DoctorMate's favorite astronomy pages, page 1

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Total eclipse of the sun | Science | guardian.co.uk: Aug 1, 4:56pm 1 review astronomy, photography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2008/aug/01/solar.eclipse?picture=3...; Solar Eclipse
"The poetry of the earth is never dead."-- John Keats
Jiayuguan, China: Visitors to the Jiayuguan Fort on the Great Wall of China
watch the eclipse Photograph: David Gray /Reuters
There are rare events that occasionally bring some sense of perspective that elude any measurement. An eclipse of the sun occurred today. I am happy for those who were able to witness the night in the day. The total solar eclipse began in Canada, and this totality was seen there and eventually over Siberia and finally in northern China.

There is a great video here with NASA footage, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4443396.ece, as well as an article, "Solar eclipse awes spectators across the globe". I was moved when, in the video, you could hear the sounds of the people cheering until that moment of blackness when there was applause. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4443396.ece

From the article: "The eclipse began in arctic Canada, when the moon first came between the earth and the sun. The shadow then passed across northern Greenland to Russia, where soon after 1000 GMT yesterday darkness descended on the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Birds fell silent and the temperature dropped suddenly. An eerie wind blew through the assembled throng (I love this--Dr.M)."

Here is the link for NASA's comprehensive coverage of the August 1st solar eclipse http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/eclipse/index.html

http://spacespin.org/images/articles/huge-black-holes-stifle-star-formation_2.jp…: Jul 15, 5:15pm 1 review astronomy
http://spacespin.org/images/articles/huge-black-holes-stifle-star-formation_2...; A star is not born ...
"This artist's concept depicts a supermassive black hole at the centerof a galaxy. NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer found evidence that blackholes -- once they grow to a critical size -- stifle the formation ofnew stars in elliptical galaxies. Black holes are thought to do this byheating up and blasting away the gas that fuels star formation. The blue color here represents radiation pouring out from material veryclose to the black hole. The grayish structure surrounding the blackhole, called a torus, is made up of gas and dust. Beyond the torus,only the old red-colored stars that make up the galaxy can be seen.There are no new stars in the galaxy."

"Event Horizon"

A sneeze; a gull; an argument; a trip;
a finger bleeding from an envelope
whose clasp turned out to be sharp as a knife
so blood welling from my sudden cut
spots the page before I open it;
a leaking fountain pen; a piece of fruit
whose juice runs down my chin; the dolphin charm
on my new bracelet snagging in a lace
shawl as I turn the page. Remorseless foreground,
no one thing more real than any other.

--Reachel Hadas

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200808/poem-horizon
From the page, "Reachel Hadas's most recent collection of poems is River of Forgetfulness (2006). She teaches at Rutger's University."

arecibo message: Mar 4, 8:49pm 63 reviews astronomy
http://www.physics.utah.edu/~cassiday/p1080/lec06.html

http://www.sheboygan-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/misc?url=/misc/zoom.pbs&Site=U0&Dat…: Feb 21, 10:16am 1 review astronomy, photography, news
http://www.sheboygan-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/misc?url=/misc/zoom.pbs&Site=U0&...; The eclipse of the moon by the earth on the evening of February 20, 2008. --photo/Gary C. Klein I wanted to write just a little more of my experience watching the lunar eclipse last night. I left home to run to the gym (kind of late and I always promise myself I'll go first thing in the morning :() and, when I got outside I looked up and saw the moon and did a double take. I didn't know beforehand that an eclipse was going on, but that changed everything for me. A neighbor said something like, "...isn't it something? The next one's isn't until 2010." I was lucky because the earth's shadow was waxing and the total eclipse wasn't for another half an hour. What a lucky chance and the sky was totally clear; there were more stars out last night in this city of glare in the night than I've seen in a while. I could see Saturn and Regulus (a bright star) as background near the moon's field where I looked. Since I wasn't prepared I didn't have binoculars; I read that with binoculars that it is possible to just make out the rings of Saturn. There were clusters of people looking up and making animated gestures. There were couples whose love I'm sure became even more fervent. So, I found an empty lamppost to lean on and took some photographs with my cell phone camera. They probably won't be great, but I wanted to have some personal document of what I was witnessing. After about ten minutes of looking up at the moon becoming darker and redder, a man came up to me and asked me what I was looking at. He seemed to be high on something and his voice was slow and deliberate. He said, "Oh, I never saw anything like that in prison." So he stayed with me for couple of minutes and then said, "Well, I guess I'd better get back to panhandling." I said, "The moon will bring you luck." He then said, "I'm going to pray." And he looked up at the moon and prayed and then left. I never saw anything so primitive and so endearing as the praying of this man. Praying to the moon ... well, I don't really know to whom or what he prayed or what he prayed for. It was a beautiful moment for me, one I'll never forget. Yet there were people who rushed by not stopping to look up. Maybe they did look later. When the eclipse's totality was reached I was so lucky to have a great view. It was cold and peaceful; my hands stung from the cold, but I didn't care. The moon was eerily red. This was a night to unify a lot of people. A cosmic night. Now I think about John Keats's poem "Endymion", where a moon goddess tries to seduce a handsome shepherd, Endymion. I think New York City became Endymion last night.

Hubble Heritage Gallery of Images: Nov 2, 2007 10:50pm 734 reviews astronomy
http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html

http://www.lucellan.com/test/s3.swf: Oct 26, 2007 8:41pm 80 reviews astronomy
http://www.lucellan.com/test/s3.swf

Carl Sagan�s Life and Legacy as Scientist, Teacher, and Skeptic (Skeptical Inqui…: Feb 23, 2007 10:11am 2 reviews astronomy, science
http://www.csicop.org/si/2007-01/sagan.html; Interesting essay of remembrance on Carl Sagan, by David Morrison, "a noted planetary scientist and colleague (and former student of Sagan) recalls Sagan's immense contributions to planetary research, the public understanding of science, and the skeptical movement." Carl Sagan with Immanuel Velikovsky at the 1974 AAAS debate. All photos by David Morrison. http://www.csicop.org/si/2007-01/sagan.html

Astro Gallery & Dancing with the moonlight night: Jan 16, 2007 7:05am 4 reviews astronomy
http://www.absolutelynothing.co.uk/astrogallery?lang=en-gb

http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/neutronstar/neutronstar.gif: Jan 15, 2007 2:20pm 1 review animation, astronomy
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/neutronstar/neutronstar.gif; A neutron star animation. "The wobbling (or precession) causes the rotation axis of the pulsar to follow a circle-like motion in time (see yellow and green axes at different epochs). The motion is very much like the wobble of a top or gyroscope. As a result, we see the cone-like lighthouse beam of the radio pulsar under different angles, resulting in the observed changes in pulse shape and arrival times. (Image by M. Kramer) The world-famous Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, University of Manchester, has discovered a pulsar that is wobbling, giving astronomers a glimpse into the interior of a neutron star. A pulsar is a neutron star, the extremely dense remnant of a massive normal star that has undergone a supernova explosion. A neutron star is typically 20 km in diameter, about the size of a city, weighs a million times the mass of the Earth, and spins as fast as a top, with predictable regularity. A pulsar produces beams of radio emission above its magnetic poles, and these sweep like lighthouse beams across the sky. When a beam crosses the Earth, radio telescopes receive a periodic ``pulse'' of radiation with a characteristic shape. The Jodrell Bank scientists (Ingrid Stairs, Andrew Lyne and Setnam Shemar) have been studying 13 years' worth of data from the pulsar PSR B1828-11. This pulsar rotates 2.5 times per second, but, unlike any other, wobbles regularly with a period of about 1000 days. The motion is very much like the wobble of a top or gyroscope; its effects are shown in an illustration and animation at http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/neutronstar/. This wobble, or precession, has two manifestations: it causes the observed pulse to change its shape, and causes the time between pulses to vary, becoming sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. In an article to appear in the August 3rd issue of Nature, the Manchester astronomers argue these variations imply that the neutron star, instead of being perfectly spherical, is slightly oblate. Stairs explains: ``The bulge in the neutron star causes the angle between the pulsar's rotation axis and its radio beam to change with time, creating the wobbling effect that we measure.'' Lyne emphasizes that the oblateness is incredibly small: ``This star departs from being a perfect sphere by only 0.1 mm in 20 km. On Earth this would mean that no mountain could be higher than 3 cm!'' The surprising aspect to the discovery is not the small size of the wobble, but that fact that it is seen at all. Astronomers know from other long-term observations, mostly done at Jodrell Bank, that a pulsar is made up largely of a neutron superfluid, with a solid crust. Current theories predict that the interaction between the superfluid and the crust should cause any precession to die out extremely quickly. ``But this pulsar is one hundred thousand years old, and it's still wobbling!'' exclaims Lyne. ``We really don't understand how this precession can be happening, and theorists are going to have to do some work to explain it,'' adds Stairs. It is remarkable that by observing emission received from these objects thousands of light years away, radio astronomers can study the internal structure of these tiny objects and learn about the fundamental physics of matter at pressures and densities far greater than anything that can be achieved in a laboratory on Earth. Information to Editors: The results of this work will be published as a Letter in the August 3 issue of Nature. Contact Details: - Professor Andrew Lyne (agl@jb.man.ac.uk) - Dr. Ingrid Stairs (is@jb.man.ac.uk) Both at the Jodrell Bank Observatory: Phone: 01477 571321 - FAX: 01477 571618" http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/neutronstar/