From our Other Members...

The Art of Space Imagery

rs5705

When you see spectacular space images taken in infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope and other non-visible-light telescopes, you may wonder where those beautiful colors came from? After all, if the telescopes were recording infrared or ultraviolet light, we wouldn’t see anything at all. So are the images “colorized” or “false colored”?

No, not really. The colors are translated. Just as a foreign language can be translated into our native language, an image made with light that falls outside the range of our seeing can be “translated” into colors we can see. Scientists process these images so they can not only see them, but they can also tease out all sorts of information the light can reveal. For example, wisely done color translation can reveal relative temperatures of stars, dust, and gas in the images, and show fine structural details of galaxies and nebulae.

Read more: The Art of Space Imagery

2012 Night Under the Stars at Alamo Lake State Park

MLachman

The 2012 'Night Under the Stars' at Alamo Lake State Park was an official Arizona Centennial Event, organized by JD & Karen Maddy of the Verde Valley astronomical society. I attended as an event astronomer. During the day, there was solar observing, which was well attended despite the sky clouding over as the day progressed. However, there were talks held under an arbor to compensate for that. One of them was about the history of Lowell observatory by a machinist who works there, followed by a raffle. A Century Plant (Agave Americana) was planted at the Park to mark the event.

Read more: 2012 Night Under the Stars at Alamo Lake State Park

Searching for Pluto

Dennis Jamison

Near the New Moon last August, Phil Oberlander and I looked for Pluto. If you have never tried this, it’s quite a challenge to positively identify Pluto. We were based at Phil’s cabin in central Colorado at an altitude of 8,500 ft and used his 10 inch Orion SkyQuest Dob.  The telescope is advertised as being able to see objects down to magnitude 14.7. The computer pointed the scope to the right star field, but that was only the beginning of the search. We then switched to the Pluto finder chart in the June issue of Sky and Telescope. It plots stars to magnitude 14.5, with Pluto’s track (magnitude 14.0) shown as a yellow line. So we were looking for Pluto near the magnitude limit for this telescope. The star field was just southwest of M25, a good reference point. The trick was to identify the pattern of stars around Pluto, and determine exactly which star it would be nearest to. The finder chart was essential for this part.

Read more: Searching for Pluto

Great Astronomy Watch? YES!

TimBurns

Several years ago I read an article on watches in Astronomy Magazine.  Ever since, I have lusted over a particular watch reviewed in that article: the YES watch (www.yeswatch.com).  There are actually several styles within the YES family of watches (the Zulu, Inca, Kundalini, etc.) but they all share a common trait: the ability to calculate sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset and many other astronomical times for any location around the world and display them on a unique 24 hour dial.  Unfortunately, a brand new YES watch is quite expensive (I have never spent more than $50 dollars on a watch before).  But recently I won an eBay auction and picked up a used Zulu model for less than half the price of a new one.  Is this watch everything the article made it out to be?  YES!

Read more: Great Astronomy Watch? YES!