Astroimagers, Environmentalists, and Fellow Stewards of our Planet,
It has come to my attention by the AAS in regard to the plans and seeking FAA approval by Reflect Orbital to light up our night sky by an additional 4 hours.
The AAS policy team is requesting input from the community regarding the potential impacts of Reflect Orbital’s proposed reflector satellites on astronomical research and night sky visibility. Reflect Orbital is a satellite company that plans to deliver sunlight at night by building a constellation of reflectors in low Earth orbit beginning in 2026, with the goal of 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030. Each satellite is expected to reflect ~0.8 lux (4-5x the brightness of the full Moon) to a ~5 km diameter beamon Earth’s surface.
Needless to say this is of extreme concern. I have posted a survey by AAAS below. We need to fight this as well as gather others in this fight.
We are used to sending our spacecraft to nearby astronomical bodies like the moon, the asteroids and the planets in our solar system. What is new over the last few years is the passage of transiting astronomical objects passing through our solar system. Like an out of town visitor driving through the main street of our town and going out without any stops. The most recent one was given the name of 3I/ATLAS. The third such object since we started tracking such extraneous objects.
3I stands for third interstellar object (dubbed as ISO). While ATLAS stands for the detection system which spotted it – Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. We know that it is an interstellar object by the trajectory it takes. Almost all other intra solar system objects move in circles or ellipses around the sun, however elongated the orbit may be. The picture below, courtesy NASA, shows the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS in blue which is cutting across our solar system. The speed is about 200,000 kmph. Such a fast moving almost straight trajectory would be an interstellar object. Its path is very close to the plane of our solar system which seems to be a coincidence.
Avi Loeb, the scientist who postulated that such objects are alien probes coming in to take a peek at our solar system, thinks that the chances of a random visitor happening to line up so neatly with our planetary plane is very low. It also has a flight path very close to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. Such a flyby can be expected from a NASA spacecraft or the one by an alien design! However, It has frozen carbon dioxide which is becoming a gas as it gets closer to the Sun. The outgassing indicates that 3I/ATLAS is a comet. Not a spacecraft.
Like our solar system which is confined to a plane, our galaxy the Milky Way is also a disk which is thick at the center and tapers as one goes away from the center. Our solar system is in the thin part of our galactic plane. If we move sufficient distance away from our solar system or our galaxy, we can see the essential disk structure !
We had two ISOs before the current one. First was 1I/Oumuamua and the second one 2I/Borisov. Investigators reveal that all the 3 ISOs originated from different regions in our galaxy Milky Way and at different times. Their ages range in age from one to several billion years. 3I/ATLAS is the oldest of the three, with an estimated age of 4.6 billion years, and originated from the Milky Way’s thick disk (closer to the center of the galaxy). It is also the largest of the three ISOs, at about twenty km in diameter. This region of our galaxy is populated by older, lower metallicity stars. In astronomy, anything other than Hydrogen and Helium are considered as metals !
1I/Oumuamua is about 1 billion years old and originated from the thin disk where new stars are still forming. 2I/Borisov is approximately 1.7 billion years old, and originated from the thin disk as well.
Asteroids and comets are material leftover from the formation of planetary systems. We have our own asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and comets at the end of our solar system. Every one of them orbiting the Sun. Presumably other planetary systems also have similar bodies. Some bodies may get ejected and travel in interstellar space and may occasionally travel through other planetary systems like ours.
It is possible some bodies from our solar system may have broken loose, or got ejected, and ventured into interstellar space and possibly other planetary systems. Gravitational scattering could be one reason why objects get ejected from the host planetary systems. Or other unknown dynamic processes. It is not just asteroids or comets which can get out from their parents’ home. Sometimes planets can do so. We do have single planets without a parent star. But none came to visit us so far !
Planetary systems are not the same. They vary in terms of the sizes of the stars, number and sizes of planets, number of moons etc. Studying ISOs gives us an indication of the planetary system where they originate. Instead of us going on interstellar journeys, the objects are coming to us so that we can study them.
While we need to keep an open mind on the possibility that any of the earlier two ISOs could have been alien spacecraft, since they could not prove to be comets, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. We don’t have evidence one way or the other. More such visitors in the future could give us opportunities for further studies.
If the event is cancelled due to weather, we will use the 9/20/25 rain date. I will email you directly (usually the night before), so watch your emails!
If you have any questions or comments, please contact me via email or by phone (see below).
Michael Franzyshen, NJAA Open House Coordinator 908-256-2918
The picture below is 100% pure luck. The right place, the right time. I had just re-aligned my mount and slew to the Moon as a test. On a whim I pulled out my phone and just held it over the eye piece. As I pressed the button the jet flew past.
I lined up the Moon nice and neat, When a jet made the image complete. By sheer stroke of luck, As I clicked—what a pluck! Now my photo’s both sky and the fleet.
All pictures here are taken with a Redcat 51 telescope, ZWO ASI2600MCDuo camera, Optolong L-Pro filter, and a ZWO AM3 mount. Processed with PixInsight.
Bubble & Lobster Claw Nebulae in Cassiopeia, 27–29 JulyM31, Andromeda Galaxy, 21–23 AugustNGC 6888, Crescent Nebula and surrounding nebulosity in Cygnus, 10–12 August
Every year I look forward to viewing the Perseid Meteor Showers. This year did not disappoint.
After seeing a spectacular fireball Friday, August 8th night, I decided to chance the full moon and put out some equipment for last night’s (August 12th) peak viewing.
The heavens panned out and I’m delighted with these lucky catches.
Equipment used was a Nikon D3100, Bulb setting, 3 second exposures with intervalometer.
NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Observes Interstellar Comet NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Aug. 6, with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument. The research team has been analyzing insights from Webb’s data, and a preprint is available online…more
-space.com
How old is Jupiter? Meteorite ‘raindrops’ help scientists pin down gas giant’s age Mysterious spherical droplets in meteorites aren’t just cosmic oddities. They’re evidence of planetary formation. In some cases, to learn more about our solar system, all we have to do is look at evidence found on Earth. Researchers from Japan’s Nagoya University…more
-NYT
This Powerful Telescope Quickly Found 2,100 New Asteroids More than a million asteroids, some of them potential threats to Earth. Asteroids with tails like comets. Interstellar objects that happen to be swinging by our sun. (Could they be alien spaceships?) More distant worlds including, perhaps, a ninth planet, which could fill in the story of our solar system’s turbulent youth….more
-NYT
Onionlike Space Explosion May Be a New Type of Supernova Carl Sagan once said we are all made of star-stuff. Astronomers have long predicted that some of the heavier elements in the universe that comprise our very being, like carbon and oxygen, are forged inside stars and released when they die and explode in powerful supernovas….more
-NYT
Scientists Find a Quadruple Star System in Our Cosmic Backyard Zenghua Zhang, an astronomer at Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues were combing through catalogs of stars in search of cold brown dwarfs, interstellar objects that fall somewhere between planets and stars. They found something odd, and rare, in the Milky Way….more
-NYT
Rainer Weiss, Who Gave a Nod to Einstein and the Big Bang, Dies at 92 Rainer Weiss, who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for developing a device that uses gravity to detect intergalactic events, like black holes colliding, and who helped confirm two central hypotheses about the universe: the Big Bang theory of how and when it began and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92….more
-NYT
Uranus Was Hiding a Moon Outside Its Rings The space around Uranus just got a bit more crowded. On Tuesday, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope announced the discovery of a moon orbiting around the pale blue ice giant, bringing its total number of satellites to 29. The latest addition, tentatively known as S/2025 U1, is tinier and fainter than any of the planet’s….more
-NASA
NASA IXPE’s ‘Heartbeat Black Hole’ Measurements Challenge Current Theories An international team of astronomers using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), has challenged our understanding of what happens to matter in the direct vicinity of a black hole. With IXPE, astronomers can study incoming X-rays and measure the polarization, a property of light that describes the direction of its electric field….more
-NASA
NASA’s Hubble Uncovers Rare White Dwarf Merger Remnant An international team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic rarity: an ultra-massive white dwarf star resulting from a white dwarf merging with another star, rather than through the evolution of a single star. This discovery, made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s sensitive ultraviolet observations, suggests these rare white dwarfs may be more common than previously suspected…more
-NASA
NASA’s Apollo Samples, LRO Help Scientists Forecast Moonquakes As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon’s south polar region for the first time ever during the Artemis III mission, scientists are working on methods to determine the frequency of moonquakes along active faults there. Faults are cracks in the Moon’s crust that indicate that the Moon is slowly shrinking as its interior cools over time. The contraction from shrinking causes the faults to move suddenly,….more
It’s Mid-Summer in AAAP. Enjoying your “summer vacation” in Jersey or other exotic destination?It’s been a good stretch of weather for nature and green plants around here in central Jersey. That’s a favorable trade-off from last fall when overly dry weather and drought was inescapable even though the skies were often clear. So, have you found an opportunity during the brief episodes of clear skies this summer to do any telescopic observing? Have you tried your hand at celestial-terrestrial photography with the Milky Way this summer? DSLRs, and cell phones such as the iPhone with night-mode setting, can capture the night sky with landscape surprisingly well, especially on vacation at a darker sky location. What have you discovered that is new to you, about the stars and the natural world and the cosmos? What deeper questions arise in your mind as you go about your life with family, friends, work, and daily activities? Sharing those thoughts, questions, and ideas about astronomy and physics is the raison d’etre for our club! You can read about one of my projects with the color of stars below.
Here’s some good news for the club: the electrical cable problem has been repaired at Washington Crossing Observatory. The permit was granted by the state and the professional electrician we hired completed the job in mid-July. We now await only final inspection and “flipping the switch” by JCP&L. I’d like to especially thank Michael Mitrano for relentlessly staying on top of the permitting and finding the electrician. Also, a big thanks go to Dave Skitt for troubleshooting the problem and working to get it fixed, and providing an AC generator to power the observatory in the interim.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Launching the New AAAP Website (beta). The AAAP is ready to launch a new, completely re-designed website. While our current website has been effective and offers a classic feel, its origins go back to the mid-90’s with various updates along the way. Changes in coding, formats, and approaches for modern websites prompted this upgrade, along with a desire for increased capabilities for club activities, security, and member usefulness. With this in mind, we are now launching the AAAP new website as beta version. Members may access the new site at the URL address below. Please note the site is not yet fully populated with content, hence the beta-designation. Some of the new members’ features and expanded capabilities of the website will require a log-in (for security), and guidance will be provided to members in the near future. We’ll keep the original site going in parallel till around September. In the meantime, we ask you to access the new site and begin to feel your way around. In September we will review feedback and offer tips on using the new site. https://www.princetonastronomy.org/beta/
Major thanks go to the website development committee: Jeff Pinyan, Mike DiMario, Gene Allen, Debbie Mayes, and Surabhi Agarwal. In particular I and the Board thank Jeff for his skilled work and time and effort put into actually creating the website.
How to Really See the Colors in the Stars. The sense of color in the stars by naked eye is subjective and often subtle. But color is an important property that relates to fundamental physics of the stars. In the scheme developed by astronomy, the letter sequence “OBAFGKM”, designates the stellar types from bluest/hottest to reddest/coolest. Mostly due to the expense and complexity of spectroscopes applied to telescopes, it’s been difficult and a bit arcane to get into amateur astro-spectroscopy. However, at nominal cost a low resolution yet modestly effective diffraction grating (the component that disperses light) with standard 1.25” filter threads is available. This approach works with eyepieces, or better with astro-cameras in a variation on the standard telescope imaging setup. Below are some initial results from my equipment in NJ in early July, using the “Star Analyzer 100” diffraction grating — a 100 lines/mm transmission grating. I attached this in place of filter on my ZWO ASI-071MC camera and 12.5” reflector telescope, with adapter to give about 80mm spacing from grating to sensor (spacing is critical to disperse the spectrum to fit the width of the imaging sensor).
In the panels below, the star is in the left center of the field (the zero-order spectrum) and the colorful first-order spectrum is dispersed to the right of each star. The color patterns and the intensities across the wavelengths of light are related to the composition, temperature, size, and physics and chemistry of the stars. Specialized software can make a graph of intensity vs wavelength (pixel position) from the original FITS image files. Though not shown here, this can reveal dark absorption minima in the spectra, the “fingerprints” of chemical composition.
Shown below are spectra of two of the brightest stars of summer, Vega (blue-white type-A) and Antares (red giant type-M). Differences can be readily seen in the extended red/orange and lesser blue of Antares compared with Vega. The Ring Nebula M57 displays only blue-green and red components in the spectrum, consistent with O-III and H-alpha emissions that we see in astrophotographs (you may recall a similar spectrum of M57 first shown by Bob Vanderbei at AAAP at a meeting a few years ago). This was all from one night in July… many other stars are waiting in the wings to have their true colors revealed!
Director Rex Parker opened the meeting in the NJ State Museum Planetarium at 1930 with 66 attending. He introduced Treasurer Ira Polans who introduced Dr. Jacob Hamer, Assistant Curator of Planetarium Education at the NJ State Museum. He first gave us a brief sky tour then showed a new presentation Spark: The Universe In Us about the creation of elements in stars and various types of stellar explosions. The planetarium program was followed by his talk Tides in the Solar System and Beyond.
A period of questions followed the talk and the meeting was adjourned at 2113.
As of June 11, we have 216 active members. So far in CY2025, renewals number 49 and expirations number 28, giving us a 64% retention rate. We have added 23 new members.
by Ira Polans, Treasurer, treasurer@princetonastronomy.org
The income statement and balance sheet below show the AAAP’s financial results for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2025, and our financial position at the beginning and end of the year.
The AAAP had a $4,813 surplus for the fiscal year. The chart below shows member dues for the past 10 years:
Dues were paid by 197 members during the fiscal year – down slightly from 203 the year before.
Our cumulative reserves are close to $31 thousand, over six years of the association’s expenses at last year’s level.
Following the end of the fiscal year, we have spent over $5,000 in observatory electrical repairs. Even with that, we are in a very strong financial position.
Please let me know if you have any questions about the report.
I am a returning member to the AAAP. My interest in astronomy really never waned but life, as they say, got in the way. And yes the weather has not cooperated, I barely find an opportunity to mow the lawn; so the night skies suffer too.
About a month ago on a visit to the local library on their used books for sale rack, I saw and bought the three volume set of Robert Burnham Jr.’s “Celestial Handbook”. What a pleasure it is to read Robert’s work. From there on, I read a 1997 article by Tony Ortega on Robert Burnham Jr. life. Inspiring but in the end tragic. Then on Burnham’s advice I purchased “Norton’s Star Atlas and Reference Handbook”, the 20th edition of course. And to round out my book purchases I ordered Kepple & Sanner’s “The Night Sky Observer’s Guide” volumes 1, 2 & 3.
I guess I can’t claim to be much of an amateur astronomer having only now read Burnham or Norton! Oh and for further inspiration I am halfway through Emily Lebesque’s “The Last Stargazers”. A great book. In addition to reading I have been making trips to the New Jersey Planetarium in Trenton for lectures. That’s it for now.
In the Andes mountains in Chile, a new telescope has captured the first light and produced the first pictures. It is exciting new technology. The pictures are equally exciting as well. Whenever a new telescope comes up, either on the earth and in space, a question comes to my mind as to how is this telescope different from others ? Is it just technology to make pictures sharper or does it represent a whole different paradigm shift ? Rubin Telescope is clearly defining a new paradigm in observation and data capture.
The Rubin Telescope is named for astronomer Vera Rubin who contributed significantly to the area of dark matter. The primary mirror itself is not larger than any of the existing telescopes. At 8.4 meters wide, the captured light is focused on to the most powerful camera ever built. The camera is the size of a small car and its CCD (Charge Couple Device) based sensors can capture 3.2 giga pixels (or 3.2 billion pixels or picture elements) in one shot.
Rubin is very maneuverable to swing around the sky to take shots of different locations every 40 seconds. To reduce the weight, a small portion of the primary mirror acts as a tertiary mirror. The picture given below, courtesy NSF-DOE, shows the optical design of the telescope. Light is coming from top to the primary mirror at the bottom. The reflected light goes to the secondary mirror at the top. The light then bounces back to a small area of the primary mirror called the tertiary mirror. Next it bounces to the middle of the picture to be caught by the CCD sensors.
The location in the Andes mountains is very remote and away from the main electric grid. The energy required to start and stop the telescope is stored in electrical capacitors and then quickly released again, a similar principle to storing solar and wind energy in batteries and then using it later.
Rubin scans the whole sky every three days. It comes back to the same location in the next cycle. The stars do not change, but the planets and asteroids do move. For the objects which do not move, the second picture reinforces the first picture taken three days earlier. A cumulative image of the distant objects gets built in each cycle in a process called “coadding”. By the end of Rubin’s ten year lifespan, the coadding process will generate images with as much detail as a typical Hubble image, but over the entire southern sky. And in frequencies including near infrared, visible and ultraviolet ranges.
The path the telescope takes to scan the sky each night is fixed each night over its expected ten year lifespan. There is no catering to individual astronomical studies like it is done for other telescopes where astronomers request for time to point the telescope to a specific object. Instead all the astronomers the world over will have the opportunity to study the huge amounts of data already collected by the Telescope.
The extraordinary amount of data collected (20 tera bytes each night) poses an information technology challenge. A 600-gigabit fiber connection has been laid from the mountain to La Serena, the closest town. From there, a dedicated 100-gigabit line and a backup 40-gigabit line connect to the Department of Energy’s network in the US. The computers at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) will process this data by filtering out all the streaks produced by passing satellites and smudges generated by cosmic rays hitting the camera sensors. Then the software will compare the scene with a template that combines at least three earlier observations of the same part of the sky. The processed data is made available to nine outside organizations known as data brokers. These automated software systems will perform additional analysis, pull out data of interest to astronomers all over the world. It will also identify interesting events that require follow-up observations by other telescopes.
Earlier, Vera Rubin discovered that the outer parts of galaxies are rotating too fast to be accounted for by the visible matter. It is suspected that “dark matter” exists as outer halos around the galaxies. The Rubin Telescope will study dark matter using a technique called “gravitational lensing”. As light from distant galaxies travels to earth, the light bends (as per Einstein’s General theory of relativity) due to the dark matter on the way. By measuring how much the light is bent, astronomers can create a map of dark matter’s distribution.
Another “dark” twin is the dark energy which indicates how fast our universe is expanding. Rubin will study dark energy with high-resolution glimpses of Type Ia supernovas. These are standard candles which show how far a galaxy is from us. By determining the red shift (shifting of the light towards lower frequencies as the source receedes away from us) of each standard candle, we get a measure of the dark energy which is driving our universe apart.
One of the first pictures, courtesy NSF-DOE, is shown below. It contains the Virgo cluster of galaxies, including two spiral galaxies (lower right) and three merging galaxies (upper right).
We are capturing so much light to study the “dark” secrets of our universe. The extra-ordinary camera and the unprecedented computer and communications network make Rubin very valuable for astronomers all over the world. As one astronomer mentioned, we are entering the era of “astro-cinematography”. The telescope was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (DOE). Will the name of the Telescope and the funding for day to day operations survive the current political climate ?
Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton 