Updates Below

Hey Everybody, for the next week or so I am keeping new updates to Palomar Skies below the post about Fred Givant. So if you are looking to see what's new, just scroll down a bit.

Thanks.

Fred Givant: 1943 - 2009

I have the sad task of announcing that Fred Givant, one of the Palomar Observatory’s docents, passed away on Sunday June 28.

We only had the pleasure of knowing Fred for just a year and a half, but he certainly left his mark on the outreach program. Fred felt passionately about the observatory and especially the need to educate young people about science. He backed up that passion with frequent visits to the observatory to help with our public outreach program.

In spite of the fact that Fred had a fulltime job (working as a risk manager for a company building the next generation of GPS satellites) he was very committed to making the trek to Palomar Mountain to volunteer much of his limited free time. It has been a record-breaking year for tours at the observatory and Fred was a big part of that. He was volunteering here three of the four weekends in June and four of the five in May!

The staff and docents of the observatory will miss Fred’s enthusiasm and dedication.

A memorial service for Fred will be held on July 10 at the Miller-Jones Mortuary in Sun City, CA. Fred’s wife Carole has asked that instead of flowers donations be made to Palomar Observatory.

Anyone wishing to make a donation can send it to:

Palomar Observatory
Fred Givant Fund
P.O. Box 200
Palomar Mountain, CA 92060

100% of the donations to the fund will be used to help kids to learn about astronomy. Fred would have wanted it that way.

Here's a docent group photo from last year. Fred is second from the left.

Galileoscopes: Delivered!

Check it out, our Order of Galileoscopes has arrived!


Hopefully I'll have a real review of them posted in the next week or so.

4th of July Fireworks in 1054 A.D.

Some people are going to experience some big Independence Day fireworks shows tonight. None of them will rival the one that the Chinese saw on July 4, 1054 A.D. They witnessed the explosive (supernova) death of a massive star. The "guest star" that they saw was so bright that it became visible in the daytime for 23 days and at night it cast shadows!

The remnant of this colossal event is now known as the Crab Nebula(also called as M1 and NGC 1952).

Hundreds of years after the event was seen observations by Mt. Wilson/Palomar astronomer Walter Baade helped to tie the nebula to the eyewitness reports from the Chinese astronomers.

In honor of the 955th anniversary of the supernova being seen on Earth I give you 2 photos of the Crab Nebula.

This first image is a vintage (possibly 1959) photo from the 200-inch Hale Telescope.

Contrasting the vintage shot is a modern image, again taken using the Hale Telescope.


The modern image looks pretty different, that mostly because it was taken in near infrared light. So the colors seen in the image are not at all what your eyes would see because your eyes can't see into the near infrared.

The Crab Nebula is located approximately 6,300 light years away. It is some 10 light years across and is expanding at about 1,800 km/sec.

At the heart of the nebula lies the Crab Nebula pulsar. The pulsar is neutron star that spins 30 times per second. It is heavier than our Sun but only about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) across! That makes the diameter of the pulsar a little bigger than the length of Palomar Mountain, yet it weighs more than the Sun.

The pulsar is arrowed in the zoomed version below.

Palomar Skies on twitter (finally)

Palomar Skies is finally on twitter.

Three Cheers for the Red, White & Blue

It is nearly Independence Day, so (here in the U.S. anyway) it is time to show off patriotic colors.

To celebrate here's a vintage shot of the Trifid Nebula (M20) as shot from the 200-inch Hale Telescope:

The reddish portions are ionized light from an emission nebula and the blue is from reflection nebula (starlight scattering off of dust).

I am reasonably sure that this shot was from 1961. Imaging at the professional and amateur levels has leaped far beyond what could be done by anyone 40-50 years ago.

Supernova Remnant W49B

(Credit: Caltech/SSC/J.Rho and T. Jarrett)

This is from a couple of years ago but I felt like posting an astrophoto today, so this is what you get. The image above shows a supernova remnant known as W49B.

It is a composite image taken by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory. It is a false-color combination of X-ray (blue) and near-infrared (red and green) light. The image is 5.7 arcmin on each side.

It is images such as this one that really highlight how ground-based and orbiting telescopes work hand in hand for astronomers as they attempt to unravel the secrets of the universe.

Here's what the Chandra website has to say about the image:

supernova remnant W49B reveals a barrel-shaped nebula consisting of bright infrared rings around a glowing bar of intense X-radiation along the axis.The X-rays in the bar are produced by 15 million degree Celsius gas that is rich in iron and nickel ions. At the ends of the barrel, the X-ray emission flares out to make a hot cap. The X-ray cap is surrounded by a flattened cloud of hydrogen molecules detected in the infrared. These features indicate that jets of hot gas produced in the supernova have encountered a large, dense cloud of gas and dust.

The following sequence of events has been suggested to account for the X-ray and infrared data: A massive star formed from a dense cloud of dust and gas, shone brightly for a few million years while spinning off rings of gas and pushing them away to form a nearly empty cavity around the star. The star then exhausted its nuclear fuel and its core collapsed to form a black hole. Much of the gas around the black hole was pulled into it, but some, including material rich in iron and nickel was flung away in oppositely directed jets of gas traveling near the speed of light. When the jet hit the dense cloud surrounding the star, it flared out and drove a shock wave into the cloud.

An observer aligned with one these jets would have seen a gamma-ray burst, a blinding flash in which the concentrated power equals that of ten quadrillion Suns for a minute or so. The view perpendicular to the jets would be a less astonishing, although nonetheless spectacular supernova explosion. For W49B, the jet is tilted out of the plane of the sky by about 20 degrees, but the remains of the jet are visible as a hot X-ray emitting bar of gas.

W49B is about 35 thousand light years away, whereas the nearest known gamma-ray burst to Earth is several million light years away - most are billions of light years distant. If confirmed, the discovery of a relatively nearby remnant of a gamma-ray burst would give scientists an excellent opportunity to study the aftermath of one of nature's most violent explosions.

The infrared data was observed with the 200-inch Hale Telescope's Wide-field Infrared Camera (WIRC). The individual frames, in very high resolution) from Palomar and Chandra can be found here.