NEWS FLASH!! FROM SPACE & BEYOND

This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.
The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.
The new image allows astronomers to better distinguish between the stars and super star clusters created in the collision of two spiral galaxies. By age dating the clusters in the image, astronomers find that only about 10 percent of the newly formed super star clusters in the Antennae will survive beyond the first 10 million years. The vast majority of the super star clusters formed during this interaction will disperse, with the individual stars becoming part of the smooth background of the galaxy. It is however believed that about a hundred of the most massive clusters will survive to form regular globular clusters, similar to the globular clusters found in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms" extending far out from the nuclei of the two galaxies, best seen by ground-based telescopes. These "tidal tails" were formed during the initial encounter of the galaxies some 200 to 300 million years ago. They give us a preview of what may happen when our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in several billion years.

"LOOK IT'S GRUS - THE CRANE - WHAT CRANE? "

October Constellations
The October sky contains seven constellations, including such well-known formations as Aquarius, the water bearer, and Pegasus, the winged horse. The only notable deep sky objects are located in these two constellations. Aquarius contains two globular clusters and one open cluster. Pegasus is home to a single globular star cluster. The remaining constellations of October are relatively unremarkable, composed mainly of faint stars with no deep sky objects worthy of mention. The only bright stars worth mentioning are Alnair, in Grus, and Fomalhaut, in Piscis Austrinus.

Grus
The Crane

Pronunciation: (GRUS) 
Abbreviation: Gru Genitive: Gruis
Right Ascension: 22.61 hours Declination: -44.52 degrees Area in Square Degrees: 366
Crosses Meridian: 9 PM, October 10
Grus, the Crane, is visible in latitudes south of 33 degrees north from July through September. It was named by Johann Bayer and represents the crane, which was the symbol for the office of astronomer in ancient Egypt.

Mythology of the constellation Grus
During the late 1590's, two Dutch navigators, Pieter Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, mapped several new constellations as they traveled south, the majority being named after recently identified birds and animals. A few years later Johann Bayer, the German astronomer, included these new star patterns in his Uranometria, published in 1603



Alnair
The Bright
Alnair means 'The Bright One', and its magnitude of +1.7 certainly makes this variable blue star the brightest in its home constellation of Grus, the Crane.

A constellation of the southern sky, lying immediately south of the bright star Fomalhaut. Important features are the hot blue star Alnair, and the easily distinguished double star of Delta Gruis.

Alnair, brightest of the stars that make up Grus the Crane, is just over one hundred light years from the Solar System.
Al Na'ir is a blue B7IV sub giant about 3 times the diameter of the sun and about 170 times as luminous.

Distance (Light Years) 101 ± 3
Visual Magnitude 1.73
Color (B-V) -0.13

Alnair (Alpha Gruis)

The brightest star in the constellation Grus and the thirtieth brightest star in the sky. Its Arabic name (also written “Al Na’ir”) means “the bright one,” and comes from a longer phrase for “the bright one in the fish’s tail,” since the Arabs considered the stars of Grus to be the tail of Piscis Austrinus. Alnair can't be seen from latitudes higher than 42° N.

Visual magnitude 1.73
Absolute magnitude -0.74
Spectral type B7IV
Surface temperature 13,500 K
Luminosity 380 Lsun
Distance 101 light-years
Position R.A. 22h 8m 14s, Dec. -46° 57' 40"

In astronomy, stellar classification is a classification of stars based initially on photospheric temperature and its associated spectral characteristics, and subsequently refined in terms of other characteristics. Stellar temperatures can be classified by using Wien's displacement law; but this poses difficulties for distant stars.

"DAD, WHY AM I DOING THIS ?"

My daughter Maya was not sure what I was doing but I promised here a stawberry sunday if she held still. The picture does not show the concept of umbra & penumbra but here is a definition that might help. ( note, blog would not let me download some nice animations that gave some examples of these concepts - please advise)
Umbra and penumbra from an extended source. You may have noticed that shadows are often fuzzy, particularly when the surface on which the shadow lies is far from the object casting the shadow. This fuzziness is because no light source is only a point in space. All sources have some geometrical size. Thus, light from one edge of the source is not quite parallel to light from the other edge.
The evenly dark part of a shadow is called the umbra. The fuzzy part between the dark and the light is called the penumbra.
If one is in the umbra of an object, the light source is completely obscured. If one is in the penumbra, the source is only partially obscured, to a greater or lesser degree as one moves through the penumbra.
The umbra of a shadow is not absolutely black because there is always scattered light that makes its way into it. In the case of sunlight, the scattered light is mostly bluish skylight, so shadows are bluer than normal.

"TEACHER, WHAT IS THE LITTLE YELLOW DOT ?"

MY STUDENTS WERE FACINATIATED WITH HOW THIS 1.4 MILLION KM SUN WAS NOW A 2-3 MM IMAGE BEHIND THE VIEW FINDER.
I HAD A HARD TIME WITH MATH AT FIRST - BUT I THINK I HAVE SOME NUMBERS I CAN USE IN CLASS. THE PICTURE SHOWS SOME OF MY STUDENTS VIEWING THE SUN WITHOUT THE RULER TO MEASURE THE DISTANCE FROM THEMSELVES TO THE IMAGE. THEY HAD A DIFFICULT TIME WITH THE RULER - THEY KEPT HITTING THEMSELVES IN THE THROAT.
HERE ARE SOME MORE FUN FACTS ABOUT THE SUN FOR MY STUDENTS.
Diameter: 1,390,000 km.
Mass: 1.989e30 kg
Temperature: 5800 K (surface)
15,600,000 K (core)

HERE COMES THE SUN

ON A SUNNY SUNDAY AFTERNOON I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXPERIMENT WITH MY COMPASS. IN THE TWO PICS YOU CAN SEE HOW WE ARE AT A 40 TO 45 DEGREE LAT. ONE LINE IS AT THE NOON LINE WHILE THE COMPASS LINE IS SHOWING THE MAGNETIC NORTH. COOL!