Tag Archives: Magnificent Universe

Across the Universe: Stellar Round Up

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This entry is part 93 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October 2008; we first ran it here in 2016 Black Mesa, Oklahoma sounds like the setting for a Hollywood Western. It looks like one, too. Every year at the Okie-Tex Star Party, three hundred amateur astronomers camp out for a week with their telescopes there, in hopes of dark dry skies. Some of their “amateur” instruments are larger in aperture than the telescopes of the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo. The miracle of computerized fabrication and the modern Dobsonian mount (a way of holding a telescope in place that replaces complex hardware with simple Teflon pads) has brought the cost of quality optics to the point where the price of a large telescope can be less than that of a small automobile. My GPS unit directed me as far as Boise City, two hours north of Amarillo, Texas; after that, I was following roads too small for most maps. I was there … Continue reading →

Does Studying the Universe Change Your Perspective of the Environment Around You?

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An 8th grader doing a research project on astronomy recently emailed the Warren Astronomical Society asking “Does studying the universe change your perspective of the environment around you?” In this post, I expand upon the response I wrote back to that student.   Absolutely it does! Astronomy and cosmology are enormously wide fields of study, encompassing everything from quantum mechanics down at the sub-atomic level, to the interactions of (as of yet) unseen dark matter on the large-scale structure of the universe. Climate studies Studying how gases in Earth’s atmosphere and liquid in the oceans reflect and adsorb light, and radiate heat is but a small part of understanding how Earth’s climate functions and can change over time. The same principles used to study the Earth’s atmosphere can be applied to the atmospheres of other worlds; Venus is an example of a “runaway greenhouse effect,” and should be viewed as a cautionary tale for Earth’s ever increasing CO2 level (410.31 parts per … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Techie Dreams

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This entry is part 178 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in May, 2008, under the title “The Magic is Real” We ran it again here in 2015. It’s hard to believe but the Iron Man movie. credited with launching the current Marvel Universe franchise, is now ten years old… I have a friend who has found a new drug: it can keep him awake and programming at his computer for 36 hours straight, without too many bad side effects… or so he claims. I think he’s nuts; aside from the obvious dangers of self-prescribing anything, I happen myself to find sleeping to be a beautifully spiritual experience. (At least, that’s what I tell the homilist after Mass.) But I was struck mostly by the motivation behind my friend’s drug abuse. He is so passionately in love with being alive and doing his work that he resents having to waste eight hours sleeping every night.   That passion is one of the great things … Continue reading →

On the immensity of space

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The Total Solar Eclipse of August 21, 2017 – fly along with the shadow! from Eclipse2017.org on Vimeo. Not quite two months ago I spent a late morning and early afternoon watching the moon slide across the sun, turning midday Philadelphia into twilight and back again. I stashed the eclipse filters for the occasional look at the sun, and dove into the semester. But each time I head out for a late evening walk and see the moon hanging over the neighborhood school’s field, I think about it coming between the earth and the sun. I tend to think of the moon and sun as large objects ponderously processing through space, from my perspective taking ten or a dozen hours to creak ’round the sky. Their movements mark out days, months and years, not so much minutes and seconds. So I was struck on the animations of the August 2017 eclipse by how fast the moon’s shadow moved across the … Continue reading →

The Scale of the Universe

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Arguably, one of the most important concepts one learns from studying astronomy, is the astounding vastness of the cosmos. This vastness extends not only out to the very VERY large and far away – it extends down to the very VERY small. The human mind is ill-equipped to grasp the scale of the universe – but we can sure give it a try! Over the last few decades, several videos have been made showing the scale of the Universe. 1977: The iconic Powers of Ten video – remember: this was made before computer graphics: 1980: Cosmos: “The Edge of Forever” – Carl Sagan discusses the origins and structure of the Universe, and gives us the quote: “We are made of star stuff; we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” Here is the intro to the episode: 1996: IMAX movie Cosmic Voyage – narrated by Morgan Freeman. An updated version of Powers of Ten, with some nice computer … Continue reading →

2016 Calendars are available!

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This entry is part 16 of 57 in the series Diary

  Every year, the Vatican Observatory Foundation publishes a calendar featuring fantastic astronomical images from amateurs around the world… and noting dates of particular interest to astronomers. They can be purchased online here… This year’s calendar is out, and it looks great. (OK, so as proofreader I missed a couple of glitches, which immediately made themselves obvious as soon as I opened up the printed version. Nothing as bad as a couple years ago when we got Galileo’s birthday wrong!) On the back, I always write a pithy little paragraph or two that nobody reads. As a freebie for readers of The Catholic Astronomer, here’s what I put there this year: A few years ago, a couple of cosmologists who styled themselves as atheists attempted to show that there was “no need for God” to start the universe, at the moment popularly known as the Big Bang. They proposed thatthat a quantum fluctuation in the zero-energy vacuum field of the … Continue reading →

Open Thread 3: Dark Vermillion Skies

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The effects of our Faith and Astronomy Workshop continue to echo. From Fr. Timothy Sauppé I received the following announcement  that he recently issued in his area: Formation of a Local Chapter of International Dark-Sky Association “Attention lovers of nature! Pollution comes in many forms! We can see the litter on the ground and smell the fouling of our air. Our ears become offended by unnecessary blaring car speakers in traffic. But most people don’t consider the most neglected of all forms of pollution…. the wasteful or unthoughtful night lighting otherwise known as light pollution. “Yes, at night we need to be able to see and to be safe, but with the growth of population, comes the ever increasing night lighting with no thought to its effects on people, the environment, and wildlife. If changes are not initiated, we will no longer be able to see nature’s greatest gift, the stars. Every new night light adds to the increasing glow … Continue reading →

Encore: The Deepest Picture Ever

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This entry is part of 7 in the series Encore

Encore: on Wednesdays, we repost the best posts from previous months. To comment, please see the original post. My favorite astronomy picture is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (HUDF). NASA has released its ultimate version, called XDF, a couple of years ago. Whether it is the original version of the HUDF or the XDF version, I find both absolutely breathtaking. Let me explain a little bit to help you appreciate them. The field of view is tiny: if you wanted to cover the whole sky with a grid of similar images you would have to make 16 million of them! It would not be very practical because the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) had enough trouble taking this one picture. It took it about a month of accumulated gazing at one spot in the sky to obtain just one image. Not in a million years (literally) could the HST cover the whole sky with such images! What was the point … Continue reading →

Open Thread #2: The Messier Marathon

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Lisa Tobias, who also provided our first open thread, expands further on the Messier Marathon that she mentioned there. I know a lot of amateur astronomers and a few professional ones. When you ask, they almost always they’ll you how they have loved the stars since they were kids and how they were so excited when they opened their first telescope box (probably a Wal-Mart special with more power than Galileo ever hoped for). That wasn’t me. I always enjoyed looking at the stars, but that’s all I did. Walking in and out to the car or sitting by the fire at camp; that was enough. I just looked up and imagined. Maybe it was Halley’s Comet that ruined it for me. I was only about 9 when the comet came through, but my school (which was located in the country surrounded by horse farms and corn fields) made a big event to go out and observe the comet. I … Continue reading →

Terrifying Silence or Wondrous Generosity?

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In my previous entry I explained about the HUDF/XDF image, urging everybody to take a good look at it. Apart from the fact that it is always good to contemplate Beauty (and it this case there is both visual or intellectual beauty), I must confess that I had another had a hidden agenda. When I give talks to the general public, I try to illustrate the immensity of the Universe and of the “astronomical” numbers by showing a succession of images. First, I show the Sun and how enormous it is compared to the Earth. Then I point out that the Sun is of of the stars of our Milky Way Galaxy which comprises about 300 billion stars.     The number is so large that I need to go back and show pictures of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster with a mere 10 million stars (30,000-times fewer than the Galaxy). Then I return to the Milky Way and illustrate what it generally looks like … Continue reading →

The Deepest Picture Ever

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My favorite astronomy picture is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (HUDF). NASA has released its ultimate version, called XDF, a couple of years ago.  Whether it is the original version of the HUDF or the XDF version, I find both absolutely breathtaking. Let me explain a little bit to help you appreciate them. The field of view is tiny: if you wanted to cover the whole sky with a grid of similar images you would have to make 16 million of them! It would not be very practical because the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) had enough trouble taking this one picture. It took it about a month of accumulated gazing at one spot in the sky to obtain just one image. Not in a million years (literally) could the HST cover the whole sky with such images! What was the point in having one of the world’s most famous and most expensive scientific instruments dedicate so much of its time to a single spot in the sky? … Continue reading →