers suspect that
the migrations of Uranus
and Neptune likely
scattered these KBOs
into their highly inclined
orbits. ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY
Sun
0 50
Astronomical units
Hal Levison of the Southwest Research
Institute; and Morbidelli proposed a theory
called the Nice model (named for the
French city in which it was formulated).
This scenario takes place after the dust and
gas in the planet-forming disk had dissipat-
ed at the conclusion of the Grand Tack. In
the Nice model, Uranus and Neptune
formed closer in than they are now and
migrated outward. Some later versions of
the theory have Uranus and Neptune
switching places, or even flinging a third
ice giant into deep space.
The clues are in models of the early
solar nebula. Estimates of its density don’t
leave enough matter in the outer reaches of
the solar system to form planets, at least
not fast enough to yield ice giants. “It’s
obvious you can’t form Neptune at 30 AU,”
says Steven Desch, a theoretical astrophysi-
cist at Arizona State University. Desch was
among the proponents of the idea that
Uranus and Neptune might have swapped
positions. Building Neptune requires a lot
of hydrogen, some two Earth masses at
least. “There’s no model where you can
grow Neptune to where it can accrete
enough gas,” he says. “It’s got to be 10 Earth
masses to hold on to it. If you form it closer
in — like 15 AU — then maybe it can grow
big enough to hold on to the hydrogen gas.”
Unlike the Grand Tack model, the Nice
model plays out over millions of years.
This is how Uranus and Neptune could
exchange enough angular momentum with
the Kuiper Belt to switch places. Although
each interaction with a Kuiper Belt object
(KBO) wouldn’t do much, over time, many
KBOs would be scattered toward the Sun
and the ice giants would20°be nudged to their
current positions. Morbidelli doesn’t think
the planet-switching is likely, however. He
refers to it as a “dead hypothesis,” and
60°
Classical KBOs
Resonant KBOs
Scattered disk
Detached
40°
20°
100 150

Debris disks, like this one around the star Beta
Pictoris, should be a lot more common if planets
take millions of years to form. Planet migration
can clear out debris quickly, however, leaving
such disks as rare commodities. ESO/A.-M. LAGRANGE ET AL.
thinks a five-planet model with another ice
giant is sufficient.
These movements also would explain
the Late Heavy Bombardment. As the ice
giants moved out, they disrupted the early
Kuiper Belt and sent volatile-rich bodies
careening into the inner system.
All this planetary dancing was crazy
enough — and then came Planet Nine.
Out in the cold
The first inklings that there might be a
large planet beyond the Kuiper Belt came
in 2003, when Caltech astronomer Mike
Brown noticed that Sedna — an object
roughly 600 miles (1,000 km) in diameter
that never gets closer to the Sun than 76 AU
— has a particularly elongated orbit. With
Batygin, he found five other objects whose
orbits seemed similarly aligned. Brown
and Batygin proposed that the only thing
that could cause that was a planet — but
Neptune was too far away to be the culprit.
It had to be a world many times Earth’s
mass in a millennia-long orbit.
If Planet Nine is real, it couldn’t have
formed in the outer reaches of the solar
system, says Kat Volk of the University of
Arizona. There simply isn’t enough mass in
that region — recent estimates put the total
for all KBOs at about that of the Moon.
The zones where Planet Nine would lurk
are home to even less material.
That means if it does exist, Planet Nine
either was ejected from closer in to the Sun
or it was stolen from a passing star. Each
hypothesis has its difficulties. Bannister
says it’s hard to imagine capturing a planet
from a passing star because it already
would have to be relatively far away from
Grand Tack model
Jupiter forms
Jupiter
Saturn Uranus Neptune
Asteroids Comets
Jupiter migrates inward
Saturn migrates to 3:2 resonance; formation of the terrestrial planets
Outward migration
End of the “Grand Tack”
After “Nice scenario”
Sun 2 AU 4 AU 6 AU 8 AU 10 AU
Astronomers developed the Grand Tack model in 2011 as a way to explain Mars’ low mass. It contends
that Jupiter, after forming some 3.5 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, migrated inward to 1.5 AU
before tacking back out to its current spot 5.2 AU away. The critical stages in the process encompass
the birth of Jupiter through 600,000 years later. ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY
its parent, raising the question of how it got the right way means a lot of things had to
there. If it were an ejected ice giant, then play out just so. “It’s probably not going to
the issue is what kind of orbit it might end happen around a large fraction of other
up in — still a big unknown. Bannister stars,” he says.
notes that an ejected super-Earth-sized or Just because our system is hard to make
ice-giant-sized planetary core would be as doesn’t mean it can’t happen. “If you want
likely to leave the solar system as to hang to describe planetary systems in general,
around its fringes. To get something that you want broad evolutionary models,” says
massive out there would require a lot of Morbidelli. “When you want to describe a
moving parts to work together. specimen, you’ve got to reconstruct its his-
tory like an archaeologist. A general pat-
Weird and rare, but home tern needs some exceptions, like describing
Rare events might be why our solar system the specific life of each one of us.”
is as odd as it is compared with what we
see elsewhere in the galaxy. Jackson says Jesse Emspak is a science writer who lives
that for Jupiter and Saturn to migrate in and works in New York City.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 27

early 2017, the two of
us, along with a few others, refreshed
the debate on the definition of planet
in scientific nomenclature. The
International Astronomical Union’s
(IAU) historic definitional vote in 2006
recognized only eight solar system
planets, and this has brought new focus
to some underlying issues of importance
to planetary science. Specifically, this
debate touches on how words acquire
their meaning and shape our thinking
in both science and everyday life.
Accordingly, the definition of planet is
PLUTO: NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY/SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE; ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY
about much more than whether students
learn Pluto’s name in a list of planets.
In science, two languages describe the
natural world: words (in our case, in
English) and mathematics. Here, we’ll
focus on words. Words possess power
beyond communication: Word choice
affects how we conceptualize, organize,
synthesize, and contextualize informa-
tion. Words are also how we scientists
and educators communicate science to
the public. In other words (so to speak),
words structure our understanding of
the world. This mental structure is what
educational psychologists call a schema.
Scientists define words as part of our
scientific nomenclature with an eye
toward schematic usefulness to concep-
tualize, organize, synthesize, and contex-
tualize information about nature.
Nomenclatures’ definitions arise organi-
cally: Scientists choose words and
28 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
An organically
phrases to describe their dune produced by the action of wind
work, and write them in predominantly from one direction …
peer-reviewed journals and peri- with a gentle slope facing toward the
odicals, and speak them aloud in scien- wind and a steep slope, known as the
tific conferences and classrooms. slip face, facing away from the wind.” (It
Precedent is a key element in forming so happens that barchan sand dunes are
definitions (just ask a lawyer!) that both all over the place on Mars!)
reflect and promote a useful schema for That definitions arise through pro-
understanding the natural world. fessional and common usage are one
Conversely, scientific definitions are blow against the legitimacy of the IAU’s
almost never and should never be definitional vote. Another blow arises
handed down authoritarian- from the fact that scientists
style from a central voting of one discipline should not
body, particularly when sci- Words possess presume to define words for
entists of different disciplines power beyond another. An illustration
have different uses for the stems from considering the
communication:
same word. The artificial word metal. Astronomers
authority behind the few Word choice use it to describe elements in
voted definitions in exis- stars heavier than helium.
tence, such as the IAU’s
affects how we Metallurgists use the word in
planet definition, should be conceptualize, the more common way, yet
viewed with skepticism and astronomers and metallur-
even dismissal. Science func-
organize, gists don’t fight over the def-
tions through individual synthesize, and inition — each user
experts making conclusions community knows what they
and coming to consensus,
contextualize mean when they use the
rather than being instructed information. word metal. What would
on what has been decided. happen if the metallurgical
For instance, as far as I (Kirby) know as community declared an official defini-
a planetary geologist, no one has ever tion of metal and then publicly scorned
voted on the definition for a barchan astronomers for using a different defini-
sand dune. Yet, through usage and prec- tion, saying, “I wish they would just get
edent, a definition for barchan exists over it”?
based on its introduction in the scien- Just as different definitions of metal
tific literature in 1881 by Alexander serve different communities, we, as plan-
von Middendorf. Britannica’s useful def- etary scientists, find it useful to define a
inition for barchan sand dune is based planet as a substellar mass body that has
on the word’s precedent in the literature; never undergone nuclear fusion and has
the definition is a “crescent-shape sand enough gravitation to be round due to
 hydrostatic equilibrium, regardless of its
orbital parameters. This is the definition
we presented at the 2017 Lunar and
Planetary Science Conference. Indeed,
planetary scientists already use and teach
such a geophysical definition of planet to
promote a useful mental schema about
the round and non-round worlds we
study: At least 119 peer-reviewed papers
in professional, scientific journals implic-
itly use this definition when they refer to
grown Should we really define a word by voting? by Kirby D. Runyon and S. Alan Stern
round worlds (including moons) as plan-
ets. The publication history for these
papers spans decades, hailing from both
before and after the 2006 IAU vote. This
overwhelming precedent cements the geo-
physical definition’s legitimacy in profes-
sional planetary science.
We realize that more than 100 objects
in the solar system fit this geophysical
planet definition, yet this does not dilute
the word’s usefulness. Rather, subcatego-
ries of planets help us form a mental
schema to recognize planets’ diversity and
then draw conclusions and insights based
on groupings of planets with similar
properties. A few useful examples of
diversity among planets include terrestrial
planets (Mars), giant planets (Uranus),
dwarf planets (Pluto, Eris, etc.), and satel-
lite planets (Europa). Each subcategory of
planet helps us recognize similarities and
differences: the domain of comparative
planetology. For instance, Enceladus (an
icy dwarf satellite planet) and Neptune (a
giant planet) are very different types of
planets in size, gravity, and orbits. Yet
both are round, contain high amounts of
water, and are located within our solar
system’s Middle Zone. (This usage further
illustrates the nonsensical claim by the
IAU that dwarf planets are not planets;
rather, dwarf planets are a subcategory of
planets just as giant planets are.) Just as
having approximately 400 billion objects
that fit the definition of star in our Milky
Way Galaxy does not diminish the useful-
ness of the word star, likewise having
many planets in our solar system does not
diminish the usefulness of the word
planet. Similarly, stars’ size and spectral
diversity between red dwarf stars and blue
supergiant stars parallels planets’ diversity
between small Kuiper Belt dwarf planets
and giant planets.
Definitions, like numerical measure-
ments, have uncertainty, or as scientists
like to call it, an “error bar.” Many small
quasi-round worlds fall into that uncer-
tainty on the small end of the size spec-
trum, and deuterium-fusing large worlds
(brown dwarfs) fall into the error bars on
the large end. However, the geophysical
definition of planet has low enough
uncertainty to still be useful to us.
The geophysical definition further
proves its worth when considering exo-
planets orbiting other stars outside our
solar system. As a thought experiment,
assume our Milky Way Galaxy has a con-
servative 100 billion possible planetary
systems anchored by at least one star.
Assume a conservative 100 dwarf planets
like Pluto or Eris in each system. That’s
10 trillion dwarf planets in just our gal-
axy. If one assumes five giant planets per
planetary system, that’s only 500 billion
giants in the galaxy compared to 10 tril-
lion dwarfs. Thus, dwarfs outnumber
giants 20 to 1 and are the rule rather
than the exception. Re-formulating our
schema of what a planet is facilitates
such insights.
This new schema for planet — properly
defined by expert planetary scientists —
will powerfully work itself out in grade
school classrooms. Rather than teaching
students the names of all the planets,
teachers should emphasize the types and
Kirby D. Runyon
is a postdoctoral
planetary geologist
at the Johns Hopkins
Applied Physics
Lab specializing
in image analysis
to understand the
evolution of planetary
landscapes.
subtypes of planets and how the solar sys-
tem is naturally organized outward from
the Sun, using a handful of planets as
examples. This is analogous to learning the
organization of the periodic table of the
elements without having to memorize all
or even most of the 100+ names.
Along with this teaching strategy,
scientists, educators, and students should
ignore illegitimate scientific definitions
that arise via voting, such as the IAU’s
planet definition. Instead, they should
adopt definitions that arise naturally
through usage by experts in the field,
which reflect and promote a useful
mental schema about the natural world
and a more accurate picture of how
science operates.
Other scientists may find a different
definition useful, such as one more con-
cerned with orbits and gravitational
effects on smaller worlds, as proposed by
the IAU. However, such scientists should
not look to the IAU’s vote to cement their
preferred definition, but should rather
use and teach the definition they find
useful. In parallel, they should not
begrudge other scientists’ criteria for
what makes a definition useful to them.
Just as in the example about the use of the
term metal, each user community should
use planet definitions useful to them
without deferring to a central voting
authority. And, just as other definitions
arise organically, the definition of planet
may now be considered organic, drawing
to a close this public hand-wringing
debate and thawing hearts that had fro-
zen toward the planet Pluto.
S. Alan Stern is a plan-
etary scientist who pri-
marily studies the outer
solar system. He is also
the principal investigator
on NASA’s New Horizons
mission and formerly the
associate administrator
for NASA’s Science
Mission Directorate.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 29
In 2014, NASA released
this updated version
of the iconic Hubble
Ultra Deep Field image.
The original zoomed
in on a tiny section of
apparently empty sky in
the Southern Hemisphere
using both visible and
near-infrared light.
For Hubble Ultra Deep
Field 2014, astronomers
collected and included
ultraviolet data, which
helps reveal the youngest,
largest, and hottest stars
in the universe. NASA, ESA,
H. TEPLITZ AND M. RAFELSKI (IPAC/
CALTECH), A. KOEKEMOER AND Z. LEVAY
(STScI), R. WINDHORST (ARIZONA STATE
UNIVERSITY)
 In an era of large-scale surveys,
citizen science projects, and new
machine-learning techniques,
unexpected discoveries should
be expected. by Mara Johnson-Groh

Seeking the
unknown in
COSMIC
DATA
In 1964  astronomers Arno A. Penzias and Robert
W. Wilson found themselves cleaning
pigeon poop out of the Holmdel Horn Antenna, a radio telescope
in New Jersey. The data from the instrument had weird, persis-
tent noise that they couldn’t get rid of. They tried looking for
places where errant radiation signals could sneak in, and even
redesigned a part of the telescope, but the noise endured. When
nothing else seemed to work, they trapped two pigeons that had
taken up roost in the telescope and scrubbed out their droppings,
yet the noise remained. Unbeknownst to them, they were trying
to remove a fundamental signature of our universe — the cosmic
microwave background.
Just over a decade later, Wilson and Penzias won the Nobel
Prize in Physics for their serendipitous discovery of cosmic micro-
wave background (CMB) radiation. Although the pair initially had
been searching for a halo around the Milky Way, they instead
found the first light of the universe, left over from right after the
Big Bang, when photons of light were just bursting forth.
Wilson and Penzias aren’t alone in making fortuitous break-
throughs. Indeed, unexpected discoveries are almost a hallmark of
astronomy. William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781 while
looking for binary stars, originally identifying the planet as a

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 31
 improve their chances of discovering the
unexpected. Perhaps the way to remain
on the cutting-edge of astronomy is to
look where no one has looked before.

The 15-meter Holmdel Horn Antenna was built in 1959 at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel,
New Jersey, with the goal of performing pioneering work related to satellite communications.
While attempting to use the antenna for research in 1964, radio astronomers Robert Wilson
and Arno Penzias accidentally made a discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize in Physics. NASA
comet. Engineer Linda Morabito found
volcanoes on Io while fiddling with
image contrast to better see the back-
ground stars behind the jovian moon.
Physicist Karl Jansky stumbled upon
X-rays emanating from the center of the
Milky Way while trying to improve
trans-Atlantic phone calls. A U.S. spy
satellite originally detected gamma-ray
bursts while looking for covert nuclear
bomb explosions in the 1960s. And these
are just a few examples.
While astronomy has progressed
through dogged reconciliation of theory
and observation, it has also greatly ben-
efited from things no one could have
expected at the time. Two decades on,
the Hubble Space Telescope has fulfilled
its key goals, but it has also discovered
proplyds (a type of planet-forming disk
around a young star), unveiled dark
energy, and showed that a seemingly
empty section of the night sky was actu-
ally burgeoning with untold numbers of
galaxies. Nobody expected these discov-
eries when Hubble launched.
With rapid advances in technology,
astronomy is emerging into an era of big
surveys. Ultra-high-resolution imaging
and new collection techniques now allow
for unprecedented amounts of data to be
recorded and stored. Astronomers are
already becoming overwhelmed with
more data than they have time to process.
When scientists barely have the time to
search the data for what they’re looking
for, how can they be expected to catch the
paradigm-shifting details no one could
have imagined?
This new era of big-data astronomy
requires a new way of looking at data,
and astronomers are developing ways to
Leaving no stone
unturned
Many unexpected discoveries in astron-
omy were possible simply because of new
technology. Galileo’s telescope allowed for
unprecedented views of the sky, uncov-
ering shocking surprises. Similarly, the
Hubble Space Telescope allowed astrono-
mers to look deeper into the universe
than ever before, revealing unimaginable
phenomena. Now, Ray Norris — an
astronomer at Western Sydney University
and the Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organisation
in Australia — will tackle an under-
observed section of the universe with a
new survey using radio waves.
The Evolutionary Map of the Universe
(EMU) survey will use the Australian
Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder to
study radio sources in the night sky. Its
goal is to combine breadth and depth to
seek out fainter sources spread across a
wider field of view than previously
attempted. Currently, 2.5 million radio
sources are known. EMU expects to find
70 million more.
Radio sources are often among the
most energetic and explosive objects in
the sky. Black holes, supernovae, and rap-
idly rotating neutron stars (pulsars) are
all known to emit radio waves. The EMU
survey expects to find many objects in
the early universe — some of known
types and some new — that can tell us
how the first stars and galaxies formed.
And Norris has spent a lot of time think-
ing about how best to make those unex-
pected discoveries.
“As telescopes develop, we’ll be getting
more and more data,” says Norris. “The

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the first light to travel This simulated image shows how the sky would have appeared
throughout the universe, left over from just moments after the Big Bang. to the Holmdel antenna, which was used by Penzias and Wilson
Over time, the light that makes up the CMB lost energy, stretching out its in 1965 to accidentally discover the cosmic microwave background.
wavelength toward the microwave and radio spectra. NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAM NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAM

32 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
Bombshell breakthroughs
DISCOVERY OF
URANUS. On
March 13, 1781,
William Herschel
was searching
for binary
stars when he
unintentionally
discovered
Uranus. He
originally
mistook the plan- VOLCANOES ON IO. Engineer Linda Morabito inadvertently discovered Io’s volcano
et for a comet. Pele in an optical navigation image taken by Voyager 1. Following Pele’s discovery,
NASA/JPL-CALTECH hundreds of smaller volcanoes were detected on Io over the years. NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

GAMMA-RAY BURSTS. In the 1960s, a U.S.

spy satellite was searching for violations of the
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when it unexpectedly
detected gamma rays coming from the sky
X-RAYS AT THE CENTER OF THE MILKY WAY. While attempting to improve long-distance instead of the ground. This was the first evidence
telephone calls, physicist Karl Jansky accidentally discovered that the center of the Milky Way for gamma-ray bursts, which are some of the
is bursting with X-ray light (magenta). NASA/JPL-CALTECH most powerful explosions in the universe. ESO

problem is finding the things you don’t
expect, which hide among the things you
can recognize and the noise in the data.”
Background and instrumental noise,
as Penzias and Wilson know all too well,
can be hard to quantify. As telescopes
and instruments become increasingly
complex, it becomes harder to under-
stand the signatures they leave in the
data. But being able to distinguish
between noise and small, unexpected sig-
nals is key in the search for the unknown.
To tease out the unexpected discover-
ies, Norris is helping develop a project
known as the Widefield ouTlier Finder,
or WTF. With the specific goal of aiding
in unexpected discoveries, WTF will use
complex algorithms and cloud computing
to pull out unusual signals in the data
and reduce the huge quantities of data to
manageable amounts.
Seek and you will find
If you can’t find somewhere new to look,
you can try looking harder than anyone
else. This method paid off for astronomer
Jocelyn Bell. While a graduate student
at the University of Cambridge, Bell was
charged with studying data from quasars
— distant active galaxies — coming from
a radio telescope. Amid all the signals,
she noticed a source that varied too fast
to be a quasar. She had discovered a new
type of star: pulsars.
This technique is the basis of surveys
like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
(LSST), which will survey the entire sky
every few nights from its location in
north-central Chile.
“There are some quantifiable reasons
why everyone believes LSST to be a major
revolution for very rare objects and
events,” says Željko Ivezić, project scien-
tist of LSST and professor of astronomy
at the University of Washington in
Seattle. “The volume, the high dimen-
sionality of measurements, and the mea-
surement precision all bode well for
unexpected discoveries and discoveries of
rare objects and events.”
Set to begin watching the night sky in
2021, LSST will provide continual sur-
veillance of the heavens in an exhaustive
manner. With a wide field of view the
size of 40 Full Moons, LSST will take
images at multiple wavelengths ranging
from visible to near-infrared. Every clear
night, it will log as much as 30 terabytes
of data. Over its 10-year expected life-
time, LSST plans on imaging each section
of the sky a thousand times, creating
more than 30 trillion observations of
40 billion celestial objects.
This style of observation will naturally
single out objects that change in bright-
ness, such as pulsars, supernovae, and
distant quasars, as well as moving objects,
like asteroids and other small bodies in
our solar system. The scientists hope it
may also help identify new variable activ-
ity in the night sky.
Large-scale surveys have been carried
out before, but never to the extent that
LSST will go. Previously, the most exten-
sive survey was the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey (SDSS), which imaged only a
quarter of the sky. LSST will use a tele-
scope nearly three times larger, providing
twice the resolution across a wider range
of wavelengths of light, and it will view a
greater portion of the cosmos.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 33
 by having them explore real images to
identify simple objects or patterns in a
fun, gamelike way. With citizen science,
the types of routine analyses that would
typically require months of work by a few
scientists can now be done by many more
science enthusiasts at their leisure.
One of the first groups to enlist the
public’s help at the data processing stage
was a team of scientists at NASA’s Ames
Research Center. Using data collected by
the Viking orbiters, which were sent to
Mars in the 1970s, the team developed
ClickWorkers, an online site where the
public could identify and map craters on
the martian surface, in 2000. The initial

Using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, Ray Norris plans to carry out the
Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) survey to investigate radio sources in the sky. Although
2.5 million radio sources are already known, EMU expects to take on another 70 million more.
With the immense amounts of data
LSST will produce nightly, it will be
essential for researchers to stay on top of
the imagery. For this, LSST scientists
have developed systems that automati-
cally process images by looking for differ-
ences between two exposures of the same
section of the sky that were taken at dif-
ferent times. This automation will allow
any changes to be noticed within a min-
ute. However, the road to understanding
the flagged events will still require hours
upon hours of analysis.
“We need to develop these tools so that
they can operate on these quadrillions of
numbers,” says Ivezić. “Today we have
these tools if you want to apply them to
millions or even billions of objects. But if
you want to scale them up by a factor of a
thousand, it’s not a trivial thing. These
tools can mean the difference between
amorphous piles of ones and zeros and
potentially paradigm-shifting discoveries.”
SKA ORGANIZATION
Enlisting the public’s help in scientific
endeavours dates back more than a cen-
tury to birdwatchers tracking aviary
migration patterns across North
America. But it wasn’t until the rise of the
internet and the online gaming culture
that citizen science projects really took
off. The idea is simple: Engage the public
Same size, different sight
Primary mirror
diameter
8m-class telescope
8m
results showed the public was both enthu-
siastic about helping and capable of per-
forming tasks accurately. Soon after, the
project was expanded.
“The majority of people participated
because they wanted to be a part of
research,” says Lucy Fortson, an astro-
physicist at the University of Minnesota
who has worked extensively with citizen
science projects. “They felt that they
wanted to do something meaningful with
their extra time.”
Today there are numerous citizen sci-
ence projects in astronomy, such as
CosmoQuest, Milky Way Project, and
perhaps most famously, Galaxy Zoo. In
Field of view
0.2°

Crowdsourcing astronomy LSST

Astronomers have determined that as
many as 400 billion stars exist in our gal-
axy, while likely hundreds of billions of
galaxies exist in the observable universe.
And, with the help of new large-scale Full Moon
surveys, these numbers could keep grow- is 0.5°
ing. Thanks to computers, scientists no
longer have to hand-count dots on pho-
tographic plates. But even with machines, 8.4 m
3.5°
there is still far more data out there than
any scientific cohort, no matter how A comparison of the field of views for a typical 8-meter-class telescope and the uniquely designed
dedicated, can tackle. Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). LSST CORPORATION; ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

34 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
Galaxy Zoo, the public is asked to iden-
tify the type of galaxy shown: Is it a disk?
Is it edge-on? Is there a central bulge?
These features can be quickly identified
by eye, but natural variations can make
them exceedingly difficult for computers
to recognize and categorize.
“Humans are actually very well
designed to picking out serendipitous
discoveries in image datasets,” Fortson
says. “By virtue of evolution, humans
have developed this amazing visual cor-
tex that can differentiate the unknown
unknowns from the knowns.”
Of course, using the untrained public
doesn’t come without its challenges.
People make mistakes. Luckily, the large
number of people involved in the identi-
fication can be used to create averages
and a group consensus, which, over the
long run, can be even more accurate
than a single scientist’s identification. In
Galaxy Zoo, 40 different individuals
examine each galaxy to create a trusted
identification. By carefully processing
the results, individual people can even
be weighted differently depending on
their identification success rate. In this
way, people whose identifications gener-
ally don’t agree with the group consen-
sus can be flagged for rejection, so they
don’t skew the end results.
Rise of the machines
Once the masses have identified and
categorized thousands of images,
significant work remains to analyze
the data. This is where computers finally
come in. These machines are the heavy
lifters, allowing for complex calculations
and comparisons that the
human brain would be hard-
pressed to match on its own. LSST will
While machines historically
can only do exactly what they collect as
are told, a subset of comput- much as 30
ers are being taught to think
on their own. terabytes of
Astronomers are using a
type of artificial intelligence,
data every
called machine learning, to clear night.
get computers to teach them-
selves how to find patterns in
the data. A specific method of machine
learning known as artificial neural
networks was designed based on how
the brain functions. These neural
networks draw connections in vast
webs of data, just as the human brain
does. To create these networks, a scien-
tist starts by showing the computer a
Galaxies, clusters
of galaxies, and
clusters of clusters
of galaxies join
with dark matter
to form a grand,
weblike structure
called the cosmic
web, a slice of
which is shown
here. With the
help of artificial
neural networks,
astronomers
hope to run
simulations like
this to investigate
the cosmic web in
much greater detail
than previously
possible. NASA, ESA,
AND E. HALLMAN (UNIVERSITY
OF COLORADO BOULDER)
“training set,” which is a series of exam- training set is not extensive enough, the
ples containing what the computer is computer will draw the wrong conclu-
looking for — such as spiral galaxies. sions. Or, as astronomers are fond of
Over time, and with enough examples, repeating, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
the computer will become adept at The other drawback to artificial neu-
identifying spiral galaxies, despite ral networks is that they require vast
their wide range of appearances. At datasets to “learn” from. Luckily, in the
this point, the scientist can provide era of large-scale surveys, vast datasets
the computer with a sample of unidenti- are common. This means that artificial
fied galaxies, and the machine will neural networks can quickly turn the
return those that fit the criteria it problem of too much data into an advan-
has assessed. tage. The larger the training set — which
Machines can also be taught a much citizen scientists can help bolster — the
more difficult task: assessing how objects better the results.
and their characteristics relate to one
another. For example, scientists have used The future of
artificial neural networks to unexpected discoveries
investigate how galaxies form “Our ability to collect these humongous
clusters and how that group- datasets is developing in parallel with
ing affects the numbers of our ability to interpret these huge data-
stars the galaxies produce. sets,” says Ivezić. “Both directions are
Only with the assistance of important — people who collect data and
computers are the scientists people who develop tools to analyze and
able to compare the many interpret. Otherwise we’d just be stuck
physical properties at play,
such as galaxy mass, distance
with a huge pile of zeros and ones we
couldn’t make sense out of.”
between galaxies, and previ- With the combination of large-scale
ous interactions between gal- surveys, a legion of citizen scientists, and
axies. And by comparing new machine learning techniques, it
many hundreds of thousands of galaxies, seems many new unexpected discoveries
scientists are able to make broad conclu- will soon emerge from the darkness. But
sions about our universe that are unbi- as for the nature of those discoveries?
ased by small irregularities. Only time can tell.
When encoded properly, artificial
neural networks can provide profound Mara Johnson-Groh is a science writer and
insight to scientists; however, they can photographer who writes about everything
also be easily misused. For example, if the under the Sun, and even things beyond it.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 35
 SKYTHIS Visible to the naked eye

MONTH MARTIN RATCLIFFE and ALISTER LING describe the

solar system’s changing landscape as it appears in Earth’s sky.
Visible with binoculars
Visible with a telescope

May 2018: Jupiter shines brilliantly

As twilight deepens, Jupiter
appears low in the east. On
May 1, it rises by 8:30 p.m. local
daylight time and achieves the
same altitude as Venus (though
on the other side of the sky)
around 9:20 p.m.
Jupiter reaches opposition
May 8, when it lies opposite
the Sun in our sky and
remains visible all night. This
peak coincides with the plan-
et’s closest approach to Earth,
so it shines brightest and
appears largest through a tele-
scope. But as an outer planet,
Jupiter changes slowly — it
shines brilliantly at magnitude
–2.5 all month, and its equato-
rial diameter stays between
44" and 45".
The planet’s steady appear-
Dark cloud belts alternate with brighter zones in Jupiter’s atmosphere. ance is reflected in its slow
Even small telescopes will reveal details within these bands, particularly motion across the sky. Jupiter
when the gas giant looms large at its peak in May. NASA/ESA/A. SIMON (GSFC) resides in Libra, beginning
May 4° east of Zubenelgenubi
For the best views through
a telescope, wait for the planet
to climb 30° high so its light
traverses less of Earth’s
image-distorting atmosphere.
It reaches this altitude around
midnight local daylight time
in early May and by 10 p.m. at
month’s close. These prime
viewing conditions last about
three hours.
Even the smallest instru-
ment reveals Jupiter’s two
dark equatorial belts, which
sandwich a brighter zone that
coincides with the planet’s
equator. More details pop into
view during moments of good
seeing, when Earth’s atmo-
sphere steadies, or when
observing through larger
scopes. Look for a series of
alternating belts and zones
that extends to the polar
regions. Also focus on fea-
tures along the turbulent

J
upiter rules the sky from
dusk to dawn. The king of
the planets reaches oppo-
sition and peak visibility
May 8, though it’s a star
attraction all month. The giant
planet has plenty of company,
however. Venus entertains
us during the early evening
hours, while Mars and Saturn
stand out after midnight. It’s
a cornucopia of planetary
delights that promises to thrill
every observer.
Let’s start our tour in the
western sky shortly after sun-
set. Venus shines at magnitude
–3.9 and appears beautiful
against the backdrop of bright
stars typically associated with
winter. On May 1, the planet
lies in Taurus about 5° north of
the Hyades star cluster and 10°
east of the Pleiades (M45). The
stars of Orion add to the stun-
ning scene as they sink toward
the western horizon along (Alpha [α] Librae) and ending edges of the dark belts.
with Venus. the month 0.9° northeast of Because the planet spins on
Venus treks eastward as this 3rd-magnitude star. its axis in less than 10 hours,
May progresses, arriving at
a point midway between the Jupiter at its best
Bull’s horns (Beta [β] and
Zeta [ζ] Tauri) on the 13th.
Arcturus
Four days later, a wafer-thin
crescent Moon stands 6° to
Venus’ left. Our satellite VIRGO
appears only 9 percent lit
because it passed between the Spica
Sun and Earth just two days C ORVUS
earlier. Venus, on the other
hand, lies on the far side of OPHIUCHUS
Jupiter
its orbit, and a telescope LIBR A
reveals a 12"-diameter disk
that is 84 percent lit.
Venus continues its east- Antares
ward sojourn all month. It SC OR PIUS 10°
crosses into Gemini on
May 19 and passes less than
1° north of the 5th-magnitude May 8, 11 P.M.
Looking southeast
star cluster M35 on the 20th.
By month’s end, the planet The solar system’s largest planet peaks at opposition May 8, but it rules
resides in central Gemini. the background stars of Libra all month. ALL ILLUSTRATIONS: ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

36 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 RISINGMOON
A fresh perspective on the Moon Furnerius and Mare Australe

The Moon’s nearside provides
more than a thousand features
within range of small telescopes.
But our satellite offers more than
just the craters, maria, and moun-
tain ranges visible at first glance.
Every month, Luna performs a
subtle dance with Earth that you
just have to look for.
Turn to the “Path of the
Planets” on p. 40–41 and locate
the blue curve showing the
Moon’s path and the orange arc
depicting the Sun’s motion. Notice
how the Moon swings below the
Sun and then rises above it, a
motion that stems from the tilt of
the Moon’s orbit relative to Earth’s.
As the two partners twirl
across the solar system’s dance
floor, the Moon’s face rises and
drops from our perspective. As a
waxing crescent May 18, it lies
somewhat below us, and the cra- Furnerius
ter Furnerius looks like a bright
dimple on the face’s lower right.
As Luna rises up with each pass-
ing day, the dimple moves away
from the limb and we see more
“under the chin.”
By the 22nd, we catch the first
hint of a dark blemish — Mare
Australe — at the southeastern
limb. This sea, the edge of a large
farside basin, slowly reveals itself N
until Full Moon on May 29. The Mare Australe
Moon’s motion is at its peak, and it E
then slowly drops back down, but
the change near the limb occurs in This pair of features near the Moon’s southeastern limb reveals our
darkness and out of sight. changing viewpoint during May. CONSOLIDATED LUNAR ATLAS/UA/LPL; INSET: NASA/GSFC/ASU

its appearance changes notice-

ably in as little as 10 minutes.
METEORWATCH
Combined with Jupiter’s gas-
eous nature, this rapid spin
causes the world’s equatorial
Halley’s debris reaches Eta Aquariid meteor shower

regions to bulge. Look care- a fiery demise CYGNUS

Altair

fully and you’ll notice that the AQUIL A

diameter through the poles is
6 percent smaller than across
its equator.
Small scopes also excel at
showing Jupiter’s four bright
moons. It can be a challenge
to identify them, but the
alignment on opposition
night makes it easy. On the
evening of May 8, Io, Europa,
and Callisto line up in that
order east of Jupiter while
Ganymede is the lone moon
west of the planet. With three
satellites on one side and one
on the other, you can quickly
tell which direction is which
— often a problem because
the orientation of the field
depends on the type of instru-
ment you use and when you
observe — and thus distin-
guish the moons.
Once each orbit, Io,
Europa, and Ganymede
— Continued on page 42
Two meteor showers trace their ori-
gins to history’s most famous comet.
Both the Eta Aquariids in May and
the Orionids in October result from
Earth crossing the orbital path of
Comet 1P/Halley. As our planet plows
through dust particles shed by the
comet over many millennia, friction
with molecules in the upper atmo-
sphere incinerates the bits and cre-
ates “shooting stars.”
The Eta Aquariid shower peaks the
morning of May 6. Unfortunately, a
waning gibbous Moon shares the sky
and will drown out fainter meteors.
For the best views, find an otherwise
dark site and place yourself where a
tree or building blocks the Moon’s
direct light.
With clear weather, observers at
mid-northern latitudes might see up
to 10 meteors in the hour before
dawn. People in the Southern
OBSERVING Jupiter reaches its 2018 peak May 8, when the gas giant shines
HIGHLIGHT at magnitude –2.5 and spans 44.8" through a telescope.
Radiant
PEGASUS
May 6, 4 A.M.
Looking east
A gibbous Moon competes with
May’s best shower, reducing
the number of meteors visible
in the predawn sky May 6.
Hemisphere could see twice
as many because the radiant
— the point in Aquarius where
the meteors originate —
Enif
CAPRIC ORNUS
AQUARIUS
d
10°
Eta Aquariid meteors
Active dates: April 19–May 28
Peak: May 6
Moon at peak: Waning gibbous
Maximum rate at peak:
50 meteors/hour
climbs much higher. It’s still a
far cry from the normal rate
(up to 50 per hour), but it’s the
best May has to offer.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 37
 N
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38 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018 S
 Note: Moon phases in the calendar vary
in size due to the distance from Earth
MAY 2018 and are shown at 0h Universal Time.
SUN. MON. TUES. WED. THURS. FRI. SAT.
a
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MAP SYMBOLS
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ILLUSTRATIONS BY ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

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9 P.M. EDT
31 The Moon passes 1.6° north of
10 The Moon passes 2° south of Saturn, 9 P.M. EDT
Neptune, 5 A.M. EDT

12 Mercury passes 2° south of

Uranus, 5 P.M. EDT
RA
YD _ IA SW
TL
j N
A

BEGINNERS: WATCH A VIDEO ABOUT HOW TO READ A STAR CHART AT www.Astronomy.com/starchart.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 39
 PATH OF THE
PLANETS The planets in May 2018
CAS
Objects visible before dawn DR A

AND
L AC
LY R HER
PER CYG
BOÖ
T RI
C rB
ARI PS C
PEG V UL
Merc Sun
ury SGE
Uranus EQU
SER
TAU PS C
AQL SER Jupiter appears at its best
Celestial equator for the year in May
Neptune VIR
ERI AQR OPH
CET
SCT n
th e Moo
Vesta Path of
Mars
Pluto Saturn LI B
F OR S CL CAP
PsA
SGR Amphitrite
MIC C rA
GRU LUP
SC O

Moon phases Dawn Midnight

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

31 30 29 28 27 26

The planets These illustrations show the size, phase, and orientation of each planet and the two brightest dwarf planets at 0h UT
for the dates in the data table at bottom. South is at the top to match the view through a telescope.
in the sky

Mercury Uranus
Mars
S

W E

N
Pluto
Saturn
Venus Ceres Neptune
10"
Jupiter

Planets MERCURY VENUS MARS CERES JUPITER SATURN URANUS NEPTUNE PLUTO
Date May 1 May 15 May 15 May 15 May 15 May 15 May 15 May 15 May 15
Magnitude 0.3 –3.9 –0.7 8.5 –2.5 0.3 5.9 7.9 14.2
Angular size 7.8" 12.1" 12.8" 0.5" 44.8" 17.8" 3.4" 2.3" 0.1"
Illumination 46% 85% 89% 96% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%
Distance (AU) from Earth 0.859 1.375 0.734 2.526 4.403 9.319 20.806 30.307 33.001
Distance (AU) from Sun 0.459 0.718 1.476 2.559 5.408 10.066 19.888 29.942 33.562
Right ascension (2000.0) 0h54.1m 5h34.9m 20h07.4m 9h19.6m 15h01.0m 18h36.0m 1h51.3m 23h09.6m 19h30.3m
Declination (2000.0) 2°41' 24°44' –22°12' 26°36' –15°48' –22°18' 10°53' –6°25' –21°33'

40 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 This map unfolds the entire night sky from sunset (at right) until sunrise (at left).
Arrows and colored dots show motions and locations of solar system objects during the month.

Objects visible in the evening Jupiter’s moons

UM a
Dots display positions
Io
of Galilean satellites at
LYN
PER 11 P.M. EDT on the date Europa
C Vn LMi AU R shown. South is at the
GEM
C OM top to match
S
es
Cer Venus the view
Ganymede
C NC through a W E
Sun
LEO telescope. N Callisto
OR I
TAU 1
tic ) CMi
clip
n (e 2 Jupiter
e Su
f th
ho
Pat SEX
MON
3

4
C RV C RT CM a
5
LEP
ERI 6
HYA FOR
ANT PYX
7
C OL CAE
PUP 8

Early evening 9
To locate the Moon in the sky, draw a line from the phase shown for the day straight up to the curved blue line.
10
Note: Moons vary in size due to the distance from Earth and are shown at 0h Universal Time.
11 Io

12
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
13

14

15 Europa
The planets 16
in their orbits 17
Venus Arrows show the inner planets’
monthly motions and dots 18 Callisto
Ceres
depict the outer planets’ posi-
19
Mercury tions at midmonth from high
above their orbits. 20
Earth
21
Mars
22

23

Jupiter 24

25

26

Uranus 27
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

Jupiter 28 Ganymede
Opposition is May 8
Neptune 29
Saturn
30

31
Pluto

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 41
— Continued from page 37
Track down Jupiter’s satellites
WHEN TO VIEW THE PLANETS S Callisto

EVENING SKY MIDNIGHT MORNING SKY

Venus (west) Jupiter (south)
Jupiter (southeast) Saturn (southeast)
transit Jupiter’s disk along with
their shadows. Earlier this year,
each moon’s shadow crossed
before the moon itself. But
around the time of opposition,
when the Sun lies behind Earth
as we look toward Jupiter, the
moons and shadows practically
overlap. On May 7, for exam-
ple, Io’s shadow touches the
jovian cloud tops at 10:56 p.m.
EDT — just two minutes
before Io itself. The moon and
shadow both leave Jupiter’s
disk at 1:06 a.m. Contrast this
with the scene May 30, when
Io transits starting at 10:37 p.m.
but the shadow doesn’t hit the
planet until 30 minutes later.
While Jupiter deserves
plenty of attention, the parade
of viewing treats continues
Mercury (east)
Mars (south)
Jupiter (southwest)
Saturn (south)
Uranus (east)
Neptune (southeast)
until dawn. Next up is
Saturn, which rises shortly
after midnight local daylight
time in early May and some
two hours earlier by month’s
end. For the best views, how-
ever, wait until it climbs
higher in the south an hour
or two before twilight starts
to paint the sky.
The ringed planet resides
among the background stars
of Sagittarius, just north of
that constellation’s Teapot
asterism. On May 1, it stands
nearly 4° northeast of 3rd-
magnitude Lambda (λ)
Sagittarii, the star marking the
top of the Teapot’s lid, and 1.7°
north of the 5th-magnitude
globular star cluster M22.
Saturn moves slowly westward
W Io
Jupiter
Ganymede
May 8, 11:30 P.M. EDT
The gas giant’s moons are easy to see through a telescope, but identifying
them can be tricky. Their arrangement at opposition makes the task easy.
during May, ending the month
1.8° northwest of M22.
Saturn brightens from mag-
nitude 0.3 to 0.2 during May. It
far outshines Sagittarius’ stars,
and its yellow glow makes it
easy to identify. The planet
will brighten a bit more, to
magnitude 0.0, by opposition
in late June.
Like Jupiter, Saturn’s
appearance through a tele-
scope doesn’t change much in
May. But that’s a good thing,
because few celestial objects
rival the beautiful ringed
world. In mid-May, the planet’s
disk measures 18" across while
the rings span 40" and tilt 26°
to our line of sight. Even small
scopes reveal the Cassini
Europa
2'
Division, a dark gap that sep-
arates the outer A ring from
the brighter B ring. Small
instruments also show
Saturn’s brightest moon,
8th-magnitude Titan.
Although you won’t notice
much change with Jupiter and
Saturn this month, Mars
improves dramatically. The
Red Planet is just two months
away from a late July opposi-
tion that will bring it closer to
Earth than it has been in 15
years. Observers will notice a
rapid buildup toward this
peak in May — Mars doubles
in brightness (from magni-
tude –0.4 to –1.2), and its
angular diameter grows by
a third (from 11" to 15").

COMETSEARCH
PANSTARRS makes its closest approach Comet PANSTARRS (C/2016 R2)

The distant Oort Cloud continues C/2016 R2 moves slowly against

to send cometary messengers
into the inner solar system. Its
best current envoy — Comet
PANSTARRS (C/2016 R2) —
should glow at 10th or 11th mag-
nitude this month. But the comet
exceeded astronomers’ expecta-
tions earlier this year, so there’s
hope it could glow brighter.
PANSTARRS reaches perihe-
lion, its closest approach to the
Sun, on May 9. Even then, how-
ever, it lies in the midst of the
asteroid belt some 2.6 times far-
ther from the Sun than Earth is.
At that distance, our star can’t
warm the comet’s nucleus
enough to make it glow brightly.
But the great distance also means
N
the background stars, and it will
s
remain a tempting target in the k
northwest after darkness falls. 31
Several nearby bright stars 26
should make it relatively easy
21
to track down the comet. In
early May, PANSTARRS lies just 16
2° south of magnitude 0.1 / 11
Capella
Capella. And shortly after mid- E
month, the comet passes a simi- 6
`
lar distance north of magnitude May 1
Path of
1.9 Beta (β) Aurigae. Comet PANSTARRS
A 4-inch telescope under a AURIGA
dark sky should be enough to
capture the comet’s fuzzy glow, l
but an 8-inch scope will allow 1°
you to pick out some structure.
You’ll want to use a fairly high Brilliant Capella and 2nd-magnitude Beta (β) Aurigae make convenient
power to get the best views. guideposts for tracking down this modest comet on May evenings.

42 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 The Moon passes Venus
Pollux
Castor
GEMINI
Procyon
Venus
Moon
Betelgeuse
ORION
May 17, 1 hour after sunset
Looking west
A waxing crescent Moon teams up with brilliant Venus to form a stunning
pair in the western sky after the Sun sets May 17.
Mars rises shortly before
1:30 a.m. local daylight time as
May opens. It then lies in east-
ern Sagittarius, 15° east of
Saturn. Unlike Saturn, how-
ever, the Red Planet moves
eastward quickly. It passes 0.3°
south of the 9th-magnitude
globular cluster M75 on the
14th; by the next morning, it
has crossed into Capricornus.
It will remain in the Sea Goat
until late August. The planet’s
eastward journey partially
compensates for the Sun’s own
easterly motion, and Mars still
rises after midnight in late May.
Your best views through a
telescope come shortly before
twilight begins. By then, Mars
has climbed about 25° high in
the south-southeast. (It
appears higher the farther
south you live.) The planet’s
visible hemisphere changes
little from one night to the
next because Mars rotates just
a bit slower than Earth. If you
observe the Red Planet at the
same time each morning, the
longitude at the center of the
disk shifts only 9.1° each day.
For observers in North
America on May’s first few
mornings, the dark, wedge-
shaped feature known as Syrtis
Major stands at the center of
the martian disk. A week later,
the dark, fingerlike Mare
Cimmerium takes center stage.
LOCATINGASTEROIDS
Passing through the Lion’s den
Capella
AURIGA
TAURUS
10°
The volcanic Tharsis region
rotates into view on mornings
in mid-May. And by the 21st
and 22nd, Solis Lacus appears
quite prominent.
The remaining planets
cluster low in the east before
sunrise. Neptune rises at the
break of dawn in early May
but becomes a much easier
target late in the month. On
the 31st, it rises around 2 a.m.
local daylight time and climbs
20° high in the east-southeast
as twilight commences.
Glowing at magnitude 7.9,
it’s an easy binocular object
set against the backdrop of
Aquarius. Look for it 1.0°
west of 4th-magnitude
Phi (ϕ) Aquarii.
Uranus pops into view at
the end of May. After a five-
year stint among the back-
ground stars of Pisces, the
distant planet now resides in
Aries. You can find it through
binoculars 10° due south of
3rd-magnitude Beta (β)
Arietis and 3° northeast of
4th-magnitude Omicron (ο)
Piscium. Uranus shines at
magnitude 5.9 and shows
up quite easily through
binoculars.
Our final planet never
escapes morning twilight
this month for observers at
GET DAILY UPDATES ON YOUR NIGHT SKY AT www.Astronomy.com/skythisweek.
If you’ve never seen a dwarf
planet before, May offers a
perfect opportunity. Ceres, the
largest object in the asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter,
slides past magnitude 4.5
Kappa (κ) Leonis on the evening
of the 18th. Point your tele-
scope at Kappa and then look
for a magnitude 6.8 star half
the Full Moon’s diameter to the
south-southwest. Magnitude 8.5
Ceres lies between the two and
slightly closer to Kappa. You
can see the dwarf planet move
in under an hour as a nearly
straight line becomes crooked.
If it’s cloudy on the 18th,
don’t despair — Ceres soon
Catch a bright dwarf planet
LEO Path of Ceres
g
E
21
26
¡ 31
h
Although Ceres fades from magnitude 8.4 to 8.7 this month, it should be
easy to find as it crosses from Cancer into Leo.
mid-northern latitudes.
Mercury reached greatest
western elongation April 29,
and it remains low in the east
before dawn in early May.
On the 1st, it stands 4° high
30 minutes before sunrise. It
then shines at magnitude 0.3
and should be visible through
binoculars if you have an
unobstructed eastern horizon.
If you’re ambitious, you can
follow Mercury for another
crosses a field conducive to star-
hopping, with plenty of unusual
patterns containing unequal
stars. Those are easy to sketch
quickly, providing a framework
that makes Ceres’ night-to-night
movement noticeable. You can
see it shift positions in a single
evening again on the 24th,
when it passes a crooked line
of three fainter stars.
Viewing Ceres in the first half
of May won’t be as easy. Still, a
3-inch scope under suburban
skies will pull it in. Your best bet
is to start at Kappa and hop over
the border into Cancer. Just be
patient so as not to get lost in
the abundance of field stars.
N o
May 1
6
11
16
i
CANCER
1°
week or two. Although the
innermost planet slowly loses
altitude, it also brightens. On
the 15th, it appears 3° high a
half-hour before sunup and
shines at magnitude –0.3.
Martin Ratcliffe provides plane-
tarium development for Sky-Skan,
Inc., from his home in Wichita,
Kansas. Meteorologist Alister
Ling works for Environment
Canada in Edmonton, Alberta.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 43
ASKASTR0
BLACK HOLE
JETS
Q: IF NOT EVEN LIGHT CAN ESCAPE
FROM A BLACK HOLE, HOW CAN YOU
EXPLAIN JETS THAT LAUNCH AT NEAR
LIGHT SPEED EXTENDING FOR NUMEROUS
LIGHT-YEARS? Robert Byerly, Windsor, California
A: You are absolutely right that
not even light can escape from
a black hole, and yet they
launch huge, energetic jets that
we can see. The key here is
while nothing can escape a
black hole once it has fallen past
a certain point — called the
event horizon — the jets origi-
nate from outside that region.
Black holes themselves are
invisible. But outside the event
horizon, infalling matter col-
lects into an accretion disk,
which grows hot due to friction
and emits all sorts of radiation,
from optical through X-rays.
When astronomers observe a
black hole, they’re actually
observing the radiation from
this disk, which ends at the
event horizon.
Black holes themselves are invisible, but they can form huge accretion disks and launch energetic jets. The
accretion disk (orange-red and blue) and jet (purple) occur outside the black hole’s event horizon (the dark sphere)
and are thus visible to astronomers. NASA/JPL-CALTECH
44 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
Astronomy’s experts from around the globe answer your cosmic questions.
It is from the accretion disk
that the jets are formed and
launched, again well outside
the event horizon. Astronomers
believe these jets arise through
interactions between the black
hole’s magnetic field and elec-
trically charged plasma par-
ticles in the accretion disk.
When the black hole’s mag-
netic field accelerates them,
they gain enough energy to
glow, allowing us to spot them.
For stellar-mass black holes,
the jets “turn on” and become
visible at a distance of tens of
thousands of miles from the
black hole. For supermassive
black holes, this distance is
millions of times greater.
Alison Klesman
Associate Editor
Q: IN THE NOVEMBER 2017
ISSUE’S GRAVITATIONAL
WAVES STORY, ROBERT
NAEYE WROTE, “IF GRAVITA-
TIONAL WAVES DISPERSE,
SLOWER FREQUENCIES WILL
ARRIVE AT THE DETECTORS
AFTER THE FASTER ONES.”
BUT HOW ARE THERE DIF-
FERENT VELOCITIES FOR
DIFFERENT FREQUENCIES?
IT SEEMS ILLOGICAL TO ME.
Aaron Morris
Smyrna, Georgia
A: Gravitational waves are dis-
turbances in the fabric of space-
time that radiate outward from
the rapid movement of massive
objects. And in fact, you are
right: Basic human intuition
says that a high-frequency wave
Light waves
disperse as they
pass through a
prism, spreading
into a rainbow.
Gravitational
waves, however,
do not disperse,
meaning both
high- and
low-frequency
gravitational
waves travel
at the same speed
through every
medium.
LUCAS V. BARBOSA
should travel at the same speed
as a low-frequency wave.
A familiar example of dis-
persion occurs when white light
passes through a prism, which
separates the light into its con-
stituent colors. This occurs
because different wavelengths
(frequencies) of light take dif-
ferent paths through the prism.
As light passes through the
prism, it is absorbed and re-
emitted by the atoms of the
prism differently, depending on
its frequency. Violet light is
slowed down by this absorption
and re-emission process more
than red light, and thus the two
travel very different paths,
spreading out by the time they
exit the prism.
According to Einstein’s the-
ory of general relativity, gravi-
tational waves do not
experience dispersion in this
way. In other words, provided
that general relativity is an
accurate description of nature,
high-frequency gravitational
waves should travel at exactly
the same speed (the speed of
light) as low-frequency gravita-
tional waves. There should be
no preferential absorption or
re-emission of gravitational
waves as they travel through
space-time, regardless of their
frequency. Many alternative
theories, however, predict that
gravitational waves could expe-
rience dispersion as they travel
through space-time; these the-
ories treat gravity and
 Objects are not to scale
h
Sun
rs
t
Ear
Ma
asteroid belt
1 10
Logarithmic scale
The Oort Cloud is an extended region of icy bodies left over from the formation of the solar system. These objects appear tightly packed in illustrations,
but they are actually spread out with great distances on the order of 31 million miles (50 million km) between neighboring bodies. ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY
gravitational waves differently
from Einstein. If the nature of
gravity is different from what
Einstein states, then gravita-
tional waves might be allowed
to disperse.
LIGO and Virgo have both
looked for dispersion in the
gravitational waves detected
from merging black holes and
neutron stars, but have so far
found that all the different fre-
quencies are arriving at the
detector at the exact same time,
just as Einstein predicted.
Robert Naeye
Contributor
Q: I’VE HEARD THAT THE
OORT CLOUD CONTAINS
TRILLIONS OF ICY BODIES.
WHAT WOULD BE THE AVER-
AGE DISTANCE BETWEEN
THESE BODIES?
Larry Guldenzopf
Milwaukie, Oregon
A: In movies you usually see
an asteroid belt full of rocks
close to one another. In reality,
this would be an unstable situ-
ation because objects that are
close to one another will col-
lide often as they orbit the Sun.
Any belt of objects will grind
down the population until col-
lisions are rare, and thus the
objects generally will not be
found near each other in a sta-
ble long-lived belt.
In our main asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter,
ne
er
Ne s
tur
ptu
nu
it
to
Jup
Sa
Ura
Plu
Main
Kuiper Belt
100
Astronomical units (AU)
between about 2.1 and 3.3
astronomical units (AU; 1 AU
is the average Sun-Earth dis-
tance, 93 million miles [150
million kilometers]) from the
Sun, there are some 1 million to
1.5 million asteroids larger than
0.6 mile (1 km). Each of these
asteroids is on average 1.8 mil-
lion miles (3 million km) apart,
or about eight times the Earth-
Moon distance. These asteroids
are small compared with our
Moon and thus would generally
not be observable from each
other. Collisions between aster-
oids still do happen, with a few
per year that create dust clouds
we can detect with telescopes.
The Oort Cloud has many
more objects than the main
asteroid belt, some trillion
objects larger than a kilometer,
but it also occupies a much
larger volume of space from
5,000 AU to beyond 20,000 to
50,000 AU from the Sun. Oort
Cloud objects larger than 1 km
have some 31 million miles (50
million km) between each
other. This is about the dis-
tance between Earth and Mars
at their closest approach.
The large distances between
small objects in our solar system
make empty space the norm
and mean spacecraft can travel
safely among the planets.
Scott Sheppard
Staff Scientist, Department of
Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie
Institution of Washington,
Washington, D.C.
Solar system distances
Inner Oort Cloud
1,000
Q: MY UNDERSTANDING IS
THAT THE MATERIALS FOR
OUR SOLAR SYSTEM AND
OTHERS NEARBY WERE
CREATED BY A SUPERNOVA.
WHERE IS THE BLACK HOLE
FROM THAT SUPERNOVA?
John Goodemote
La Grange, Illinois
A: The heavy elements we see
throughout the galaxy today,
including our solar system,
were indeed created in and dis-
persed by supernovae, as well as
by colliding neutron stars such
as those observed in August.
However, not all supernovae
end in black holes. Current
models predict that a star must
have a mass at least 20 times
that of the Sun before the core
collapse at the end of its life
will result in a black hole. If
any nearby supernovae didn’t
meet this initial criterion — if
their parent stars were only
between eight and 20 solar
masses — they would have left
behind a neutron star, not a
black hole.
Neutron stars are difficult to
observe, particularly when they
are old and lack a binary com-
panion. They are typically on
the order of 12 miles (20 km)
in diameter and cool off over
time unless they are actively
accreting material from a
nearby companion star. Black
holes have the same observa-
tional problem — they only
“light up” and become
Oort Cloud
10,000 100,000
detectable when infalling mat-
ter forms a disk that emits
radiation. A lone black hole
with no companion accretes
slowly, so it has a minimal disk
and remains virtually invisible.
Finally, nothing in our
Milky Way is static. Every star
(and neutron star and black
hole) revolves around the cen-
ter of the galaxy, and also
moves relative to the objects
around it. This ultimately
means that astronomers aren’t
able to reliably wind back the
clock to determine what our
Sun’s surroundings looked like
before it formed. A black hole
or neutron star left by a nearby
supernova isn’t in the same
place it was billions of years
ago. We may never find the
exact supernova remnant or
remnants that left behind the
material from which our solar
system formed.
Alison Klesman
Associate Editor
Send us your
questions
Send your astronomy
questions via email to
askastro@astronomy.com,
or write to Ask Astro,
P. O. Box 1612, Waukesha,
WI 53187. Be sure to tell us
your full name and where
you live. Unfortunately, we
cannot answer all questions
submitted.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 45
 WHY DO
GALAXIES
ALII N
N
AL GG ??
The matter in our universe forms
filaments and threads like a grand
cosmic web, tugging galaxies and
clusters into place along the way.
by Michael West

The galaxy cluster
MACS J0416.1–2403
is highly elongated.
The orientations of
its brightest member
galaxies, which appear
round and yellow in
this image, reflect this
arrangement. ESA/HUBBLE,
NASA, AND HST FRONTIER FIELDS
O
ne of the most striking features
of the distribution of matter in
the universe is its filamentary
appearance, with long, luminous
strands of galaxies woven togeth-
er into a vast cosmic web.
Nowhere is this more evident than the
Perseus-Pisces Supercluster. This colossal chain
of galaxies snakes across more than 50° of the
northern sky, fed by a network of smaller fila-
ments that resemble tributaries flowing into a
river. Embedded within these filaments are
densely populated groups and clusters of galaxies.
Between them lie immense voids.
Our own Milky Way Galaxy resides in the
outskirts of a similar structure known as the
Laniakea Supercluster. (Laniakea means “immea-
surable heaven” in Hawaiian.) Home to an esti-
mated 100,000 galaxies, it’s a tangled knot of

46 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 60°

30°

150° 120° 90° 60° 30° 330° 300° 270° 240° 210°

–30°

–60°

A slice from the all-sky 2MASS XSCz infrared survey

shows galaxies within 140 million to 280 million light-
Decades of lively debate followed. English ama-
years of Earth. Long chains of galaxies — filaments
— are seen stretching across vast expanses of space, teur astronomer Francis Brown spent more than
linking together to create an intricate network known
as the cosmic web. TOM JARRETT (IPAC/CALTECH)
30 years investigating galaxy alignments in his
spare time. In a series of papers published between
WHY ARE
1938 and 1968, he presented evidence that galaxy
GALAXIES
orientations in certain regions of the sky were far ELONGATED?
filaments stretching half a billion light-years from from random. But many astronomers remained
end to end. University of Hawaii astronomer Brent skeptical, suggesting that the results might be a Most galaxies are elon-
gated in shape; round
Tully, whose team discovered Laniakea in 2014, lik- consequence of measurement errors, selection
ones are rare. But why?
ened it to “finding out for the first time that your effects, or even psychological biases. A galaxy’s image is a
hometown is actually part of a much larger country Then in 1968, Gummuluru Sastry of Wesleyan snapshot of its stars’
that borders other nations.” University showed beyond any doubt that the ori- motions, a moment fro-
Everywhere we look, galaxies trace out the paths entations of some galaxies are clearly not haphaz- zen in time. Spiral galax-
of these filaments. But it turns out galaxies don’t just ard. Sastry discovered that giant elliptical galaxies ies like the Milky Way
illuminate the cosmic web — they’re also shaped by it. owe their flattened
that populate the centers of clusters — the biggest
shapes to rotation. Just
and brightest galaxies in the universe — have a as a ball of pizza dough
When the stars align remarkable tendency to be elongated in the same flattens when spun, a
In 1874, less than a decade after the Civil War direction as their host cluster. For example, if a spiral galaxy’s stars
ended and long before anybody knew for certain cluster is elongated north-south, then more often spread into a thin disk as
what galaxies were, astronomer Cleveland Abbe than not, its brightest member galaxy is, too. If gal- it rotates. Traveling at
wondered how “nebulae,” as galaxies were known axies were human, psychologists would call this a half a million miles per
hour, our Sun has made
in those days, are oriented in space. textbook example of mirroring behavior. nearly two dozen trips
To answer this question, Abbe chose 59 of the Although Sastry’s conclusion was based on only around the Milky Way
most extended nebulae in Sir John Herschel’s five galaxies, other astronomers have subsequently since its birth.
famous Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars confirmed his results with much larger samples. Elliptical galaxies, on
and measured their direction of elongation. His sur- Recent studies with the Hubble Space Telescope the other hand, have lit-
prising conclusion was that the nebulae appeared to — whose sharp vision allows us to see the remote tle or no rotation. Their
stars swarm around the
favor certain orientations with respect to the Milky past by looking far into space — reveal that these
galaxy’s center like bees
Way. But his study drew little attention and was alignments even existed billions of years ago. around a hive, each fol-
soon forgotten; Abbe moved on to a more successful And there’s more. lowing its own seem-
career in meteorology. In 1981, Bruno Binggeli of the University of ingly random path.
Forty years later, American astronomer Edward Basel in Switzerland showed that clusters of galax- However, these orbits
Fath revisited Abbe’s question. After measuring the ies aren’t oriented at random, either. Instead, they are often elongated in
one direction more than
orientations of hundreds of galaxies on photo- exhibit a remarkable tendency to “point” toward
others, stretching the
graphic plates taken at Mount Wilson Observatory, neighboring clusters. Binggeli’s discovery was galaxy into a shape
he reported in 1914 that they “appear to be oriented anticipated a few years earlier by Estonian astrono- resembling a lumines-
at random.” mers Jaan Einasto, Mihkel Jõeveer, and Enn Saar. cent football. — M.W.

48 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 SMEARING
COSMIC
SHEAR
One astronomer’s signal is
sometimes another’s noise.
Charles Messier com-
piled his famous list of
deep-sky objects to spare
fellow comet hunters
from wasting time on
them. Edmund Weiss, a
19th-century Austrian
astronomer, called aster-
oids the “vermin of the sky”
because their trails on long-
exposure photographs
were considered blemishes.
And galaxy alignments turn
out to be a nuisance for
some astronomers, too.
Gravitational lensing,
the deflection of light rays
by gravity, has become a
powerful tool for cosmol-
ogy. As light from faraway
Above: The giant galaxies journeys through
galaxy in the cen- space, the gravitational
ter of the cluster pull of matter — both visi-
Abell 3827 is in the
ble and invisible — alters
process of devour-
ing several smaller its path. This causes galax-
ones. Galaxies like ies near each other in the
this grow by first sky to appear slightly elon-
capturing and then gated and aligned.
later cannibalizing Astronomers call these dis-
their neighbors. tortions cosmic shear.
R. CARRASCO ET AL., GEMINI
Although it’s a minus-
OBSERVATORY/AURA
cule effect, by carefully
Left: Galaxy merg- measuring the shapes and
ers often occur orientations of large num-
along filaments in bers of galaxies, astrono-
the cosmic web, mers can infer the amount
possibly imparting and distribution of dark
the end result with matter, the mysterious
a preferred align- stuff that makes up much
ment. ESA/HUBBLE AND of the universe.
NASA; ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:
JUDY SCHMIDT (GECKZILLA)
But a crucial assumption
in cosmic shear studies is
that galaxy orientations
are inherently random, so
Cosmic cartography that any apparent align-
ments are the result of
On this map of the gravitational lensing.
50° galaxy distribution
Physical alignments, such
in the region of
the Perseus-Pisces as those seen in giant ellip-
45°
Supercluster, each tical galaxies, masquerade
40° point represents as cosmic shear and com-
Declination

a galaxy located plicate analysis.

35° 150 million to So, while intrinsic align-
300 million light- ments provide important
30° years from Earth. clues about how environ-
Dense clusters ment shapes galaxies,
25°
of galaxies, the
they’re a nuisance for scien-
20° metropolises of the
cosmos, dot the tists whose goal is mapping
15° prominent filament the dark matter content of
like beads on a the universe. — M.W.
string. MICHAEL WEST
3h00m 2h00m 1h00m 0h00m 23h00m 22h00m
Right ascension

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 49
 SIMULATING
THE UNIVERSE
In 1941, five years before digital
computers were invented, Erik
Holmberg of Lund Observatory in
Sweden performed the first simu-
lation of colliding galaxies. What
he lacked in computational power
he made up for with ingenuity.
Because an object’s gravita-
tional pull and apparent bright-
ness both vary inversely with the
square of distance, Holmberg
realized he could use light as a
proxy for gravity. Representing
two galaxies with 37 lightbulbs
each, he measured the brightness
at different locations to deter-
mine the strength and direction
of the gravitational force and
adjusted their motions accord-
ingly. Although crude, Holmberg’s
analog computation provided
insights into the frequency of gal-
axy mergers and suggested that
close encounters could generate
spiral arms.
Astronomers quickly
embraced digital computers as a
tool to simulate events and time-
scales beyond anything accessi-
ble to mere mortals. In the 1970s,
brothers Alar and Jüri Toomre
pioneered numerical simulations
of galaxy mergers by represent-
ing each galaxy as a swarm of
interacting particles whose tra-
jectories were calculated by the
computer. Although the avail-
able computing power at the
time limited the number of par-
ticles that could be followed,
these simulations revealed that
galaxy mergers are common,
and that mergers of spiral gal-
axies can produce things that
look like elliptical galaxies.
As computational power
grew, so did astronomers’ ambi-
tion. Today, thanks to state-of-
the-art computers, it’s possible
to simulate the evolution of
enormous volumes of space in
unprecedented detail using tril-
lions of particles to represent
both luminous and dark matter.
Beginning from some assumed
set of initial conditions, astrono-
mers can run the simulation for-
ward in time to see what the
predicted distribution and
properties of galaxies would be
today and then compare the
results with observations. Such
simulations have become an
invaluable tool for understand-
ing how the universe reached
its present state. — M.W.
50 A S T R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
Dark matter distribution
70° 60° 50° 40° 30° 20° 10° 0° 350° 340°
–30°
Density of matter
– 40°
1 billion light-years
–50°
An international team of scientists used the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera at Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory in Chile to record light from 26 million galaxies. Tiny distortions in
their apparent shapes caused by gravitational lensing provide a map of the dark matter in different
regions of space. In this image, red regions have more dark matter than average, while blue regions
have less. Hints of large-scale filamentary features can be seen. The European Space Agency’s
Euclid mission and NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, both scheduled for launch in 2020, will
measure cosmic shear from space, providing even sharper views of the cosmic dark matter distribution.
CHIHWAY CHANG OF THE KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR COSMOLOGICAL PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE DES COLLABORATION
They noticed that clusters in the Perseus-Pisces
Supercluster are elongated in the same direc-
tion as the filament that bridges them, leading
them to suggest in a 1980 paper published in
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society that “the orientation of clusters in
superclusters is a conspicuous morphological
property of superclusters.”
The alignment of galaxies and clusters over
tens or hundreds of millions of light-years
means the innermost regions of some galaxies
are aligned with their surroundings on scales
larger than 1,000 times the size of a single gal-
axy itself. It suggests that the birth and evolu-
tion of these objects have been strongly
influenced by the cosmic web. But how?
Going with the flow
Galaxies, like people, are products of their
environment. Elliptical galaxies, for example,
usually huddle together in groups and clusters,
while spiral galaxies prefer more elbowroom.
Environment clearly plays a role in galaxy
orientations, too. There are two leading theo-
A computer simulation shows the gossamer-like
structure of the cosmic web. Within this network, ries for how this happens. One suggests that
matter flows along filaments, piling up where they galaxies are born aligned with their surround-
intersect. The simulation shown here, one of the ings, while the other assumes that alignment is
largest ever done, followed the motion of trillions
of particles as gravity amplified tiny variations something they acquire later.
in their initial distribution. Black points show the Galaxies might gain their orientation in
locations of dark matter; yellow denotes dense several ways. Big galaxies grow by cannibaliz-
regions where galaxies and clusters form; and ing smaller ones, a process astronomers euphe-
white indicates voids. The region displayed here is
2.5 billion light-years across, only a portion of the mistically call merging. But mergers aren’t
entire simulated volume. JOACHIM STADEL, UZH haphazard. Computer simulations show that
they occur most frequently along well-defined
 A computer simulation of our home galaxy,
the Milky Way. Today’s simulations are
more realistic than ever before, following
the birth and evolution of galaxies from
the Big Bang to the present day. This
simulation required 15 days of number
crunching with one of the world’s fastest
supercomputers. HOPKINS RESEARCH GROUP/CALTECH
directions as gravity shepherds material along
filaments. This imprints a built-in memory of
their environment on these cannibals, one that
reflects the surrounding cosmic web. In a
sense, giant galaxies are like spiders waiting for
prey, only it is smaller galaxies rather than bugs
that they devour, and the web they sit in is
elongated rather than circular.
Alternatively, given enough time, gravity’s
relentless tug will slowly reorient galaxies until
they align with their surroundings. Theoretical
calculations and computer simulations suggest
this should occur on timescales shorter than
the age of the universe, which means that even
if a galaxy was initially misaligned with its
surroundings, it should have fallen into line
by today.
As is often the case in science, it’s possible,
even likely, that there’s more than one explana-
tion for galaxy alignments, with mergers along
filaments and twisting due to gravitational
effects both contributing to the end result.
Is there more to
cosmic congruence?
“Things are the way they are because they were
the way they were,” maverick astronomer Fred
Hoyle once quipped.
Beginning with the thinnest of strands —
tiny irregularities in the primordial distribution
of matter — gravity has slowly woven a cosmic
web of sublime beauty and complexity. It’s
astonishing to think that the filamentary distri-
bution of matter on large scales is not only
GARGANTUAN
GALAXIES
People come in a wide range of
shapes and sizes. According to
Guinness World Records, the heavi-
est person ever was an American
named Jon Brower Minnoch, who
tipped the scales at a whopping
1,400 pounds (635 kilograms). At
the other extreme, a Mexican
woman named Lucia Zarate, who
suffered from an extreme form of
dwarfism, weighed only 13 pounds
(6 kg) as an adult — less than
1 percent of Minnoch’s weight.
But that’s nothing compared
to galaxies, where the biggest
outweigh the smallest by factors
of a million or more. Lurking in the
centers of many galaxy clusters are
the largest known stellar systems
in the universe, giant elliptical
galaxies that could easily swallow
dozens of their neighbors — and
probably have. It may be no
coincidence that these behemoths
are so strongly aligned with their
surroundings. — M.W.
MRC 1138-262, the Spiderweb Galaxy, is seen
in this Hubble Space Telescope image as it
appeared only 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
The giant galaxy, located at the center of a
growing cluster, is being assembled via mergers
of smaller systems of gas, dust, and stars. Such
mergers occur preferentially along directions
defined by the surrounding cosmic web. NASA, ESA,
G. MILEY, R. OVERZIER AND THE ACS SCIENCE TEAM
traced by galaxies and clusters, but also reflected
in their orientations.
There’s tantalizing evidence that alignments
might even extend to other scales. In 2014, a
team led by Damien Hutsemékers from the
University of Liège in Belgium reported that the
spin axes of some quasars are parallel to each
other over distances of billions of light-years,
and that they share the same orientation as the
surrounding filamentary structure.
If confirmed, this would suggest that the
cosmic web has even influenced the supermas-
sive black holes powering quasars, further evi-
dence of a truly remarkable coherence of
structures in the universe.
Michael West is deputy director for science
at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
His most recent book is A Sky Wonderful With Stars:
50 Years of Modern Astronomy on Maunakea.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 51
 Leo’s exotic
Beyond the brightest galaxies,
the Lion contains many
challenging deep-sky targets.
by Stephen James O’Meara

52 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
deep-sky gems

The Leo Triplet — M65

(top right), M66 (bottom
right), and NGC 3628 —
consists of three galaxies
that make up one of the
finest galaxy groups in
the spring sky. CHUCK KIMBALL

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 53
M
ost deep-sky hunters excellent seeing to look for that orange
associate Leo with dwarf’s 13th-magnitude red dwarf com-
galaxies … and so panion (C) 2.5" to the east. The greater the
they should. Although magnification, the greater the apparent
the celestial Lion has separation, and the greater your chances
other wonders (espe- are to see faint objects.
cially Regulus and Gamma Leonis, two Yet there’s more! Even small-telescope
regal double stars), we can enjoy them on users can search for a 12th-magnitude line-
our way to more exotic galaxies. of-sight companion (D) 3' due west of
Most of these galaxies can be seen read- Regulus — a sneaky little star often missed
ily through modest-sized apertures, but by the casual viewer. What you can’t see is
some will require much greater apertures. the spectroscopic object, speculated to have
Others still are best appreciated by involv- once been a luminous giant greater than
ing the imagination to see the delicate dra- Regulus but is now an Earth-sized high-
mas unfolding in and around them in density white dwarf star of 0.3 solar mass.
wavelengths that extend beyond the eye’s Take a deep breath before you head to
visual range. After all, astronomy is half our next challenge, Leo III (Leo A). This
science, half imagination. enigmatic dwarf galaxy is one of the most
I hope the latter exotics will inspire
astroimagers to capture these objects and
their demanding details and bring them to Below: Two odd galaxies, NGC 3226 and
light so the rest of us can enjoy them as NGC 3227, float in Leo as they gently lock
in a tidal embrace. NGC 3227 (right) is the
they truly are.
somewhat brighter barred spiral in this
interacting pair. Elliptical galaxy NGC 3226
Hidden dwarfs lies to its left. ROBERT LOCKWOOD
Leo harbors a fine selection of dwarf galax-
ies, many of which can be enjoyed by
observers using telescopes both large and
small. But we’ll start with a visual chal-
lenge: the 10th-magnitude dwarf spheroidal
Leo I.
Astronomy Senior Editor Michael E.
Bakich succinctly summarizes the situa-
tion: “Easy to find, hard to see.” The galaxy
lies only 20' north of Regulus (Alpha [α]
Leonis), but its light spreads across 12' by 9'
of sky. (That’s comparable in size to NGC
205, but two magnitudes fainter and with
no core!) Add in glare from Regulus, and
you’ve got a wonderful visual challenge.
Hints: Use a wide-field eyepiece that
provides moderate magnification (70x),
push Regulus out of the field of view, and
gently tap the tube as you look for a dim
and uniform carpet of ethereal light against
a bleak background of stars. At a distance
of 800,000 light-years, Leo I may be the
farthest satellite system orbiting our galaxy.
Regulus itself is a multiple star system
that can be seen with binoculars and tele-
scopes, and offers a secret challenge. This
glistening 1st-magnitude jewel shines with
a dazzling light. An 8th-magnitude “violet”
(a color-contrast illusion at low power)
companion (B) lies 3' to the northwest; B is
actually an orange dwarf. If you are using a
large aperture (12 inches and greater), don’t
stop there. Use 300x or more on a night of

54 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018

Above: Leo I is a faint, challenging dwarf galaxy
that lies in our Local Group at a distance of about
800,000 light-years. It lies a short distance from
Leo’s brightest star, Regulus. BERNHARD HUBL
Left: Regulus itself is a 1st-magnitude beacon
that hides two faint stars circling the bright
primary: a “violet” companion 3' away and
a fainter red dwarf 2.5' away. This telescopic
sketch captures all three stars and was made
with a 6-inch f/8 reflector at 240x. JEREMY PEREZ
isolated of its kind in the Local Group.
Lying about 2.5 million light-years away, it
appears as a featureless sphere of stars
bursting forth with relatively youthful stars
(around 90 percent of which are less than
8 billion years old), yet it shows no signs of
Gamma Leonis is tidal interactions having taken place to
beautiful, appearing trigger new star formation.
Finding this cosmic puzzle will test
as two golden orbs: your visual mettle. The rub is that Leo III
is three magnitudes fainter than Leo I but
a reddish-orange much smaller (5' by 3'), so its light is more
compact. You’ll find it about 1˚ south-
primary with southwest of 5th-magnitude 20 Leo
a lemon-yellow Minoris in the Lion’s high mane (R.A.
9h59m26.4s; Dec. 30˚44'47"). The one
companion. observation I’m aware of was made by a
South African observer using an 8-inch f/6
APM Wirth-Intes Maksutov Newtonian 86
telescope. The galaxy was described as tri-
angular shaped, and was held steady with
averted vision.
Galactic cannibals
Let’s dip farther south into the Lion’s mane
to 2nd-magnitude Algieba (Gamma [γ]
Leonis), near which we’ll find an amazing
galaxy gobbler. But first, keep your tele-
scope trained on Gamma Leonis, one of
the night sky’s finest binaries for telescopes
of all sizes. It’s amazingly beautiful, appear-
ing as two golden orbs: a 2nd-magnitude
reddish-orange primary with a lemon-
yellow 3rd-magnitude companion about 5"
away. At times, the secondary will take on a
more illusory aqua hue when seen at high
magnification; indeed, the 19th-century
observer William Henry Smyth saw the
companion as “greenish yellow.” You’ll have
to use your imagination to see the
10-Jupiter-mass exoplanet in its Earth-like
orbit around the primary.
When you’ve finished exploring Algieba,
poodle along just 30' to the east-northeast,
where you’ll find the interacting galaxies
NGC 3226 and NGC 3227. NGC 3227, the
larger and brighter of the two, is a peculiar
barred spiral that shines at 10th magnitude
and appears as a 7'-long ellipse, making it a
near twin in size to M108 in Ursa Major.
NGC 3226 is a 2'-wide, 11.5-magnitude
peculiar elliptical nipping the north-
northwestern rim of its larger neighbor. At
their union, a tiny bridge appears to con-
nect the two. (And I wonder what size tele-
scope is required to see that!)
I’ve spied the two easily through a 5-inch
refractor, but the real drama is reserved
for users of large-aperture telescopes
and astroimagers, as the two galaxies are
awash in the remains of a deceased third
galaxy — cannibalized by the gravity of
the visual pair.
High-resolution optical images with the
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in
Hawaii, combined with data from the
European Space Agency’s Herschel Space
Observatory and NASA’s Hubble and
Spitzer space telescopes, have revealed the
braided remains of the cannibalized galaxy,
whose gas and stars have been torn asunder
by gravitational forces. This extragalactic
detritus now describes a vast and ornate
series of loops and swirls around the two
visible members. How much of this detail
can be seen visually (and through what
size telescope) is something you can
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 55
Above: An obliquely oriented spiral, NGC 3521
is one of the most overlooked bright galaxies
in the sky. A small scope shows it as a beautiful
cloud of light. KEN CRAWFORD

discover and share. Skilled deep-sky

observers are renowned for seeing what
used to be deemed impossible, and I have
faith in them.
Observers can easily overlook Leo’s dis-
crete southern extension, which contains
some interesting galaxies. Chief among
them is NGC 3521, one of the most
neglected bright galaxies in the night sky.
This 9th-magnitude marvel rivals many of
the Messier galaxies. Through a 4-inch
scope, this oblique spiral spans 12' by 6.5',
is oriented northwest-southeast, and
appears cometlike — similar to an ellipse
within an ellipse. It is classified as a floc-
culent spiral (like NGC 2841 in Ursa
Major) with extensive debris shells that
surround the galaxy’s disk like a toy in a
bubble bath. This is yet another stunning two 9th-magnitude spirals, M65 and M66, but the most amazing and concealed fea-
example of a galactic cannibal, where the joined by the slightly fainter edge-on spiral ture of the group is a striking tidal “plume”
sloppy remains of several long-deceased NGC 3628 (the Hamburger Galaxy). trailing off NGC 3628. This extragalactic
satellite galaxies still surround a voracious Located about halfway between Theta (θ) umbilical cord of star-forming regions
spiral. While much of this drama is invis- and Iota (ι) Leonis in the big cat’s thigh, extends some 2˚ east of NGC 3628’s north-
ible to the eye, I do wonder if the brightest this winning trio travels as a pack at a dis- eastern rim before arcing slightly to the
patch of the slaughter — just northeast of tance of about 30 million light-years. All north, making the galaxy appear like an
the nucleus — can be spied in large ama- measure about 10' in length, can be spied old westbound ocean liner trailing smoke.
teur telescopes. even in 10x50 binoculars under a dark sky, Lenses as small as 200 millimeters have
and telescopically display the deforming been able to capture this tail. The question
Rings and things effects of tidal warping. is: Can it be seen visually? And if so, at
Leo’s most famous gaggle of galaxies is Telescopes as small as 4 inches can what aperture and magnification?
undoubtedly the Leo Triplet, consisting of reveal the “broken arms” of M65 and M66, Return your telescope to Regulus. Now

56 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018

Above: The 12th-magnitude galaxy NGC 2964
(top right) lies near another strange galaxy,
NGC 2968, which has a twisting dark lane
running across its midsection. JOHN BESWETHERICK/
ADAM BLOCK/NOAO/AURA/NSF
Left: Another trio in Leo consists of M95 (left),
M96 (above center), and the elliptical galaxy
M105 (right). Other galaxies lie near M105,
including NGC 3384 (above and right of M105)
and NGC 3389 (above NGC 3384). DANIEL B. PHILLIPS
make a 10˚ sweep east with a wide-field
eyepiece. You are within striking range of
another celebrated pack of reasonably
bright galaxies: M95, M96, and M105.
M95 and M96 are separated (east-west)
by only 42'; both magnitude 9.5 barred spi-
rals are about 7' wide, with tight arms that
wind around a bright core, forming both a
bright inner annulus and a fainter outer
NGC 3628 has a tail ring. Only M95 is seen nearly face-on
(looking like the Death Star from Star
that looks like an Wars), while M96 is inclined 45˚. M96 is
also the more curious of the two, as it is a
ocean liner trailing one-armed spiral that loops around the
core from the southwest to perform a tight
smoke. Can it be counterclockwise inner swirl, forming an
seen visually? And if ill-defined inner annulus before looping
again to form a warped outer loop, the
so, at what aperture northern rim of which is rife with star
formation. And this is where it gets
and magnification? interesting.
About 1˚ east-northeast of M96 lies its
extragalactic neighbor M105, with two
close attendants: the 11th-magnitude len-
ticular galaxy NGC 3384 about 7' to the
northeast and 12th-magnitude NGC 3389
(which is most likely a background galaxy)
near equidistant to the southwest. We can
now imagine the location of the Leo Ring,
a giant blossom of cold gas that surrounds
these galaxies; it once was one of the night
sky’s most dramatic and mysterious clouds
of intergalactic gas in the radio spectrum.
First detected by radio telescopes in
1983, the ring was further studied in 2009
by the ultraviolet vision of NASA’s GALEX,
which detected emissions interpreted as
dwarf galaxies forming out of primordial
gas. A year later, astronomers using the
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope found
optical emissions associated with the ring
— not from dwarf galaxies, but from bursts
of star formation along the ring. Their
models indicate that the gas is not primor-
dial, but formed by a billion-year-old colli-
sion between M96 and NGC 3384.
Let’s slip far to the northwest corner of
Leo’s boundaries, about 5˚ southeast of
Alpha Lyncis, where we’ll find the “other”
Leo Triplet: 12th-magnitude NGC 2964,
13th-magnitude NGC 2968, and 14th-
magnitude NGC 2970. Included in
Astronomy contributing editor Phil
Harrington’s Cosmic Challenge, this triad
appears through modest-sized telescopes as
a series of extragalactic “dust motes.”
Whereas NGC 2964 is oriented east-
west, measures 3' by 1.5' across, and sports
a tiny, fuzzy core, NGC 2968 is oriented
northeast-southwest, measures 2' by 1.5',
and reveals no core. In reality, NGC 2964 is
a mixed spiral galaxy, and NGC 2968 is an
irregular galaxy with a peculiar S-shaped
dust lane running lengthwise through its
body. But there’s more! A tidal tail con-
nects NGC 2968 and NGC 2970, extending
to the northeast. NGC 2970 is a true visual
dust mote, measuring only 0.5'.
NGC 2968 is very distorted and sur-
rounded by shells. What’s more, a super-
nova occurred in 1970 on the luminous
bridge, confirming a physical association
between NGC 2968 and NGC 2970.
If you make an astonishing observation
of any of these exotic features, send an
email to sjomeara31@gmail.com.
Stephen James O’Meara is a well-known
observer, author of many books, and a
contributing editor of Astronomy.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 57
 Observe
MARS
at its best
It’s been 15 years since the Red Planet was this close and this big. Set up
your scope, and take advantage of this apparition. by Michael E. Bakich

Although a bit PLANETARY OBSERVING HITS A HIGH called oppositions, when Mars lies opposite the Sun from
farther and smaller
than it appeared
point this summer as Mars once again dominates our perspective on Earth. This year’s opposition occurs
in 2003, Mars in the evening sky. Dust off your scope, because this is July 26 or 27, depending on where you live. Let me
2018 will appear the year to observe the Red Planet. It hasn’t been this explain.
much larger than big and bright since 2003, and it won’t be again until
during its worst
opposition, more September 2035. Dates and numbers
than 800 years So, excitement is building. For readers new to Red The moment of opposition occurs at 5h13m Universal
from now. ASTRONOMY: Planet mania, astronomers’ interest peaks during times Time on the 27th. In the United States, that’s 1:13 a.m.
ROEN KELLY
EDT. If you observe from the Mountain or Pacific time
zones, the date of opposition will be the 26th.
Middle ground Then, a scant four days later, Mars reaches its closest
point to Earth. An opposition happens every 780 days
63,070,000 miles (minus 1 hour 26 minutes 24 seconds, to be exact). But
Sun 35,785,000 miles each closest approach to Earth is not really, well, closest
because Earth’s and Mars’ orbits are not circular, so the
34,580,000
miles distance between our two worlds changes from one oppo-
sition to the next.
Earth
During a distant opposition, Mars can lie more than
60 million miles (97 million kilometers) away. Contrast
that with a nearby opposition that places Mars less than
35 million miles (56 million km) from Earth.
August 2003 July 2018 March 2832 For observing purposes, it all comes down to apparent
diameter. Astronomers use angular measurement to
describe how large a celestial object appears. A planet’s
angular size can change a lot. Mars varies in size at oppo-
sition from a minimum of 13.8" to a maximum of 25.1".
And its maximum brightness at each close approach var-
ies from magnitude –1.5 to –3.0.
In 2018, opposition occurs July 27, but Mars lies closest

58 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 This Hubble
Space Telescope
image, taken
June 26, 2001,
remains one of
the best ever of
Mars. At the time,
the Red Planet
was 43 million
miles (68 million
kilometers) from
to Earth (and thus appears a smidge larger) on the 31st. equator) is –25°34'. This means for an observer at 40° Earth. NASA/THE HUBBLE
HERITAGE TEAM (STS CI/AURA)
The Red Planet will lie 35,785,000 miles (57,590,000 km) north latitude, Mars will climb a scant 24° above the
away then. It will span 24.33" and shine at magnitude southern horizon at midnight local time.
–2.8. And — not that you’ll need any stars to locate it It’s important to consider a planet’s altitude because
— its position will lie within the constellation the less air you view (or photograph) through, the better
Capricornus just north of the midpoint of a line joining the image. So, if you have a choice, head south. Even a
the magnitude 4.7 star 62 Sagittarii (HIP 98688) with 10° change in latitude will let you see more surface
magnitude 4.3 Omega (ω) Capricorni. details. Ideally, we all probably want to observe from
latitude 25°34' south. Anyone up for a trip to Brisbane,
Head south Australia? At midnight there, Mars will be overhead on
Observers at northern latitudes find themselves at its opposition date.
a severe disadvantage this summer. At opposition, Here’s a tip: Don’t wait for opposition. Although Mars
Mars’ declination (distance above or below the celestial will be biggest and brightest around opposition, you can

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 59
 How bright will Mars be?
24"

–2.8
23" 24"

–2.6
Magnitude 22" 23"

How big –2.4

and bright Mars 21" 21"
appears depends
on when you –2.2
observe it. This
graph shows how 20" 20"
the Red Planet’s
–2.0
apparent size
grows before
opposition and June 25 July 1 July 9 July 15 July 31 Aug. 10 Aug. 19 Aug. 28 Sep. 4
shrinks afterward. Date
ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

“Mars will look as large as
the Full Moon to the naked
eye.” How exciting — if
only it were true. This
deliberately misleading
statement first appeared
online during mid-2003,
when Mars was as close to
Earth as it will be for thou-
sands of years. And if that
wasn’t bad enough, we
saw this statement again
before Mars’ next half-
dozen oppositions.
Nothing could be farther
from the truth, but expect
this lie to pop up again this
year. Just tell your friends
it’s someone’s idea of an
internet joke. — M.E.B.

This sequence,
taken June 5, make quality observations long before and after that
2016, shows Mars’ date. At the start of May — a full three months before
rotation over
closest approach — Mars will shine at magnitude –0.4
slightly more than
2 hours. The left and measure 11" across, nearly 50 percent of its maxi-
image was taken mum size this year. At that size, detail will be visible.
at 1h17m36s UT, Because Mars will really put on a show for more than
the center one
at 1h48m36s UT, a month on either side of opposition, the darkness of
and the right one your site doesn’t matter much. Indeed, some ambient
at 3h26m36s UT. light actually is welcome when you observe the Red
DAMIAN PEACH
Planet. A white light off to your side (not directly in your
field of view) lighting up your surroundings will cause
your daytime vision — which is superior to night vision
in both resolution and color sensitivity — to kick in.
Want to observe from a parking lot in Chicago? If it’s
clear, you’ll see some detail, even through small tele-
scopes. But you shouldn’t observe from a parking lot
because the steadiness of the air above your site — what
astronomers call seeing — makes all the difference. The
better the seeing, the more detail your scope will reveal.
Unfortunately, any parking lot stores lots of daytime heat
in the summer and releases it at night, ruining the view
of even bright objects like Mars. So leave the city behind.
What can you see?
Albedo features are the areas most subject to seasonal
changes such as brightening or darkening. Through a
4-inch or larger telescope, you’ll see large albedo features
— regions distinguished by the amount of light they
reflect. Mars’ best include Syrtis Major (an easily seen
dark, triangular feature), Chryse, Elysium, the Hellas
Basin, Libya, and Solis Lacus.
Mars’ day, which astronomers call a sol, is 37.4 min-
utes longer than an Earth day. So, if you observe Mars at
the same time each night, its markings will appear to
move 9.11° per day to the west. In a little more than five
weeks, the planet seems to slowly rotate backward one
full spin. All of Mars’ prominent features will, at some
time during this period, lie on its meridian, the line
splitting the planet’s visible disk from top to bottom, as
seen from Earth. All martian features look their best
when on the planet’s meridian.
Even including albedo highlights, the Red Planet’s
best surface features are its polar ice caps. At opposition,
Mars’ south polar cap will tilt 11° in our direction.
Due to the temperature range at the martian poles,
astronomers subdivide each ice cap into larger “sea-
sonal” and smaller “residual” caps. Residual caps last
through the martian year. The southern residual ice cap
measures about 200 miles (320 km) across. The northern
residual ice cap spans about 600 miles (960 km).
Winters are more severe in Mars’ northern hemi-
sphere, and the seasonal ice cap there has reached a

60 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 This image,
taken October
23, 2014, shows
Mars (bright
object at bottom
center) passing
by the Lagoon
(M8) and Trifid
(M20) nebulae
in Sagittarius.
DEREK DEMETER

latitude of 45°. In the southern hemisphere, the seasonal N

ice cap never passes above a latitude of about –55°.
p /
Don’t confuse the Hellas Basin with the polar cap. m
Hellas is a round, bright feature — an impact basin with CAPRIC ORNUS
lots of bright dust and sometimes fog or clouds. When
seen near the limb (the planet’s edge), it can look like a June 1
15
15
polar cap. May 1
With respect to clouds, all of them on Mars are tem- July 1 Path of Mars
porary. Discrete clouds associate with a specific area,
E
and Mars’ rotation carries them along. 15
Orographic clouds are a type of discrete cloud. Wind 31 52
t
passing over high mountains and volcanoes creates t SAGIT TARIUS
Aug. 1 60
these water-vapor clouds. Observe orographic clouds 15
through a blue or violet filter to see the most contrast. 59
Look away from Mars’ meridian and observe morn- 62
ing and evening clouds. These bright, isolated patches
of surface fog appear at sunrise (the western edge of
2°
Mars) and sunset. Evening clouds generally appear
larger and are more numerous, and as the martian night
approaches, they grow larger. These clouds respond best Mars’ motion
to blue or violet filters. is any night it’s in the sky. Once every 26 months, Mars across the stars
Color filters show a lot when you observe Mars, but appears bright in our sky, but some of these appearances takes it through
the constellations
they do take some getting used to. Be patient, and you’ll — like this one — are better than others. Take advantage Sagittarius and
be amazed at how much more detail you’ll see. of the planet’s size and brightness, and don’t worry so Capricornus from
much that it’s so low in the sky. Head out to a science May 1 through
No need to rush center or observatory, contact your local astronomy club, August 31.
ASTRONOMY: RICHARD
Although Mars will appear biggest July 31, it will look or simply point your scope at the Red Planet. Then focus TALCOTT AND ROEN KELLY
almost as bright several weeks before and after that date. and take a good, long look.
So, if you’re clouded out, or if the 31st just doesn’t work
for observing, cheer up. Unlike totality during a solar Michael E. Bakich is a senior editor of Astronomy. He also is
eclipse, a martian opposition isn’t a short-lived event. a longtime observer of the Red Planet, having traced its path
Just keep in mind that the best time to observe Mars along the zodiac starting in the 1960s.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 61
 GUIDE
YOUR The photographer
captured Barnard’s
Loop in Orion over
two nights from
a plateau about

CAMERA
25 miles east of Globe,
Arizona. He used an
AstroTrac tracking
mount on a heavy
tripod as his base.
He mounted his QSI
583wsg camera on an

TO
autofocus mounting
bracket and attached
it to a Pentax 67
medium-format lens.
NICHOLAS CLARKE

GREAT LIKE MANY OF TODAY’S ASTRONOMICAL

imagers, I started astrophotography by taking simple
star and planet trail shots, and photographing the
Moon through my telescope. This was during the

SHOTS
A variety of mounts and techniques
can help you create stunning
images. Which one is for you?
by Mike Reynolds
film era, when most amateur astronomers considered
color emulsions advanced, not to mention special
spectroscopic and astronomical films and techniques,
like cold cameras and film
hypersensitization.
As I progressed though more
detailed and complicated photo-
similar to the ones I used in the
film days; the advantage is that
you can control with your cam-
era many of the settings I had to
graphic techniques, acquiring a deal with by using different film
mount that accurately tracked types or in the darkroom. As
the sky was the next step. This with film, prints, and the dark-
took the trails out of my expo- room, digital processing is
sures and gave me nice wide- another story in itself.
field images of the night sky. General interest in wide-field
Today’s digital techniques are camera-lens imaging has

62 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
partially been reignited
through the work of The World
at Night (TWAN). Initiated by
Babak Tafreshi and Mike
Simmons through Astronomers
Without Borders, the 30 or so
regular TWAN photographers
(and many others) have con-
tributed well-composed images
and time-lapse videos of celes-
tial objects with interesting
natural or human-made land-
marks in the foreground. The
phrases “lightscape imaging”
or “light painting” are often
used to describe such work.
Necessities
What do you need to create
wide-field astronomical images
of your own? First, get a camera
that will allow a number of set-
tings for long-exposure photog-
raphy. I define “long exposure”
here as anything greater than
1 second. The digital single-
lens reflex camera, or DSLR,
is a great choice. Price points
for DSLRs range from several
hundred to thousands of dollars.
And what you may have heard is
true — you can take high-quali-
ty tracked astrophotos with one
of the lower-priced DSLRs.
An alternative to the DSLR
has emerged: the mirrorless
camera. This version doesn’t
need a mechanical mirror to
switch between the viewfinder
and the sensor. Manufacturers
can reduce the camera’s overall
complexity, weight, and size by
replacing the optical viewfinder
with a digital version. This also
eliminates a vibration source in
the system. There are some
pros and cons: Most mirrorless
cameras have reduced-size sen-
sors, require specific mirrorless
camera lenses or a special lens
adapter, and use battery power
at a faster rate than DSLRs.
Sony and Fuji are currently the
leaders in mirrorless cameras.
Like the DSLR, these will con-
tinue to evolve.
Next, invest in a good cam-
era lens. Most of today’s DSLR
lenses easily meet that require-
ment, even those referred to as
kit lenses (less expensive lenses
These superb full-frame cameras for astroimaging use different tech. The Canon 6D (right) is a standard DSLR
that employs a mirror to send the image to the viewfinder. The Sony a7R II is a mirrorless digital camera. COURTESY
OF THE MANUFACTURERS
included with the purchase of a
DSLR). Lens autofocus and
image stabilization features are
not necessary and actually can
cause problems. Your lens focal
length should not be too long. I
usually consider anything lon-
ger than a 135-millimeter tele-
photo lens to be too long,
though I often shoot through
telephoto lenses.
One discussion you might
hear is whether you should use
a zoom lens. Today’s zoom
lenses are much better than
those of 30 years ago, back in
the film era. The glass used to
make lenses is of higher quality,
and the lens mechanics are
greatly improved. I have had
good success using zoom lenses
for astrophotography. With a
zoom lens, I have the flexibility This image of the summer Milky Way was shot through a Canon 6D with
a 47mm lens at ISO 3200. The photographer mounted his camera on a
to create a specific field of view. Celestron Advanced VX tracking mount and made a 2-minute exposure.
Another advantage is having JOHN CHUMACK
multiple focal lengths available
in one lens instead of buying
several fixed-focal-length a reduced sensor size, the image you are setting up a scope just
lenses. I use both zoom and it produces is magnified, thus to piggyback a camera, as a lot
fixed lenses for astrophotogra- reducing your field of view. of work is involved.
phy, yet find myself almost Keep that in mind. A number of small equato-
entirely using zoom lenses for Next, let’s take a look at rial tracking platforms are
regular photography. tracking. A high-quality polar- available at reasonable prices.
The effective focal length of aligned mount or go-to plat- Each will carry a camera and
a lens depends on whether you form with accurate tracking is lens, or even a small telescope
are using a full-size or cropped- essential if you want to produce with a camera attached, but you
sensor DSLR. Full-size sensor images without trails. will need a sturdy tripod on
cameras (with chips the same Accessories are available that which to mount the tracking
size as the old 35mm film) are will let you piggyback, or platform. Setting up and polar
more expensive; the sensor is attach, a camera-lens combina- aligning such a system is usu-
larger than the Advanced Photo tion to a telescope on a mount. ally easy, and this equipment is
System type-C (APS-C) This can be an ideal setup if the also light, so it’s a joy to trans-
cropped-sensor cameras. mount is equatorial. The only port. For the exposures you’ll
Because the APS-C camera has drawback to this method is if collect, perfect polar alignment
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 63

The LighTrack II Mount
from Fornax is easy to assemble
and use. The company also sells
the optional FMW-200 wedge
and polar alignment scope.
ASTRONOMY: WILLIAM ZUBACK
The constellations Andromeda and Triangulum (with their two large galaxies)
dominate this wide-field shot taken through a Canon 6D with a 47mm lens
mounted on a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer tracking mount. JOHN CHUMACK
is not as important as it is when
you’re planning to use a CCD
or DSLR through the telescope,
yet this does depend on the
length of the exposure.
Other beneficial accessories
include a reasonable-size mem-
ory card that allows you to
quickly download exposures, a
fully charged battery or an
external power supply, and an
intervalometer. I also carry
spare memory cards and
charged batteries with me.
The intervalometer is an
important accessory. It allows
you to program and control the
length of your exposures with-
out touching the camera, so
64 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
that you avoid inducing vibra-
tions that can ruin your expo-
sures. Canon refers to its
intervalometer as a Timer/
Remote Controller; Nikon calls
it a Multi-Function Remote
Cord; and Sony calls it a
Remote Commander. Be cer-
tain you check your camera
model compatibility if you pur-
chase this accessory.
With an intervalometer, you
can set the length of each expo-
sure when you set your camera
to “bulb” on some DSLRs or
“manual” on others. With most
intervalometers, you can set the
time between activation and
when the first exposure is
taken, the period between
exposures, and the number of
exposures. Some intervalom-
eters even allow you to set the
time between mirror lockup
and exposure, since the mirror
lockup introduces vibration in
the system.
Camera settings
Proper camera and lens settings
will not only save you a lot of
frustration, but also noticeably
improve the quality of your
images. And the beauty of digi-
tal media is that you can delete
and reshoot — unless your
subject is a total solar eclipse or
a magnificent fireball.
Turn off the lens autofocus:
Many camera lenses — in your
smartphone, point-and-shoot
camera, and most DSLR lenses
— have a feature called autofo-
cus. For taking general photos
of people and scenery, this is an
invaluable feature, but not so
for astrophotography. If you
leave the camera DSLR lens on
autofocus when taking astro-
nomical images, the lens will
perceive the sky as blank and
continually search for the
focus. Autofocus also drains
your battery.
Turn off your flash: This
one might seem obvious, but
I’ve seen instances when a nov-
ice did not know to turn off the
flash, or an experienced imager
forgot to do so. This is one of
the reasons why I still use a
checklist when I prepare for a
night of astrophotography.
Mirror lockup: This lets
you lock the mirror before you
begin imaging. In normal oper-
ation, when the mirror swings
out of the way as you start an
exposure, the motion intro-
duces a vibration into the sys-
tem. This is not a problem for
normal, handheld, usually
short exposures, but it can
Celestron’s Advanced VX
Mount has a maximum weight
capacity of 30 pounds (13.6
kilograms). Counterweights
and a tripod are included.
COURTESY OF CELESTRON
cause problems for exposures
when you want stars to appear
as points of light, rather than
squiggly lines.
Set the white balance
to auto: White balance lets you
adjust colors so that the image
looks natural in its setting.
This is great if you are shooting
a wedding under some unusual
lighting, or skiers against
bright white snow, but it’s
not necessary for nightscapes.
So, leave the white balance
on auto.
ISO setting range: The
measure of the camera sensor’s
sensitivity setting is the ISO, a
photographic standard adopted
during the film days by the
International Organization for
Standardization. Most digital
cameras start at a low sensitiv-
ity of 100 ISO (or even 64 ISO)
and range to 102,400 ISO on
high-end cameras. Although a
high ISO setting would seem
ideal for low-light astronomical
imaging, there is an important
trade-off. As you increase the
ISO, you increase electronic
noise. I prefer to image at a
maximum of 400 ISO. But the
noise-suppression software in
your camera may work won-
ders. Experiment with higher
ISO settings, and see what
results you get. But be warned:
You’ll look at a high-ISO image
and think, “Look at all of those
stars!” Unfortunately, most of
the points will be noise.
Manual or bulb setting:
Your DSLR features a pre-
determined number of expo-
sure lengths, with the longest
usually 30 seconds. With the
manual setting, you set the
exposure length. On the bulb
setting, the shutter stays open
while you depress the shutter
button, and it closes when you
release it. Most cameras also
allow you to manually set your
lens aperture from either of
these settings.
File size: This lets you
choose the exposure’s final size.
I always recommend capturing
RAW exposures, the largest file
possible. This will use more
space on your memory card,
but it will also give you more
data for better results when
processing your images.
Noise reduction: Electronic
noise can be an issue with digi-
tal cameras. With this feature,
you can reduce the amount of
noise (which usually looks like
faint stars), an important con-
sideration when many of your
backgrounds will be black and
your subjects will be faint
points of light. The drawback is
a decrease in detail. Experiment
with this feature, and see what
works best for you.
Lens aperture: This is spe-
cific to the lens, though usually
controlled by the DSLR.
Adjusting the aperture changes
the amount of light that reaches
the camera’s sensor. The pur-
pose of an adjustable lens aper-
ture is to change the depth of
field. As the aperture decreases,
the f-number increases, bring-
ing more objects in the picture
into focus. Because we are deal-
ing with astronomical objects
(with the exception of light-
scape imaging) this is not an
issue. Set the aperture at the
lowest number so your lens will
allow the maximum amount of
light through.
Dew control: I bring along a
plastic garbage bag to cover my
equipment in case of sudden
inclement weather. Depending
on where you observe, conden-
sation might also be a problem.
A variety of accessories — for
example, a dew heater — can
help you combat this poten-
tially session-ending issue.
As you complete your
checklist, keep in mind where
you will be doing your imag-
ing. You won’t take many good
images with a lot of light pollu-
tion around. Yet some imaging
from a light-polluted area can
make for interesting lightscape
photography. I am fortunate to
live far enough from bright city
lights that I can easily see the
Milky Way without optics. Shooting comets is popular with astroimagers. Here, the photographer
However, you might have to attached a Canon XTi to a Zeiss 80mm refractor and mounted them
travel some distance to find a on a tracking mount. This image, shot April 8, 2013, between 4:45 A.M.
dark sky. and 4:55 A.M. MST, combines ten 1-minute exposures at ISO 800. CHRIS SCHUR
Under the stars
Now that you’ve completed
your preparation, you’re ready
FULL VS. CROPPED SENSOR LENS
for some imaging. But where EFFECTIVE FOCAL LENGTHS
do you begin? If it’s your first
Full Sensor Canon APS-C 1.6X Nikon APS-C 1.5X
session, start with a bright
constellation. This will help 16mm 25.6mm 24mm
you see what the sky conditions 24mm 36mm 38.4mm
are. Take some initial test shots 50mm 80mm 75mm
with different exposures and a 85mm 136mm 127.5mm
couple of different lenses if you 135mm 216mm 202.5mm
have them. 105mm 168mm 157.5mm
Say you’re going to take
400mm 640mm 600mm
some exposures, and it’s winter.
The constellation Orion is
above the horizon, a great place
to start. First, check the focus
carefully. Do not trust the the lens and its aperture, ISO astronomical imaging a try,
infinity mark on the lens. Over setting, noise reduction factor, especially if you already have
the years, I’ve gotten to know how well your mount is polar the equipment. You’ll find it
where infinity is on my lenses, aligned, and more. I also exper- fun and relaxing to create
yet I always check at the start of iment. Try a range of exposures images. You’ll also have lots of
(and several times during) each from short to long, and pick the chances to experiment, some-
imaging session. one that looks best to you. times with the placement of a
You can approach exposure Wide-field astronomical pine tree in the foreground,
length a couple of different photography will let you image and at other times by trying a
ways, depending on whether the Milky Way, meteors and range of lens focal lengths.
you plan to process your meteor showers, and aurorae Hopefully, your sessions will
images, a whole new factor in dancing in the starry sky. You lead to high-quality pictures
astrophotography. Or do you might even capture a satellite you’ll be proud to share.
want to keep it simple for now or the International Space
and see what immediate results Station passing through one of Mike Reynolds is a contributing
you can get? The maximum your images. editor of Astronomy and a
length you can expose depends I cannot encourage you passionate celestial imager —
on factors like sky conditions, enough to give DSLR-tracked especially of total solar eclipses.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 65
 CAPTURE VIDEO
with this low-cost camera
Lots of accessories make the RunCam Night Eagle an easy match
for any telescope or camera lens. by Richard P. Wilds
12mm to
Strain relief Camera C-mount adapter
A
n inexpensive new video cam-
era has come onto the scene.
RunCam Technology Co.,
in partnership with the
International Occultation Timing
Association (IOTA), has adapted one of its
sensitive “quadcopter FPV” video cameras
for use by amateur astronomers.
The monochrome RunCam Night
Eagle 2 Astro Edition has a sensitivity of
0.00001 lux and supports the 640x480
NTSC and 720x576 PAL formats. Using
CMOS technology, its sensor can detect
faint stellar targets even through small
portable telescopes.
IOTA’s input
IOTA has assisted RunCam to produce an
incredible video camera at an affordable
price. Enhancements made specifically
to aid in the observation of occultations
include internally controlled integrations
of two, four, and eight exposures (pro-
viding images of stars across the field of
view well into the double-digit magnitude
range); improved gain controls for faint
objects (which now include settings from
1 to 9); and brightness controls for bright
objects (which now include settings from
66 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
5mm C-mount C-mount to 11 ⁄4" adapter Knight Owl 0.5X Focal Optional 11 ⁄4"
spacers (2) ( 1 ⁄ 2" barrel length) Reducer or equivalent extender ring
Above and right: The individual parts and the
assembled view for the RunCam Night Eagle 2
Astro Edition are shown in a configuration typical
for refractors with 2-inch or larger apertures, and
all Newtonian reflectors. RICHARD P. WILDS
8 to 250). This gives the user maximum
control over video exposures.
An added bonus for star party users is
that RunCam includes a digital zoom so
others can get a close-up view of objects on
the video screen.
Of course, your field of view through
different optical configurations will vary.
When using the 0.5 Knight Owl Focal
Reducer without the zoom, a 12-inch f/5
Newtonian reflector produces a field 0.5°
wide, or equal to the width of the Full
Moon. A 4.8-inch f/5 refractor gives a field
twice as wide, a full 1°. And wider (even
much wider) fields are possible through
camera lenses of various focal lengths.
Because of the camera’s sensitivity,
bright planets can saturate the sensor when
using the Knight Owl 0.5 Focal Reducer.
However, I am confident that those inter-
ested in planetary photography will find
little difficulty in replacing the Knight Owl
Focal Reducer with a quality Barlow lens to
This computer reduction shows the first scientific results from an original
RunCam Night Eagle. It plots multiple results of the light curve of the
momentary disappearance of stars behind asteroid 206 Hersilia. DAVID DUNHAM
double or triple the system’s focal length,
making the planets much more viewable.
Required accessories
RunCam produces and sells the Night
Eagle 2 on its own. The Night Eagle 2 Astro
Edition, which contains the aforementioned
enhancements, is available only through
IOTA. That organization offers three differ-
ent kits. For $79 plus shipping, you’ll receive
just the camera with a wide-angle lens.
For $149 plus shipping, you get the cam-
era, plus all accessories (M12 to C adapter,
5mm spacer rings, camera C-mount to 1¼"
adapter) except the 0.5x focal reducer. IOTA
includes the Knight Owl 0.5 Focal Reducer
and everything else for $179 plus shipping.
In the picture to the left, you can see a
black bracket attached to the camera.
While the company designed this bracket
for mounting the camera in quadcopters
(an environment where there would be lit-
tle or no stray light), users found that the
mounting holes let in light that can
impinge on the sensor. So, I recommend
attaching this bracket both to seal out stray
light and to relieve strain on the delicate
power and video cables.
Even with the bracket holes sealed,
though, some light can get in around the
edges of the camera case. For advice for
dealing with this issue, visit IOTA’s web-
site: http://occultations.org/documents/
AstroMetalTapeLightLeakSolution.pdf.
Recording video
You can record the camera’s output direct-
This montage of the Moon combines 11 exposures. The photographer set
the gain to 1 and the brightness to 8. This test image shows how well the
camera can handle saturation issues. TONY GEORGE/IOTA
PRODUCT INFORMATION
RunCam Night Eagle 2
Astro Edition
Image sensor: 11⁄8" CMOS
Horizontal resolution: 800 TVL
Screen format: 4:3
Signal system: NTSC/PAL switchable
Signal-to-noise ratio: 50 dB
Electronic shutter speed: Auto
Maximum gain: 1–9
Minimum illumination: 0.00001 lux
Power: DC 5 to 36 volts
Work current: 90mA at 12 volts, 200mA
at 5 volts
Housing: Aluminum alloy
Weight: 0.56 ounce (16 grams)
Price: $79 to $179 plus shipping
URL: occultations.org/test-night-eagle-
ordering-page
ly onto a small portable video camera
(like the Canon ZR or Elura series, which
both use DV tape and little compression),
a full-size VCR recorder, or a computer
hard drive. For computer capture, a USB
3.0 port and a frame grabber (like the
StarTech SVID2USB23) are required.
IOTA does not recommend using small
portable digital video recorders because
they compress the images to a point where
their scientific value is degraded.
You can download for free all the soft-
ware offered by IOTA members in support
of occultation recording. You’ll find it at
www.asteroidoccultation.com/observations.
Most useful to the beginner will probably
be the IOTA Video Capture program,
which allows a Windows computer to cap-
ture the video stream and convert it to an
AVI file for later analysis. Further down on
the webpage, you’ll find the link to a dedi-
cated YouTube channel that contains
examples of RunCam Night Eagle 2 Astro
Edition videos and images.
Precision timing
In occultation work, accurate timing of
the disappearance and reappearance of a
star is extremely important. To help you
out, IOTA has developed the IOTA-VTI
v3 video time inserter, which you’ll find at
http://videotimers.com/home.html.
This small, battery-powered device con-
tains a GPS antenna and adds a time stamp
(accurate to milliseconds) to the bottom of
every frame of your occultation video. It
also allows you to record the exact location
at which you made the observation.
Recording stellar occultations allows
amateur astronomers to make real scien-
tific contributions to the study of the solar
system, double stars, and more. The combi-
nation of the RunCam Night Eagle 2 Astro
Camera and the IOTA-VTI v3 offers an
inexpensive way to get into this exciting
branch of citizen science.
Richard P. Wilds is a member of the American
Astronomical Society’s Historical Astronomy
Division and IOTA.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 67
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W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 69
 OBSERVINGBASICS
BY GLENN CHAPLE
I know where,
but when?
Timing can make or break an observing session, but
don’t let converting to Universal Time bog you down.
N
oting the time
that a predicted
astronomical event
will occur can be
problematic. If I
told you that a comet is pre-
dicted to impact Jupiter at 9:00
P.M. on May 1, you’d rightly ask,
“9:00 P.M. where?” In a world
ajumble with some two dozen
time zones, we need a standard
way to express the time of astro-
nomical events.
To this end, astronomers use
Universal Time, abbreviated UT.
To avoid the confusion between
A.M. and P.M. hours, UT utilizes
a 24-hour “military time” clock,
and it is based on the time at the
0° longitude meridian in
Greenwich, England.
For any place on Earth out-
side this zone, you have to make
a correction. Here’s how it
works for me. I live in the
Eastern time zone. During
Eastern Daylight Time (EDT),
which runs from the second
Sunday in March through the
first Sunday in November, my
clock is four hours behind
Universal Time. The rest of the
year when clocks “fall back” to
Eastern Standard Time (EST), I
subtract five hours from UT.
Unfortunately, there will be
no comet/Jupiter collision, but
the big planet arrives at opposi-
tion this month. According to
the 2018 Observer’s Handbook
— an annual publication put
out by the Royal Astronomical
Society of Canada — the pre-
cise time of opposition is May 9
at 1h00m UT. That translates to
May 8 at 9:00 P.M. EST.
I don’t plan to mark that date
BROWSE THE “OBSERVING BASICS” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/Chaple.
70 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
and time on my calendar
because Jupiter will be a readily
seen telescopic sight for months
to come, but other Jupiter-
related events require precise
times, too. For instance, if the
skies are clear on the evening of
the 8th, I may want to take out
my telescope and try for the
Great Red Spot (GRS). Will it be
visible then?
To find out, I’ll need to know
the time when the GRS will be
near the center of the side of
Jupiter’s disk that faces us. I
turn to Project Pluto (specifi-
cally, www.projectpluto.com/
jeve_grs.htm), which supplies
transit times for the GRS. A
transit is predicted at 1h17m
In a world ajumble with some two dozen
time zones, we need a standard way to express
the time of astronomical events.
UT on May 9, which corre-
sponds to 9:17 P.M. EDT on May
8. This is an hour after sunset,
so Jupiter should be comfort-
ably positioned above the east-
ern horizon.
What about your time zone
and the correction you need to
make to convert to UT?
Astronomy simplifies the pro-
cess by posting times in Eastern
Standard (or Daylight) Time.
You can also refer to a chart and
article on EarthSky (earthsky.
org/astronomy-essentials/
universal-time). The article
refers to Universal Coordinated
Time (UTC), which, for all prac-
tical purposes, is identical to
Universal Time.
Apparent field of view (AFOV)
Large
Low
Image magnification
High
Last January, I described
three simple ways to determine
the true field of view (TFOV)
of any eyepiece/telescope com-
bination. Mike Bertin, of
Orange County Astronomers
in California, offers another
method for those of you who
own a go-to scope that displays
altitude and azimuth. The
beauty of this method is that it
works during daylight by using
a distant terrestrial target, like
the top of a light tower.
He writes, “I level the scope
— eyeballing it is OK, but I usu-
ally use a small level that I have
mounted on top of the optical
tube. Next, I move the telescope
in azimuth so the object is at
one edge of the field of view, and
I write down the azimuth value.
Then I move the telescope so the
object is at the other edge of the
field of view. I write down the
new azimuth value, and by tak-
ing the difference, I have the
TFOV in azimuth.”
Bertin then double-checks
his result by repeating the pro-
cess in altitude. “I once again
center on my reference object
with the scope still level. I move
the telescope so the reference
Small
ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY AFTER BRUCE MACEVOY; DYLAN O’DONNELL
object is at the bottom of the
FOV, and I note the altitude
value. Then I move the tele-
scope so the object is at the top
of the FOV, and I write down
the new altitude value. The
difference gives me the true
field of view in altitude. All of
this takes less than 5 minutes.”
Al Nagler, a pioneer in the
production of ultra-wide-field
eyepieces, notes that the appar-
ent field of view divided by
magnification does not give an
accurate TFOV because of eye-
piece focal length and distor-
tion variations and tolerances.
He notes, “The actual
calculated true field of ANY
eyepiece is its field stop diam-
eter divided by the telescope
focal length, times 57.3°.”
Field stop data for all Tele Vue
eyepieces are published on the
company’s website. If you’re
not sure of the field stop
diameter for a different brand
eyepiece, the methods I men-
tioned in the January column
will suffice.
Do you have questions,
comments, or suggestions of
your own? Email me at
gchaple@hotmail.com. Next
month: The missing Messier
object. Clear skies!
Glenn Chaple has been an
avid observer since a friend
showed him Saturn through a
small backyard scope in 1963.
 Journey to Iceland for an unforgettable view
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Everyone should experience the astonishing beauty of the aurora borealis once in
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• The seldom-visited Great North region and the stunning Westfjords peninsula.
• Whale watching, fascinating local museums, a superb local guide, and much more.
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W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 71
 READER
GALLERY

1. RAIN OF STONES
This photographer endured a
temperature of –18 degrees Fahrenheit
(–28 degrees Celsius) on December 14,
2017, near Daqing, China, during the
annual Geminid meteor shower. His
final image combines 48 exposures,
each one recording a single Geminid.
• Jeff Dai

2. THREE-IN-ONE SHOT
This wide-angle shot captures the
California Nebula (NGC 1499) in
the constellation Perseus at left,
the Pleiades star cluster (M45) in
Taurus at right, and a fortunate
astrophotographer in the middle.
• Amirreza Kamkar

72 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 3. CLUSTER STRUCK
The constellation Cassiopeia contains
many open clusters, bright and faint.
Stock 6 is the one at the center of this
image. It’s one of 24 open clusters
recorded by German astronomer
Jürgen Stock in the 1950s. NGC 688 is
the brighter open cluster below center,
and Berkeley 63 is the tight open
cluster to its right. • Dan Crowson

4. BARK AT THE MOON

Features on the waning crescent
Moon appear sharp on the morning
of November 15, 2017. The Moon’s
illuminated portion was less than
10 percent when this image was
taken from San Carlos, Brazil.
• Fernando Oliveira de Menezes

3 5. BLUE GHOST
Imagers seldom capture reflection
nebula IC 2169 as a separate object
because it lies in the general region
of the much more photogenic Cone
Nebula (NGC 2264) in the constellation
Monoceros. This intensely blue cloud
scatters light from nearby stars and
reflects it in our direction.
• Bruce Waddington

6. THE FISH HEAD NEBULA

IC 1795 is a star-forming region
some 6,000 light-years away in the
constellation Cassiopeia the Queen.
This area is filled with a mixture of
emission, reflection, and dark nebulae.
Here, the photographer captured
the cloud through Hydrogen-alpha,
Oxygen-III, and Sulfur-II filters.
• Chuck Ayoub
4 5

Send your images to:

Astronomy Reader Gallery, P. O. Box
1612, Waukesha, WI 53187. Please
include the date and location of the
image and complete photo data:
telescope, camera, filters, and
exposures. Submit images by email
6 to readergallery@astronomy.com.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 73
 BREAK
THROUGH
In the hub
with Hubble
Perched above Earth’s
turbulent atmosphere, the
Hubble Space Telescope
can resolve fine details
in crowded fields. This
view of the Milky Way’s
central bulge could be
Exhibit A. During the past
nine years, scientists have
used Hubble’s unique
capabilities to track
about 10,000 Sun-like
stars in this congested
region. They found that
the younger stars —
those richer in elements
heavier than hydrogen
and helium — orbit the
galaxy’s center faster than
their older cousins. The
researchers suggest that
these youthful interlopers
could be relics of smaller
galaxies that the Milky
Way cannibalized.
NASA/ESA/T. BROWN (STS CI)

74 A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
 Capture the red planet in stunning high
resolution during opposition.
Mars will light up the night sky during its epic opposition
this summer. Peaking on July 27, this opposition
promises to be the best and brightest since 2003.
There’s no better time to gear up with a high resolution
Celestron imaging system.

Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain and EdgeHD optics are

perfect for capturing Mars’ polar ice caps and surface
details with excellent contrast, high resolution, and
large image scale. Pair one of these optical tubes with
our upgraded CGEM II mount for an all-in-one Mars
imaging kit. After the opposition is over, you can use
this versatile system for superior planetary and deep
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Astronomics – 800.422.7876 – astronomics.com Focus Camera – 800.221.0828 – focuscamera.com MARS IMAGE BY DAMIAN PEACH
 SOUTHERN
SKY
July 2018: Red Planet renaissance
July offers planet observers
quite a feast. As twilight deep-
ens in early July, four naked-eye
planets span the sky roughly
from east to west. But it is the
fifth bright planet, which rises
shortly after darkness falls, that
undoubtedly will command the
most attention.
Mars puts on its finest
appearance in 15 years this
month. The ruddy world rises
around 7 p.m. local time July 1.
It then shines at magnitude
–2.2, but it grows noticeably
brighter as it approaches a
splendid opposition on the
27th. Mars gleams at magni-
tude –2.8 during July’s entire
final week. That’s more than
100 times brighter than any of
the stars in its host constella-
tion, Capricornus.
Although the Red Planet
comes to opposition roughly
every 780 days, some of these
close approaches are consider-
ably better than others. This
one is particularly favorable
because the distance to Mars
shrinks to just 57.6 million
kilometers (on July 31), which
is about as close as it can get.
To make this appearance
even better, the planet lies at
a declination of –26°. From
mid-southern latitudes, Mars
passes nearly overhead around
midnight local time and
remains at an altitude above
45° from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. Its
lofty position means observers
should get sharp views through
their telescopes.
At its closest approach in
late July, Mars’ disk spans 24.3",
and it remains above 20" all
month. Consider using eye-
piece filters to bring out surface
MARTIN GEORGE describes the solar system’s changing landscape
as it appears in Earth’s southern sky.
details. Red and orange filters
reveal dark markings well,
while a blue filter shows the
polar regions and clouds more
clearly. Make the most of this
apparition — Mars won’t be as
close again until 2035!
Although Mars rules the
night, don’t overlook July’s
other bright planets. Let’s
tackle them one by one, mov-
ing from west to east across the
early evening sky. First up is
Mercury, which appears low
in the northwest after the Sun
sets. The innermost planet
reaches greatest elongation
July 12, when it lies 26° east
of the Sun and stands 15° high
45 minutes after sundown.
A telescope reveals an
8"-diameter disk that’s slightly
less than half-lit. Over the fol-
lowing 10 days, the planet’s
disk grows while its phase
wanes to a pleasing crescent.
Look to Mercury’s upper
right and you can’t miss Venus.
The brilliant world brightens
from magnitude –4.1 to –4.3 in
July and dominates the evening
sky. Venus spends all month in
Leo the Lion, passing 1.1° north
of 1st-magnitude Regulus on
July 9. When viewed through
a telescope, the planet shows a
disk that grows from 16" to 20"
across during July and a gib-
bous phase that wanes from
70 percent to 57 percent lit.
The solar system’s two larg-
est planets also put on great
shows this month. Jupiter
rides high in the north after
darkness falls. Shining at mag-
nitude –2.2 at midmonth, it
overshadows the background
stars of Libra. Even a small tele-
scope resolves the gas giant’s
equatorial region into two par-
allel dark belts that sandwich
a brighter zone. Larger aper-
tures reveal more atmospheric
details on a disk that measures
40" across.
Last but not least, Saturn
stands as the brightest object
between Jupiter and Mars. The
ringed planet resides in north-
western Sagittarius, just north
of the Archer’s conspicuous
Teapot asterism, and climbs
highest in the north in late eve-
ning. Saturn shines at magni-
tude 0.1 in mid-July, when a
telescope reveals the planet’s
18"-diameter disk surrounded
by a lovely ring system that
spans 41" and tilts 26° to our
line of sight.
A slight partial solar
eclipse occurs July 13 for resi-
dents of southeastern Australia.
From Hobart, Tasmania, the
eclipse lasts from 2h52m
to 3h56m UT, and the Moon
covers 10 percent of the Sun’s
diameter at maximum.
Half a lunar month later, on
July 27, the Moon dips deeply
into Earth’s shadow. People in
Africa and Australia can wit-
ness a total lunar eclipse with
brilliant Mars at opposition just
7° south of the Moon. The
eclipse’s umbral phase begins at
18h24m and ends at 22h19m
UT, while totality runs from
19h30m to 21h13m UT. (In
Australia, the event takes place
before dawn July 28.) The 103
minutes of totality makes this
the longest total lunar eclipse
since 2000.
The starry sky
Southern Hemisphere observ-
ers enjoy a splendid view of the
Milky Way splayed across the
southern sky on July evenings.
Our galaxy’s disk stretches
from the eastern to southwest-
ern horizon, with Crux the
Cross near its center. Although
our eyes tend to focus on the
bright objects, the Aboriginal
people of Australia formed
patterns from the Milky Way’s
dark dust lanes.
Perhaps the best known of
these is the Emu. The most
famous dark nebula in the sky,
the Coal Sack, represents the
Emu’s head. The Coal Sack
tucks up against the southeast-
ern side of the Cross and is easy
to see under a dark sky. It
stands out well with averted
vision, which brightens the
Milky Way and thus increases
contrast, making the Coal Sack
appear darker.
At first sight, the Coal Sack
seems devoid of stars — indeed,
it blocks our view of most
objects beyond. It is far from
empty, however. Pay particular
attention to the open star clus-
ter NGC 4609. It lies 1.8° east of
1st-magnitude Acrux, Crux’s
brightest star, in the direction
of Alpha (α) and Beta (β)
Centauri. The 5th-magnitude
star BZ Crucis dominates this
group, with the remaining stars
spreading out to its northwest.
Based on its estimated dis-
tance of more than 4,000 light-
years, NGC 4609 lies behind the
Coal Sack and shows through
its dust. Although binoculars
show the 7th-magnitude cluster,
it appears most pleasing
through 10-centimeter and
larger telescopes. A magnified
view reveals quite a few stars,
many of them forming pairs.
 STAR S
DOME
LMC NGC 20
THE ALL-SKY MAP 70
SHOWS HOW THE SMC
SKY LOOKS AT: H Y DRU S
VO
9 P.M. July 1 RI
CA
NG NS
LA
8 P.M. July 15 NA C2 MENSA
4
51 GC 10 N
A N
7 P.M. July 31 6 CA
TU

Planets are shown

S
O C TA N
SCP
at midmonth

V
E
LA
C HA
PY

MAE
LEON
XI

3 VO
NG372 PA
S

C AU S T R A L E
T R IA NG U LUM
CR _ NG
AN

U C4
X 755
TL

S
IA

N LI
IU
` a

RO RA
97

A
O
51 ` _ 3
C6

O T
SC
NG 39

S
CIRCINUS NG

AU
LE

IUS
C

C
T
MA

CE
RA
A NOR
N
HYD

NG
TA

C5
U
RA

RU

NG231
28 1

US
C

M7
S

PI
S
PU

Saturn
C ORV U S

LU

CO
M83

M8
M6
S E X TA N S

M22
W

S
Antares
C R AT E R

_
M4

M20
M17

SCU
M10

Spic

M16
4

Ju
_

pit
er
(ecliptic) LIBRA
V

n
Path of the Su
IR

S
G

U
H
O

M5 C
IU
Ven

RP
PH
O

SE
u

M6
s

C
M6

6
5

De

NS
SERPE
LE

ne

T
CAPU
`
O

Arc
ola

tur
us
M6
4 _

C NG
P
B OM
ER A
EN
IC
ES C O RO NA
MAGNITUDES BOÖTE
S BOREALIS
Sirius Open cluster M13
0.0 Globular cluster CA
1.0 VE NES ES
Diffuse nebula NA CUL
2.0 TI
C HER
3.0 I M51
Planetary nebula
4.0
5.0 Galaxy

N
 HOW TO USE THIS MAP: This map portrays
the sky as seen near 30° south latitude.
Located inside the border are the four
JULY 2018
directions: north, south, east, and
west. To find stars, hold the map Calendar of events
overhead and orient it so a
direction label matches the 1 The Moon passes 5° north of 16 The Moon passes 1.6° north of
S
U direction you’re facing. Mars, 2h UT Venus, 4h UT
The stars above the
R
G
map’s horizon now 4 The Moon passes 3° south of 19 First Quarter Moon occurs at
match what’s Neptune, 0h UT 19h52m UT
in the sky.
6 Last Quarter Moon occurs at 20 Asteroid Thisbe is at opposition,
7h51m UT 9h UT
U
D

UM
IN

Earth is at aphelion (152.1 million 21 The Moon passes 4° north of

PI

kilometers from the Sun), 17h UT Jupiter, 0h UT

O
SC

7 The Moon passes 5° south of 25 The Moon passes 2° north of

RO

Uranus, 14h UT Saturn, 6h UT

IC
M

9 Venus passes 1.1° north of Mercury is stationary, 7h UT

Regulus, 20h UT
S

27 Mars is at opposition, 5h UT
NU

10 The Moon passes 1.1° north of

OR

Mars

Aldebaran, 10h UT The Moon is at apogee

A

IC
ITT

(406,223 kilometers from Earth),

AR

11 Jupiter is stationary, 4h UT 5h44m UT

SAG

12 Mercury is at greatest eastern Full Moon occurs at 20h20m UT;

elongation (26°), 5h UT total lunar eclipse

Pluto is at opposition, 10h UT The Moon passes 7° north of

E Mars, 22h UT
M

13 New Moon occurs at 2h48m UT;

UTU

partial solar eclipse 30 Southern Delta Aquariid meteor

shower peaks
M11

The Moon is at perigee

ILA

(357,431 kilometers from Earth), 31 The Moon passes 3° south of

AQU

8h25m UT Neptune, 6h UT
S

14 The Moon passes 2° north of Mars comes closest to Earth

INU

Mercury, 22h UT (57.6 million kilometers away),

UD ENS

PH

8h UT
ir
_
Alta
A
P

DEL
CA

A
TT
GI
SA

STAR COLORS:
LA

Stars’ true colors

U
EC

depend on surface
LP

temperature. Hot
U
V

stars glow blue; slight-

ly cooler ones, white;
RA
LY intermediate stars (like
the Sun), yellow; followed
_ by orange and, ultimately, red.
ga Fainter stars can’t excite our eyes’
Ve
color receptors, and so appear white
without optical aid.

Illustrations by Astronomy: Roen Kelly

BEGINNERS: WATCH A VIDEO ABOUT HOW TO READ A STAR CHART AT www.Astronomy.com/starchart.

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