danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I am taking an astronomy lab this semester.  It is supposed to be a one-hour-per-week class, but we meet for two hours every Thursday morning, and a couple hours at night several times throughout the semester.  I don’t know how the university considers that one hour, but they do.  So it was, then, that I felt a little annoyed to have to go out last night at 9:30.  I was looking forward to the looking, but distressed at the prospect of being at school until eleven o’clock, particularly when I had already spent my daytime hours in class and in the waiting room of Town Tire getting an oil change.

But my dismay quickly abated when I arrived at the observatory.  I had been there years before on a Friday night, when the facility is open to the public.  That visit marked the first time I had ever seen the rings of Saturn or the giant spot on Jupiter.  Last night was very clear, and the temperature quite pleasant.  There are only a dozen students in my class, and only eight of them showed up, so we all got plenty of time to use the telescopes.

Two eight inch reflectors were aimed at Albireo, a binary star in Cygnus.  It’s incredible to think that these two individual stars take a hundred thousand years to orbit one another.  We looked at two different objects in the 12 inch reflector.  The first, the Ring Nebula (M57), was a little disappointing.  In all the photos I have ever seen, the nebula appears to be vibrant and colorful, but in person it appears to be no more than a hazy ring.  Dr. Reyes, the director of the UF teaching observatories, told me that the the photos we see of the Ring Nebula are composites, and filter certain wavelengths of light to create beautiful images.  The second object we viewed with the 12 inch telescope was the open cluster M11.  It doesn’t look especially vibrant in photographs, and, to be honest, in person it is even more subtle, seeming at first to be just a hazy speck against the blackness of deep space.  But after staring for a minute or two, my eye began to perceive some of the brighter individual stars in the cluster.

Finally, before I left, I asked one of the graduate students to aim a telescope at Jupiter, since it was so bright in the southern sky.  Through the eight inch reflector (with a 26mm eyepiece), I could see the stripes in the planets atmosphere, and its four Galilean moons.  It was awesome.  It looked pretty much like this photo, but with the moons all to one side in a straight line.

I’m looking forward to our next night lab.

Filed under: School, Technology on September 9th, 2009