The Toxic Chemist and The Barking Dog

I was a scientist you know, once upon a time, a time so ancient it now feels like I had to dodge dinosaurs when making my way up to campus.

I had wanted to become and astronomer, so did all the usual things like visit Patrick Moore at his house and do all science A-Levels. But then I realised that I was never going to be good enough at maths and wasn't very much better at physics.

I did however enjoy chemistry, especially the theory side of things. I loved drawing molecules, and indeed inventing molecules; designing elegant organic reactions with the little fish-hook arrows to represent electrophilic attack, and marking great broad swathes of pencil to indicate covalent bonding.

The practicals I found a little more difficult. I was as clumsy as hell which meant it took me a while to construct my apparatus, and then when I had finally got my glassware and chemicals in order, I was so obsessive compulsive about the accuracy of my results that often I would end up not getting any.

But at school level these were only minor hiccups; my teachers were really encouraging and chemistry not being a popular subject, I got offers from all my chosen universities, including St Catharine's College at Cambridge.

Too bad I missed my required 3As by a mile.

Still I had a place elsewhere, and was really looking forward to going away. But not to study. By now, I had misgivings about science. I worried it wouldn't satisfy me intellectually. And I thought it would be too hard.

I was right. The theory I still enjoyed, no problems there. I even found myself able to solve second order differential equations, the bane of my maths career. But the lab classes...my god. Two three hour sessions a week, having to build huge Frankensteinian arrangements of tubes and bottles, and then fill them with some rather nasty chemicals without knocking the whole thing over.

By the time I'd built the apparatus, the class was over, and I'd have to stay late to get even the tiniest bit of actual you know chemistry done, while the supervising PhD students glared at me while their pints sat in the pumps in the bar.

I'd break things. I'd spill things. Once I sloshed a largish amount of ether all over my workbench, and spent the next half hour getting more and more insensible as the fashionable party anaesthetic of Victorian partygoers collected at face level. If my bunsen burner had been on I'd have gone up like the Hindenburg.

In the second year, it would have been 12 hours of lab a week. In the third, 18. I would have ended up more contaminated than Chernobyl. The delights of working with benzene and cyanide awaited.

It was time to get out. A classicist I became. But I've never lost my love of science. It's amazing when it works, and to demonstrate this, enjoy Sir Martin Poliakoff making a chemical barking dog!

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 14.12.15

Black Holes and Revelations

I have now finished my superb Futurelearn online course on Gravity, and in the final week the subject of study has been Black Holes.

They are, as you might have expected, completely crazy places. Sadly, unlike the 1979 Disney movie "The Black Hole", they are not filled with lost souls being taken to hell while Maximillian Schell watches from atop a burning rock fused with his robot creation; also called Maximillian and BTW one of cinemas most memorable androids.

They are in actuality far stranger than that. What most folk would consider the "boundary" of a Black Hole, the Event Horizon beyond which light can no longer escape its clutches, is a baffling place where due to relativistic time dilation you can never see something cross the horizon, just see a last frozen image of it before it slowly fades from view. Nothing more can ever be known about anything that crosses this boundary.

Within the Event Horizon, time and space decide they are reversed. Space only points in one direction now, towards the singularity, the infinitely small centre of the black hole where all mass falls, and time can run anyway it wants, so indeed you might perhaps see your own back, and your own past and future, as you fall into the singularity.

Which you wouldn't be able to do, because if you hadn't already been fried by the tremendous amount of X and Gamma rays that are found around black holes, the spaghettification of your body by the intense gravitational field will be your unpleasantly stretched out fate.

Then there is information? Is it preserved in there to be slowly re-emitted by Hawking radiation, or does it imprint on the surface of the event horizon like a hologram? Or is it scrambled, or lost forever?

The concepts are mindblowing.

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 03.12.15

Philosophizing at the Death of the Universe

I've just completed the fourth week of my excellent and highly thought provoking Futurelearn course "Gravity", and we've been discussing the supremely headscratchy topics of dark matter - matter that we wouldn't notice if we walked into a room stuffed with it despite the fact there's 5 times more of it than normal matter in the universe - and also dark energy, energy that drives the expansion of the universe, and forms nearly 70% of the Universe despite the fact we've never detected it.

Dark energy in particular is a concept to put your brain through a blender. It corresponds, it is theorised, to the vacuum energy permanently blazing away in space time, an energy produced when a particle and its anti matter equivalent are produced FROM NOTHING and then annihilate each other back into nothingness so fast that we can never possibly detect them.

At the quantum level, creating matter and energy from nothing is allowed. Providing it goes back into nothingness faster than fast can be, this is allowed. Whereas light and gravity act as a brake on the expansion of the universe, vacuum energy does the opposite. It sucks space-time away from itself. And it is doing so at a faster and faster rate.

The expansion of the Universe is accelerating. It will never stop, contract, fall back on itself in a big crunch. The Universe will go on forever.

This sounds fabulous, but it isn't really. It doesn't mean that life will go on forever. Space-time will expand forever, but the Universe will die. Fundamental particles like protons will all decay; the atoms that make up you and me, many of which were around at the time of the big bang, will all splutter out into massless ghosts. As the Universe expands faster and faster, we will see less and less of it as it disappears over a kind of cosmic horizon provided by the speed of light. The longest living stars, red dwarves, will eventually peter out and the universe will be dark and cold, apart from black holes spinning silently in the blackness. And even they too will waft away bit by bit, trillions upon trillions of years hence. No life. No light.

I find it distressing, from a philosophical point of view. In a sense, it means that life is pointless, no matter it does anywhere in the universe to improve itself, it is doomed to fail. There's no point to anything. We cannot defy the laws of particle decay.

Yet I still wonder what hope there could be for life? The only hope that I can see would be to start another universe, a universe with renewed matter and vigour, and leave our ageing protons behind and transfer to a new vessel, within the new universe. Shades of "Being John Malkovich", I realise! Anyone who knows how to start a Universe, your Nobel prize awaits.

Or we could hope that the multiverse theory of everything is correct, that our Universe is merely one of many universes floating around within an 11 dimensional membrane, occasionally triggering new Big Bangs when they brush up against themselves. Here, life could find a way of tunnelling from one universe into an other, or a newly created one, and continue to do so as energy potential runs out in each Universe it colonises on a timescale that makes eternity look like the blink of an eye.

For I do no want life to fizzle out, in a cold sweep of darkness' cloak.

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 19.11.15

Surfing on the Wave of the Universe

I've now finished my third week of my Futurelearn Gravity course, which has now achieved a level of mindbendingness that a thousand mile high Uri Geller could not achieve even if he lived in a universe  comprised of nothing but spoons.

We've been talking about the Inflation of the Universe, a theory that states that while the universe was still opaque to light - charged atomic particles absorbed it all at this time - rather than expanding in a constant progression, it suddenly began to expand effectively faster than the speed of light.

The driving force for this was, if you can believe it, energy created by matter and anti matter colliding with each other, this matter being effectively created out of nothing before wiping itself out before it can violate laws of conservation of energy. Eventually the universe encountered a second vacuum that was at a lower energy, and so the expansion slowed to what we know today.

I had no idea how one vacuum could suddenly become one with different properties and felt very stupid for doing so. Luckily, it was pointed out to me that no-one else on the planet does either.

Myself, being a writer with an interest in science rather than a scientist - you don't need to be as intelligent - I preferred to imagine the universe as a big bucket of fluorescent yellow dye. Drop this into a fast flowing stream, and the dye spreads out rapidly, colouring the flow in neon hues as it surfs along the babbling, seething waters representing the vacuum energies our universe rode. But then, an oil slick from a badly run farm stops the flow, stops the expansion, and the dye moves sluggishly along, until eventually, the oil dissipates somewhat, and the dye can flow a little freer again.

It really is a thought provoking course, but one that results in increased tea consumption and chocolate biscuit eating. You need to keep your blood sugar up for this!

Here are some clever people who can draw and talk better than I can write.

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 11.11.15

Tangled up in the Fabric of Space Time

I'm studying another Futurelearn online course, and it's a real brain killer.

All the Futurelearn courses I've done - and there have been ten of them on a variety of subjects - have been great, but none has been as thought provoking as this one. The debate on the comment threads has been of an extremely high level, and the chief educator, one Pierre Binetruy of the Diderot University in Paris, is an excellent lecturer with a bone dry sense of humour.

Such concepts as Galilean Frames of Reference, and Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity, have been covered in such a way that even a tired out working fellow such as myself can get to grips with them.

If only to a level that I can blag it in conversations at the pub with my friends.

Where am I really enjoying getting utterly lost is in the concept of "Space-Time". The favoured method for explaining how the universe expands is with the aid of an inflating balloon. Dots getting further apart as the balloon blows up represent galaxies moving apart from each other, the greater the distance between them, the greater the displacement. Within all this, phrases like "Imagine the surface of the balloon is the fabric of Space-Time."

We hear it again when the reason gravity works the way it does. "Imagine this mattress is the surface of Space-Time, and this brick is a large mass...see how things fall in towards it as Space-Time is distorted. If the mass is great enough, even light beams may appear to bend."

Aha, thinks I, Space-Time must be a physical thing if it can be distorted by masses, and post such in he discussions, only to be shot down - politely - by proper science people saying "Well, not really, it's not really a tangible thing, imagine it more of a terribly terribly terriblyterriblyterriblydifficultsciencemoresciencebrainbentbrainmangledbrainfried concept."

So I'm still left with my tangible Space-Time, a tight skin of rubber, or a wafting satin sheet drying in the breeze, smeling gloriously of pink bottle Lenor, before the wind blows it off the line and it wraps itself around me in super symmetric knots. Galaxies gathered along filaments, 23 dimensional superstrings.

N and P. The branes. The Eleventh Dimension that wraps the entire Universe round yet is closer to you than your own clothes. Harmonics in space. The vacuum that isn't a vacuum but rather spits out and reabsorbs energies as subly-sub atomic particles come into being for trillionths of seconds.

None of it is understandable. All of it as beautiful. Not beautiful as a bird or flower I might photograph of a summer's day, but the beauty of it being simply every damn thing there ever was or could be.

Enjoy this film of the universe from near, to farther than far can be.

Si

All text Copyright CreamCrackeredNature 05.11.15

The Philae Lander has Awoken!

Back in November, I wrote with sad eyes slightly shining, of how the Philae lander carried to Comet 67P by the European Space Agency Rosetta mission had finally run out of power after its landing on the comet's surface.

It had apparently settled in a dark ditch upon the surface, and was thus unable to properly recharge its batteries with its solar panels. After 60 hours of activity, the much anthropomorphised "plucky" little spacecraft finally went to sleep as its batteries dies, tweeting heroically all the while.

Here's what I wrote at the time.

But now, I read that the ESA have made contact with Philae again. As was hoped at the time - rather optimistically, I thought - the decreasing distance of the comet to the sun as it approaches perihelion has meant that the lander is now getting enough sunlight to charge its batteries and operate.

There is now the chance that we will see for the first time what happens on a comet's surface as a comet makes its closest approach to the sun, which could make for a heck of a spectacle as volatile gases erupt off the warming surface to form jets, and other material streams out to form the cometary tail.

But never mind the science, not when today's evens have given the ESA an opportunity to produce another cute cartoon!

Si

Dazzled by an Iridium Flare

I was having my usual late night potter around at midnight last night, taking a gentle late night tour of the sky.

I've been neglecting my astronomy I know, I keep saying! There just aren't enough hours in the day or night to do everything, and I have to rest occasionally. Using binoculars makes my eyes tire very quickly at night these days. But luckily, the sky has more than enough to keep the naked eye interested.

So it proved last night. Approaching low from the south, rising up to meet the bright orange star Arcturus, was a faint satellite. I could see however that it was brightening up, so I figured out quickly what it was.

The Iridium Satellites

These are communications spacecraft who's highly reflective panels direct sunlight onto a narrow strip of the Earth below as the satellite passes about 900km up. I've seen them before, the brightest ones reaching about the same brightness as Venus, around -4 for a few seconds before the sun-satellite angle becomes unfavourable for the observer and the Iridium craft fades away again.

This one, however, became almost as bright as a half moon. It cast shadows, had a halo lighting up a quarter of the sky, and it all but hurt my eyes to look at.  It drowned out the stars for a moment, and it almost felt like a celestial god was shining a torch on my face, it was dazzling.

Outside of the moon, this was the brightest object I've ever seen in the night sky.

A twitter contact down south thought it might have been a flash of lightning.

It was actually Iridium 32, and it had reached a magnitude of a shade under -8.

You can use the "Heavens Above" website to predict views for Iridium Flares - and also things like International Space Station passes. This is the pass I observed last night. If you enter your location, it will predict and locate bright Iridium Flares for you.

They really are spectacular.

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 12.06.15

A Return to Astronomy!

It seems like so long since I had a proper observing sessions outside with my 10x50s, so even though I had an early start today, a crisp clear sky last night was so tempting that I risked sandpapered eyes to do some astronomy.

Astronomy with company at that, for as I craned my neck skywards, a hedgehog was snuffling invisibly, but loudly, through leaf litter and undergrowth as it hunted for invertebrate treats.

Above, the sky was panther dark and studded with stellar gemstones; the topaz Arcturus, pale sapphire Vega, setting citrine Capella, and the blood ruby of Antares, the heart of the Scorpion low in the South.

But it is only when you turn the binoculars on the sky that the true magic appears. Even at this early stage of summer when it is low in the sky, the Milky Way in Cygnus forms a tumbling river of stars waterfalling down into the North. There is the faint constellation of Coma Berenices, an echelon of faint celestial geese chasing Leo the Lion down into the West.

And then there are the globular clusters, smudgy and grey in binoculars - I observed Messier 3, 5 and 13 last night - but even a small telescope resolves them into glittering balls of stars.

Then when you turn the Hubble onto them, you see this...

Si

Messier 13, courtesy of NASA/ESA/Hubble

What are your Favourite Stars?

A rather gossipy title, by my standards, but where I'm sitting at the moment, in a works canteen, there is little nature to enjoy, and the sky is the same battleship grey it has been all day. Green fields seem to emit a swampy vapour, and there is not a bird to be seen.

So, one is naturally drawn to contemplate the Universe. Well, I am, anyway.

As regular readers have probably realised, I tend to stargaze any clear night I can, either more serious sweeps with my binoculars, or a more relaxed, contemplative, naked eye observation. The night sky is endlessly fascinating to me, and I could talk of my love for Mu Cepheii, the deep red "Garnet Star" christened by Herschel or perhaps my endless hunting for the famed La Superba, Y Canum Venaticorum. This star is reputed to be the reddest thing in the entire sky, and my neck craning binocular searches are designed to prove to myself that this might be the case.

So far, I'm not convinced. The Garnet Star wins every time.

But in many ways, it is the seasons that define my life, not with any kind of Vivaldi-ish romanticism, but the rather more humdrum need to have a safe cycle to work in light conditions, without blizzard winds sweeping over roads darkly glistening with black ice. And to get to work without my agonised fingers dropping off with frostbite as if I was a foolish mountaineer.

So, it is the stars of early morning that catch my eye, the stars of summer that mark the commencement of spring when you can see them when you leave for work at 6am. So my most beloved stars are Vega, the metal blue guardian of warmer nights, and Antares, the low heart of the Scorpion, the constellation that stalks the horizon in a hopeless search for Orion placed safely by the gods on the other side of the heavens.

When I leave my home and can see both Vega, and Antares, I feel that the difficult months are over, and I will soon be chasing butterflies through the parks of Spring.

Si

Final Geminid 2015 Report

Well, the final report is one of disappointment after the 2015 Geminid meteor shower started so well here in Newark!

My first proper observation session took place at 2am on the night of the 12th-13th. It was well below zero, but warmly dressed, it was strangely pleasant reclining on a garden chair in the frost, watching the stars crisply pierce the black vault above.

In the 45 minute session I had, I observed 8 Geminids, none brighter than 2nd magnitude and most fainter. The last quarter moon was providing some interference in the East, but bright meteors were still easily visible. In fact the brightest I saw were two sporadics of first magnitude streaking North - South through Leo, against the tide as it were.

The night of maximum, the 13th-14th (Saturday-Sunday) commenced with me making a 7km run around the streets, including a trip up Clay Lane and to the Elm Avenue cricket ground. Here skies were dark, and I was certain of seeing meteors, or so I thought.

As it happened, during the 45 minute run with these frequent meteor stops, I saw no meteors, despite the gloriously clear skies. Of odd looks from dog walkers and car drivers, wondering who this neck craning athlete was, there were many. Of shooting stars, there were none.

However, during a 15 minute session later on where I observed from a well lit street, I saw 5 meteors at around 8pm and was really hopeful of a fantastic night of illuminations. Ha ha. In the great tradition of British weather, clouds rolled in from nowhere at around 9pm and blanked the sky out for the rest of the night.

Cruel. So cruel.

The night of post maximum was the same, and the one after. Finally, on the Tueday night, I saw my final Geminid of the shower, a proud but strangely sad specimen heading East leaving a short trail.

No more.

It could have been so darn good!

Will Storr - Of Heretics and Skeptics

Or, a warning for the ultra-skeptics amongst us.

I’m not a book reviewer. I’m not a scientist. If I was, I’d be writing a proper piece  using reams of notes, annotated margins, and perhaps dictaphone recordings of interviews with some of the protagonists. Tucked behind the mantlepiece would be a copy of my contract with the Times Literary Supplement.

Instead I’m writing this in a works second string canteen, with a mound of banana peel by my left elbow, and a brain possibly of insufficient ability to attempt this task.

“The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science” is a book by Will Storr, a writer with an apparent religious family background, and issues with mental health in his past. In it, he makes Louis Theroux style visits on “independent thinkers” - a hardline creationist homophobic preacher, devotees of extreme yoga therapy, homeopaths, UFOlogists, and in one memorable chapter, Holocaust denier (or perhaps no longer) David Irvine and a merry band of right wingers as they tour the Extermination camps of Europe.

He also spends time with the Skeptic movement movers and shakers, as they attempt a mass homeopathy suicide, and original Skeptic hero James Randi.

The book is fascinating, although sometimes you feel that the time he spends with his subjects is almost cut short just as his visits get into their stride - something you never feel with Theroux, say - and that he has to throw some proper, but tough to follow, science as a little bit of padding. However, this may just be myself as a non-scientist who prefers the character case studies.  Saying that, the chapter dealing with Recovered Memory Syndrome is truly dramatic, and here Storr really does get to grips with the damage that can be caused by dabbling with this sort of therapy, especially when the investigator is so convinced the abuse exists that any rational refutation is ignored.

And this is the crux of what the book is about. He finds that in some cases, the Skeptics are just as dogmatic, if not more so, than the so called cultists, and a lot less sympathetic in a kind of striving for uniformity of thought. Their methodology is also called into question, when really there experiments should morally be far more stringent than those they seek to discredit.

Ultimately, however, all the evidence in the world is pointless if your brain is going to ignore anything that doesn’t agree with your own innate prejudice, deeply ingrained by years of seeing the world from your own perspective. This is something called “Confirmation Bias”, a way of skewing the world to fit your own vision that both the cultists, and the Skeptics, and myself, are guilty of. And to me this is quite frightening.

How can we be possibly open minded, if our brains won’t let us? Is everyone who says that they are truly open minded, nothing other than a bigoted liar who sees only what they want to see?

It is disturbing. And a point brilliant explored by this book.

Copyright Creamcrackered 05.08.14

Alas Comet ISON, I never knew you

You may well have read my blogs talking about my observations of Comet Lovejoy, but there was always an underlying hint in my writing, I think,  that I was hoping for something bigger and better elsewhere...

My attempts to view ISON were always thwarted. Clear skies at the wrong time, clear skies when I was asleep, a bad horizon from my urban location. I woke up at 5am one day to try and observe it, then probably fell asleep again. A few more days and ISON was much too close to the sun to observe from any Earth based observatories. It was up to the battery of solar observation satellites out in space to try and keep us in the picture.

And it was looking really good, for a just a painfully short time. After some earlier reports suggesting that ISON was already starting to disintegrate, the comet passed through a rough patch, and then brightened rapidly. By the time of perihelion, the comet had reached an estimated magnitude of about 0, and was showing a beautiful pair of tails - a dust tail, and the straighter, narrower ion tail.

ISON just before perihelion 28.11.13, image from NASA SOHO satellite.

ISON then whipped out of view behind the sun for a short time, and observers held their breath. By the time it reached its closest point to the sun, at less than a million miles, ISON was being heated to 4000K and was travelling at 800,000 mph - 0.11% of the speed of light.

ISON was travelling so fast, it was undergoing relativistic effects. Time was running slower for the comet!

Clearly subject to such temperatures and forces, it was never a given that the comet's one mile or so nucleus would survive. Initially, it seemed that nothing had survived, but then this SOHO picture gave hope.

Had Comet ISON (at 11 o'clock) survived?

Something had clearly made it around perihelion, but what?

Hopes were high that some, or perhaps even all, of ISON's nucleus had survived, but then sadly, it became apparent that the image captured above was just a remnant of gas and dust from the comet's tail, with no solid nucleus present. Over the next two days, it gradually smeared out, and disappeared to nothing.

It may be that the comet springs one last surprise on us; the debris around its orbit may give us a new meteor shower when the earth crosses ISON's orbital path early next year. But this is unknown at present.

Comet ISON may be dead, and I may be sad to never have seen it. But the study of this comet, and the interest it generated, was unprecedented, and that is Comet ISON's legacy.

Now get your binoculars out, and look for Comet Lovejoy!

Copyright Cream Crackered Nature 02.12.2013

Comet Lovejoy, with Rum this time

Last night was clear, but pretty cold out. This time of year, my scale of sky clarity is usually based around “How well can I see Lepus tonight?”, and last night most of the stars of this fairly undistinguished constellation below Orion were in view from my urban garden, as was the tail of the Great Dog next door.

Behatted and begloved, and fortified with a rum and coke, I headed out at 2am with my 10x50s, and took in a few easy targets while dark adapting. Messier 41 was an easy spot last night, below Sirius, and as always, the starfields of Orion and Monoceros were an attractive sight to sweep lazily around. I spotted the Christmas Tree cluster in Monoceros, looking like exactly that, a tiny inverted Christmas tree, and the Rosette cluster nearby, almost in the same binocular field of view.

Messier 35 in Gemini was spotted, and high above all three Messier clusters in Auriga too. As ever I gave special attention to Kemble’s Cascade, and took in the faint mag 9 stars that form a long straight line in between the brighter stars.

Now it was time to comet hunt.

I didn’t actually know where Comet Lovejoy was, I hadn’t looked up its position, so took a guess that it was near Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici somewhere, beneath Ursa Major. I initially panicked when it wasn’t, but some slow sweeping picked up further east, roughly halfway between Alkaid and Cor Caroli about a degree NE of a 6^th magnitude star.

Last night it was showing at about the same brightness as my last sighting, about mag 4.5 at a guess, and very definitely elongated in a NW direction. To my eyes there were definite hints of a tail visible, as well as some uneven structure in the coma. It no longer has a globular cluster feel about it in the 10x50s. There was a last quarter moon interfering with my view a little, but it was still a good sight.

Seeing as more and more reports suggest Comet ISON is in the process of disintegrating, Lovejoy is probably the only comet I shall observe at this time of the year. And I'm glad I found it.

Copyright Cream Crackered Nature 26/11/2013

Comet Lovejoy and Cachaca

As the sun set last night, I watched the rainy skies catch fire in the west, and then watched intrigued as the cold weather front cleared the sky, a long purple-grey to blue divide advancing from the horizon.

I was excited. This meant clear skies later, this meant comet hunting. Never mind the cold.

And by 2am, it was really cold. No dark rum in the house, so I whipped up a rather crude sort of capirinha affair with Christmas present cachaca, and headed outside.

I took a look at the moon first, a couple of days past full, but it was a very wobbly moon as I struggled to keep my shivery hands still. It was obviously going to wash out decent deep sky observing, so I headed over to the non obstructed garden view to the North-East, lifted up my binoculars to my eyes, expecting a difficult search…

….and it was there straightaway!

I suspect without the moonlight it would have been a much more impressive sight than it was. About half a degree, or nearer, to a 5^th mag star in the lower reaches of the Great Bear, Comet Lovejoy was presenting as an elongated “splodge” now rather larger and brighter looking than Messier 13 (as I observed it a week or so ago), and again with the sort of two distinct degrees of condensation I reported previously.

To my eyes, there was no sign of the green colour very apparent in photographs and from other observer reports. There was a tantalising hint of tail pointing to the North-West, but no amount of averted vision could persuade even me I was seeing a tail.

And no amount of cachaca would either. So I headed inside for an impromptu fried egg sandwich and a cup of tea, to warm me up!

Copyright Cream Crackered Nature 19/11/13

The Old Telescope and The New

Well, I'm a little older than  I was, and as an undeserved reward for this I have been given a new telescope.

It's not an astronomical one, it's a little spotting scope, 20-60x60. Obviously it's primary purpose is as a tool for birdwatching and hopefully some fairly rudimentary photography - maybe I'll snap an egret with my mobile phone through the eyepiece. But it occured to me that I could attempt to use it for astronomical purposes, and as the sky was clear early on last night, I gave it a go.

Sadly, I don't think it is going to be up to much. Even the brighter stars look faint and difficult to focus, the optics I don't think will handle astronomical work. It also feels like your looking through a Smarties tube, very narrow image field, feels like only 60 degrees. The 45 degree eyepiece is very awkward to use. The tripod isn't up to non-terrestrial use either.

I'll evaluate it again when I get a moon to look at, but while birdspotting is going to be fun with it, the night sky not so easy.

Hmmmmm. I daydream of buying a scope sometimes, there's some excellent value kit around. But, as I've said before, I've got an old telescope that lurks at the folk's house, my old Broadhust Clarkson and Fuller 6 inch Reflector. I tried it a couple of years ago, and thought the mirror was much too degraded to be any use. But then, I was looking from a brightly lit street, on a wobbly mounting. I figured it might be worth another try.

And it was. It's fine. I set it up in the back garden, and tried to roughly align it to North. Being left eyed, it took a lot of faffing to get the finder in the right place for me, and the German EQ mount is superheavy, and the hand operated worm gear a total pain. BUT I COULD SEE STARS! And see them clearly too. My 20mm Erfle eyepiece, providing about 60x, showed Deneb, pointlike, with a diffraction cross, and a slight shimmer. But it wasn't distorted as far as I could see. Then, with a very badly aligned finder, I managed to find Albireo, and had my first view of the beautiful, subtley tinted gold and blue double star, easily split even at this low magnification.

I have a working astromoical telescope! Sure, the mirror is probably a bit dirty, and the EQ mount far too heavy. But I have a deep sky and double star scope, that may yet give me great pleasure on clear nights!

The new spotting scope

The old 6 inch reflector

Binoculars? Who Needs them to Enjoy the Sky?

Most of you will have noticed that when this blog devotes itself to matters nocturnal, my stargazing reports are based around observations with my 10x50 binoculars.

However, with work this morning at 6am, a proper binocular session seemed out of the question. But such a glorious crisp sky, I didn't want to waste. So I just pottered around the garden, looking at the sky between the sycamores whose obstructive leaves will soon fall, and seeing what I could see.

Surprisingly from my town site, I could see plenty.

The Andromeda Spiral was the first thing I chose to look at, and it was just about visible with averted vision. Messier 15 globular in Pegasus, no chance, and I figure than ever seeing a naked eye globular from my garden under clearer colder skies is a no-no. But open clusters are a different matter. The Perseus double cluster was easily visible nearly overhead, to my naked eye, a sort of peanut shaped fuzzy path halfway between Mirfak and Cassiopeia, and seeing it made me wish I could just have a little peek with a small telescope. Not far away, I could pick up Messier 39 in Cygnus too, but this was far fainter.

But enough of that non naked-eye heresy! The Mirfak cluster itself is an interesting sight, never really mentioned as a sight to rival the nearby Hyades, but my favourite orange star amongst all the blue-white ones is invisible to the naked eye almost certainly under all sky conditions.

The v-shaped Hyades are of course the face of Taurus the Bull, with Aldebaran (not Alderaan, Star Wars fans!) representing its baleful orange eye. Above them is an interesting little asterism – perhaps I want to discover my own Kemble's Cascade – a little grouping of mag 5 stars around Mu, Kappa and Omega Tauri. A little further up lies the Pleiades.

The most famous open cluster in the entire night sky, the grouping also known boringly as Messier 45, or more poetically The Seven Sisters, has always brought out my competitive side. Just how many of them could I see these days? Sadly, the answer was only a boring, bog standard seven. I swear when I was fifteen I could see nine or even ten of them. I'm over forty. My eyes must be going...

Luckily, as I headed inside to bed, my eyes weren't so decrepit that I couldn't see the milky way, a river of mist flowing from Cygnus in the West to Auriga to the East. Sad, that many folk now never get to see it with their own, very naked, eyes.

Copyright Creamcrackerednature 06/10/2013

The Loneliness of Voyager 1

The thought of the Voyager 1, cold, alone, silently travelling the starlight sprinkled obsidian darkness, always moves me very greatly.

This little spaceship, launched 36 years ago to the gas giant planets with the latest in hi-tec - a tape recorder for data storage and transmission - has no crossed the heliopause and is now cruising the realm of interstellar space where the sun's influence is overwhelmed by that of the general cosmic drift of deep space.

It's journey will never end, unless it is intercepted by aliens, and it's analogue gold record played, and the sounds of earth heard by unimaginable entities, a concept that by the way formed the plot of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Little spaceship, I hear your call.

A Little Touch of Astronomy in the Night

I got home very late last night, and although the night was cold, I headed out with my 10x50s to have a look and see what was around. Skies were clear, but the cold air signalled the dive of the Summer Triangle below the weatern horizon, indeed Aquila is getting very low by 3am.

But the autumn skies bring news sights. Messier 15, the Pegasus Glbular cluster, is an easy to find object that looks decent in binoculars, if not having the impressiveness of Messier 13, 3, or 5.

Moving west, the Mirfak cluster was a piece of abstract jewellery upon a black cushion, with the fascinating Mag 7 orange-red interloper. Messier 34 in Perseus and the double cluster also showed well, but lower down still a read indicator of colder months ahead was showing between an awkward angle of two rooftops. Messier 35 in Gemini was visible, and making me wish I had a little more aperture, darker skies, and a tripod. Because in, say, a pair of 20x80s, it would look staggering.

Auriga's Messier triplets, 36,37, and 38, also put in an appearance. But for me, the memory of the night was just an ordinary star, the vividly orange Deneb Kaitos in Cetus. At magnitude 2.0, it really dominates a fairly blank patch of sky low below the Square of Pegasus.

Perseid Report 2013

I attempted to dedicate two evenings to proper Perseid observations - Sunday 11th - 12th and Monday 12th - 13th.

Sunday was a terrible disappointment. My initial reading led me to believe that this would be the best evening for observing, but as it transpired, I was clouded out for the most part, indeed my initial drink at the pub where I attempted to do some "outreach" work over a pint of a very fine Adnams ale. The clouds half cleared for about 15 minutes when I got home, and I stood outside hopefully, but I saw precisely one meteor before the clouds completely rolled in and killed off observing for the night.

I was gutted, and I was not the only one by the looks of things.

However, reports the next day suggested that the peak may be later than first though, and that the ZHR (Zenithal Hourly Maximum" rate was still increasing. So, as I had another fine pint of ale pre midnight, and was able to show a Perseid off at the pub - several were seen from here after I went home.

Me, I was a good and conscientious citizen scientist. I headed home, got out my garden chair reclined to the max, my 10x50s, and a warm jacket. I had about a third of the sky in view, the radiant to Square of Pegasus, to Ursa Major, and over the zenith to Hercules.

It was a slow start at about 1230am, and it took a few minutes to see my first meteor, but as the radiant rose higher, the view just got better and better. As I usually tend to expect from the Perseids, most meteors were fast moving, short lived, and not too far from the radiant - I find the Geminids tend to be much more widely ranged across the sky.

The typical Perseid was usually about Mag 2, and distinctly orange in colour. There were three or four much brighter, Mag 0 specimens, leaving distinct smoky trails, but sadly no spectacular fireballs for me! I observed for an hour, counting around 30 Perseids and 1 sporadic - I lost count!

In between Perseids, I got in some nice looks at Kemble's Cascade, Cassiopeia clusters, and Cygnus and Lacerta too, and all the while I listened to some interesting tech reports on the BBC World service.

All in all, it was a very rewarding night's observing, I hope many new observers were outside with a warm drink and their eyes turned skyward!

Kemble's Cascade and the Mystery Cluster

I had another fine night's observing last night; a dull day had given way to clear skies, and a chance to do some astronomy outreach work using the Interrnational Space Station - at the pub.

At home, I quickly had the 10x50s and enjoyed the sights of the mixed summer / autumn skies  - beautiful endless stars along the milky way, cygnus full of endless knots and unidentified clusters of stellar bodies. Messier 71 in Sagitta was easily seen, and then Messier 27, the dumbell nebula and the easiest planetary nebula in the sky to see.

The night's main target was Kemble's Cascade, sat lowish in the great blank patch of sky that marks the constelation of Camelopardalis. Ironically Alpha is one of the more distant and thus luminous naked eye stars visible from earth, being 6000 light years from earth, but you wouldn't think so looking at this undistinguished patch of sky.

Luckily I'm able to pick out the Cascade more or less automatically now. I looked at it totally afresh last night, leading to extra discovery about it.

I hope.

The bright northern part of the cascade is what I tend to have been identifying as the whole asterism. After last night, I think I was wrong - at this time of year that bright part extends east for a couple of lunar diameters or so, then curves to the south out of the field of view . Trouble is, I think, is that these stars are fainter, and the Cascade tends to look a bit like it has gaps in it. The NGC1502 cluster was not apparent, but again this cluster to the south-west is very prominent.

I can't find anything on star maps of the area, but if this cluster is NGC1502, I'm looking at the Cascade in entirely the wrong way.

Perhaps the readers will see this formation better!