Experimental sketch goodbye – Active Region 2738

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April 16th On April 16th Active Region 2738 was heading towards the limb, looking very dramatic. I decided to try an experimental sketch using just pencil to capture the action around the giant sunspot. I used a very black pencil called a Conte de Paris Carbone B, which was deeply black. For the sketch I also used some silicone tipped brushes, these were perfect for drawing with and allowed some good flexible movement to be developed.  There is always massive movement  in the area around sunspots. A kind of disturbance caused by the huge magnetic activity in the sunspot itself. The light bridge and the change in it since April 10th was clearly visible in my h-alpha view  however the seeing was soft not as sharp as I would have liked. A well shape filament would have been nice to observe but none developed as I viewed April 18th On April 18th another opportunity to view this active region came … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Dramatic Science

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This entry is part 64 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2008. We ran it here in 2016. From a glass-enclosed visitor’s gallery at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, I watched three technicians, encased in white suits, slowly affix bits of equipment to a large aluminum frame, the platform of an SUV-sized rover to Mars. Two sets of steering rockets were already attached; two large metal spheres painted black and gold were seated nearby. “Those are the fuel tanks, right?” I asked my friend Steve, an engineer on the project who guided my tour. “Like the ones that blew up the Mars Orbiter in the 1980s?” Every piece has a necessary function, and every piece has a history of what can happen if it goes wrong. Even with a recent string of triumphs, Mars probe failures still outnumber the successes. Each piece is added in a carefully scripted order, with a quality-control specialist looking on: the torque wrench must not overtighten … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – April 23, 2019

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This entry is part 93 of 97 in the series In the Sky This Week

Did you get a chance to see the conjunction of Jupiter and the Moon the the predawn sky this morning? I did as I drove my wife to work. Mercury and Venus appear very low in the eastern sky just before sunrise all week – seeing Mercury may be a challenge. There will be a conjunction of the Moon and Saturn in the eastern predawn sky on April 25th; Jupiter and the star Antares continue to appear in the southwest. Mars continues to move away from the Pleiades – which is very close to setting with the dusk; the constellations Orion and Taurus set shortly after sunset. Over the last several months, Earth’s orbit has taken it away from Mars (see solar system images below). M5 – The Rose Cluster Messier 5 or M5 (also designated NGC 5904) is a globular cluster in the constellation Serpens. Under extremely good conditions, M5 is just visible to the naked eye as a faint “star” near the star 5 Serpentis. Binoculars or small telescopes will identify the … Continue reading →

Welcome to Sacred Space Astronomy!

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You may have noticed a change here… what we used to call The Catholic Astronomer is now Sacred Space Astronomy. And along with a change in layout and title, we’re expanding the way you can support our work. Why the name change? OK, so I admit, I am the guy who came up with the original name. I meant it as a pun, in the sense that “catholic” means “universal” and of course astronomers look at the universe, while our interests on this site cover pretty much the gamut from naked-eye stargazing to theoretical cosmology. All, of course, under the aegis of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Well, like most puns, nearly everyone missed it entirely. And since a number of our contributors are not actual Catholics (again, there is a gamut, from practicing Jews to Catholic priests to non-churchgoers) the face value of the title wasn’t always appropriate. Meanwhile, for those of you who contribute financially to keep the site (and … Continue reading →

Growing Suspect of Religion, not Science

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On the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages there is a really cool entry that readers of The Catholic Astronomer should take a look at.  The entry consists of an excerpt from the Tahāfut al-falāsifa, or The Incoherence of the Philosophers, of Abu Hāmid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-Tūsi al-Ghazālī.  (The excerpt is fully downloadable in PDF format.)  Al-Ghazālī, who lived in the eleventh century, is one of medieval Islam’s best-known religious intellectuals. Al-Ghazālī says that disputing matters of science on the basis of religious texts or ideology is a waste of time.  Moreover, he says the atheists love it when people of faith do such things, because, he says, “then the atheist’s path for refuting religion becomes easy”.  He says that once something is scientifically well-established (for example, the mechanism by which eclipses occur), then whoever inspects them and is convinced by their evidence, deriving for himself information about the extent, times of occurrence, and duration of these two kinds … Continue reading →

Drawing Active Region 2738

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  Massive sunspot It was great to have a new huge active region to observe recently. This massive area of magnetic disturbance heaving its way across the solar disc was fascinating to watch. The weather smiled on Ireland, several days of sunshine in April is unusual to say the least. Active region 2738 boasted the largest sunspot in several years. Its diameter is three times that of the Earth. Across the center of the umbra is a light bridge circa  20,000 km long and circa 800 km wide. !! Drawing Active Region 2738 is a challenge indeed but it  is also an opportunity to try some new ideas. At 12:36 UT on the 10th of April,  a very bright plage flare erupted from the base of two dark filaments. Then one of the filaments got very long very quickly. Then the flare subsided. It’s the yellow part of the drawing. The umbra was very dark and the surrounding penumbra seemed … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Exploding Centaur

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This entry is part 21 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in April, 2006, and first published here in 2015. It was April Fool’s Day at the Vatican’s telescope in southeastern Arizona, and we’d had three nights of cloudy weather. This night looked promising, however. Bill Romanishin, our colleague at the University of Oklahoma, had given us a list of Kuiper Belt Objects to observe, orbiting out beyond Neptune. Included were some Centaurs, objects that some day might become comets plunging close to the Sun. At the telescope, I was with Steve Tegler from Northern Arizona University. Along with each object, we also observed bits of blank sky, so we could find and remove all the dust spots on the images; and fields of stars whose colours and brightnesses were already well known, so that we could calibrate our objects against these known standards. Around midnight, about halfway into a field of standard stars, Steve looked over his list again and remembered, “Oh, Bill wanted us … Continue reading →

Skyward: April 2019

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Sparking an Interest in Astronomy in Young Students During our monthly star nights at our neighborhood Corona Foothills Middle School, I sit down on a chair near the telescope to assist with the observing. The students attending are well behaved no matter their level of interest. Some of the kids are there just for the evening’s assignment. But occasionally one student or two will sit down next to me and ask me a few questions. They don’t have to do this. They may ask how I got started in astronomy, in a time without computers, or even what my favorite planet or comet is. I love these conversations; they signify to me that the girl or boy is developing an interest in the sky, and an inquiring mind is at work – that is so rare and precious these days. That interest and curiosity may go nowhere; it may persist for a few months, or it may go everywhere. Why are relatively few young people … Continue reading →

ⓜ Adventures in traveling by train… Diary of 16 April, 2019

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This entry is part 40 of 41 in the series Diary

Travel news! I am in Tucson today; Here is where I have been, and where I will be going… More Stats: Since April 2 we’ve added 60 more people signed up to get notifications of these posts either via Twitter, Facebook, or directly asking for email updates here. And we’ve added two more paid subscribers, now up to 124. Thanks, and welcome! If we could double the size of the readership, would we double the number of supporters? It’s probably not that simple… but it would certainly help. More travels: I finished out my month in Italy with a trip to Padua, where I got to visit the historic astronomy tower of the University of Padua and the telescopes at the Asiago Observatory. But then, following a wonderful night train from Padua to Paris and the a high speed train to Brussels, I got to attend the historic unveiling of the first image of a Black Hole and celebration of the 100th … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – April 16, 2019

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This entry is part 92 of 97 in the series In the Sky This Week

Updating the Near-Earth Object stats for this post, I noticed that the number of known NEO’s has crossed the 20,000 threshold! I need to update this chart every time I talk about asteroids – note the steep angle of the discovery curve, and how the curve keeps growing… precipitously! If you get up at the crack of dawn, and look really low towards the eastern horizon, you may catch a glimpse of Mercury near Venus. Both planets will appear a bit lower in the sky each morning this week. Saturn, Jupiter and the star Antares appear in southern predawn sky all week; it’s interesting to note that for the last several weeks these all appeared in the south-southeastern predawn sky. Mars and the constellations Orion and Taurus appear in the western sky after sunset. Mars has dimmed significantly since last year; it and the two constellations appear a bit lower in the western sky each evening. Mars continues a slow crawl away … Continue reading →

An Historic Picture and An Infectious Smile: Who is Dr. Katie Bouman?

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The old cliche claims, “A picture says a thousand words.” This cliche may need to be revisited. When seeing the Facebook pic of Dr. Katie Bouman reacting to the first image of a black hole, I wondered what is more striking? A picture that will become one of history’s most iconic images of a black hole or a smile so full of pure, infectious joy that it has entranced the world. Congratulations Dr. Bouman, your smile is one of the few things powerful enough to rival a picture that carries the historic significance of the Apollo 11 landing! I also think it is noteworthy that this may become the first Facebook profile picture to end up in every science textbook on the planet! Sadly, the vicious nature of social media is trying to damage this wonderful scientist’s achievement. Ignoring the fact that Dr. Bouman is downplaying her role in this image, giving equal if not more credit to the international … Continue reading →

The Observatory and The Midnight Mass

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In my post last week about the Alvan Clark refractor at the Cincinnati Observatory, I mentioned that the observatory was originally built in the 1840s in a part of Cincinnati called Mt. Adams (located just east of downtown Cincinnati on the Ohio River) but it moved three decades later to its current location.  It is now located in a neighborhood of Cincinnati called Mt. Lookout.  A drawing and photograph of the original observatory building on Mt. Adams are seen below. The observatory was moved on account of pollution.  There is a painting in the Cincinnati Art Museum that illustrates just how bad the pollution at Mt. Adams was, and how difficult it would have been to do astronomy there.  The painting is by Edward Timothy Hurley, painted in oil on canvas in 1911.  Its title is “The Midnight Mass” (it is featured on Google Arts & Culture).  It portrays Immaculata Church, which is still there on Mt. Adams.  The Cincinnati … Continue reading →