Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton

by Ted Frimet

carmen sandiego ?

A few months ago, AAAP Program Chair, Ira Polans, invited Dr. James Lowenthal of Smith College to lecture our club on a Tuesday night, in Princeton. Dr. Lowenthal wooed us with his Hubble Space Telescope (HST) time, and his nascent discovery of multiple gravitational lensing events. I am especially indebted to Dr. Lowenthal for taking the time, and for extending an invitation to peruse his name, on open source images. All of which can be found as a MAST data retrieval request from, the archival hot seat at STSCI.

If you go back a few issues, and re-visit Fiddle-Dee-Dee (https://princetonastronomy.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/fiddle-dee-dee/)
you will find our first attempt to colorize HST images.

Now that time permits, post lecture of course, we visit, however contritely, three images produced by the progeny of of Dr. Lowenthal’s space telescope time.

Below is a reprint of HST Proposal 8191, obtained from
http://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?id=8191&mission=hst
last visited on July 7, 2018

We propose deep WFPC2 imaging and STIS slitless spectroscopy of two of our ultra-deep VLA fields. Those 4- and 6-cm maps have 1-Sigma levels of 3 and 11 Mu-Jy, respectively, comparable to VLA observations of the HDF, and show 14 and 9 sources in statistically complete samples. Keck spectroscopy and imaging to B, R, I ~26.5 have identified most of the sources as compact, luminous starbursting and interacting galaxies at redshifts z es1; about 25 at z>1.5. Our goals here are: {1} identify the remaining sources; {2} pinpoint regions of star formation; {3} quantify the incidence of interaction using spatially-resolved kinematics; {4} quantify morphologies; and {5} constrain the evolution of these faintest of radio sources. Only the HDF and one other field have such deep VLA, HST, and Keck data, and there is strong evidence that field-to-field variations are significant. WFPC2 images with F814 will provide the resolution needed to measure morphologies on sub-kpc scales, identify interaction- induced star-formation, and distinguish AGN from non-AGN components. Slitless spectroscopy with STIS will reveal faint emission-line sources invisible in our Keck images and will provide spatially-resolved kinematics, necessary to disentangle the star forming components in interacting systems. The VLA fields extend over some 8 min each, so both WFPC2 and STIS can be used simultaneously.

Giddy with the tedious nature of the above abstract proposal, we ventured forth, with the good doctor’s permission, to colorize some, if not all of his open source material. It is in the spirit of this good old graphic digital designers intent; an attempt to highlight what may not have been visible in the plain, and very ordinary black and white deep field HST images, for our lecturers intended purpose.

Clearly, what you are about to view are not the many-color girded view of HST deep space photographs. It is, however, the result of combining three very well related images that represent the gravitational lensing effects that Dr. Lowenthal was studying. It is noteworthy and memorially correct to note, here, that Dr. Lowenthal discovered more gravitational lensing effects, than any other well placed study, in recent memory. I could further enhance the image to produce a self-evident Einstein Ring. However, that would be as mischievous as the HST graphic artist painting an UV emitting White Dwarf, well, white!

So, without further adieu, here is my first, and probably last attempt at false-coloring Hubble Deep Space, highly luminous, and strongly lensed sub-millimeter galaxies. All source images used are public release in the Mikowsky archives, with study done by Dr. James Lowenthal.

red channel:
O5G101010
RA (J2000) 08 44 44.043
Dec (J2000) +44 31 58.56
start time 2001-01-25 14:58:28
end time 2001-01-25 15:05:52
exposure time 400.000

green channel:
O5G102010
08 44 43.981
+44 31 59.91
2001-01-22 11:24:44
2001-01-22 11:32:08
400.000

blue channel:
O5G103010
08 44 44.149
+44 32 00.79
2001-01-27 10:24:56
2001-01-27 10:32:20
400.000

Each frame was “centered-on” in Photoshop, and a minor curve was applied

Further credit to:

Papers related to proposal id:
The morphology of nine radio-selected faint galaxies from deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging — Roche, Nathan D. et al 2002MNRAS.337..840R

Here are the three “untouched” images:

And here is our composite graphic:

by Ted Frimet

Blazing Saddles!

Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.

In the Verge(1), Loren Grush reports neutrino detection from a Blazar, as does author Daniel Clery in this weeks Science(2).

Good articles, easy to read and learned a pant-lode.

I took a great deal of notes, from the D. Clery write-up, and wanted to get an input on the below. So I scrambled this write up, and posted to my Google+ Astronomy hang-out. So far, no taker on my commentary or question. I suspect that, unlike the multi-messenger service provided to the likes of Blazar identification, and neutrino co-relation, my flaring source of “irridium” will take the slower, anthropoetic observers trail.

Okay. Anthropoetic. I just made that up. So I better come up with some Anthro-poetry, post-haste!

Look out the window and what do you see
A bird, a bee, and a reflection of me

I might need to reconnect with an Astrophysicist or two. Neutrino astronomy is making me daffy! Would someone step up to the plate and recommend one for me? I am being left with the confounded notion that high energy gamma ray producers are knocking head and tails against cosmic rays, accelerating them to evolve to high-energy neutrinos. The likes of up to 400 GeV.

Has Blazar TXS 0506+056 been co-related with IceCube-170922A at 290 GeV ? Despite the alert, and crucial observations across a broad range of wavelengths, a 5-sigma has not been established. Clery reports that IceCube and other observers agree on a one in 740 chance. Still looking for love in the all the wrong places? Scientists will require a confirmation at 1 in 3,500,000 probability for other than coincidence.

Daniel writes, “If the IceCube team is right, blazars could be the first confirmed source of these cosmic rays”. I am pretty sure he was referring to this specific neutrino detection. Or at least, I was hopeful. Although, I didn’t “feel it”. Hence this essay.

Because the different parts of my brain, have a jitter pattern that is unparalleled in all of neuroscience, you know that didn’t sit quite right in ye crawl space. Forgive me my rant, as I recall a Princeton lecture, hosted by our club, given by Dr Jia Liu.

The talk was given on September 13, 2016 at 7:30PM in Peyton Hall on the Princeton University campus. Titled, “Neutrinos: Their discovery, detection, and future prospects” by Princeton University Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Jia Liu.

I commiserated, this past Friday night, as I substituted on Team One observation duty, with fellow Amateur Astronomer, Thomas Swords. Tom pointed out how our lectures eventually reinforce a knowledge base and understanding for more recent developing events. He was so, spot on!

In her lecture, Dr Liu taught us about the three flavors of neutrinos that evening, long ago, and spoke of the many detectors, then in place. It prompted my to poke a little further, and stir my memory. More jitters.

In his compositional essay, co-editor S. Prasad Ganti, writes:

The “Kamiokande detector in Japan, also known as Super K, detected the first neutrinos from outside of the solar system from the 1987A supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located 160,000 light years away. Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba,the Director of Super K, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002.”(3)

Am I off base, in suggesting that Clery might have been more precise writing: “the first confirmed source of these cosmic rays from a blazar”. I am nit-picking. Am I not? Or did the Super K team not confirm the the first neutrino detection, from outside our Milky Way?

I could yield to the Neutrino Antarctic detector IceCube and the confirmation by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. No yielding, unless I feel it. And I am not getting that warm fuzzy feeling. Not just yet. Especially so, when a summary reporting author over looked the Super K.

In the Dalai Lama’s ideation there are three types of wisdom (4). We have already surpassed the first stage of hearing, or reading. As of the time of this essay, I have placed us at the second stage, immersed with the constant familiarity of a topic. Have we arrived, finally at the third stage? Are we able to feel it?

When you feel it, let me know. I don’t want to be out in the cold, during the next confirmed Antarctic light show. I want to believe. Really, believe. Though, Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.

1. Grush, L. (2018, July 12). Astronomers trace the source of a high-energy particle that slammed into Earth. Retrieved July 22, 2018, from https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17556052/icecube-observatory-high-energy-neutrino-blazar-supermassive-black-hole

   Finding the birthplace of a deep-space neutrino

2. Clery, D. (2018, July 13). Ice reveals a messenger from a blazing galaxy. Science, 361(6398), 115-116.

   This is an in-depth news story review of research articles pp. 146-147 lbid

3. Ganti, S. P. (2016, January 15). Neutrinos and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. Retrieved July 22, 2018, from https://princetonastronomy.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/neutrinos-and-the-2015-nobel-prize-in-physics/

   Prasad is the current co_editor of the Sidereal Times, The official publication of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton

4. Gyatso, T. (1988). The Path to Tranquility (R. Singh, Ed.). New York, NY: Penguin Compass. p284. His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Daily Wisdom

by Ted Frimet

man bites dog

There comes a time in every amateur astronomers life, when they have to come to terms with real astronomy. I used to be fond of saying, from time to time, that “real men eat quiche”. Now-a-days, I am fine tuning my hind-brain to accommodate a phrase, “real amateur astronomers understand what makes a cepheid variable, variable”.

Too long? Yeah, I get that all the time. In a Dale Carnegie course, I was taught to make it simpler, smaller, and with fewer words. How about, “helium sucks light”? That might be more akin to “man bites dog”. For Astronomers, anyway, it entices you to read on. Where is Hubble, when you really need him? Probably lurking in the shadows of my discontent, stroking along with Schroedinger’s cat. Meow.

At one or more points in time, over the last two years, I managed to get confused between type 1A supernovas and Cepheid variables. I know, I know – “how is that even possible”, you ask? It is because in the ven diagram of my mind, I see them both as astronomical distance measurement tools. And now, sitting down to one, or the other, to study, I choose to make short work of the cepheid variable. I do this, because I don’t want to visit fermi pressures on compressed star matter before it nova’s. It is simply not in my wheel house, this fine Fourth of July morning. You know, on second thought, a nova is more akin to galactic fireworks display. And truth be told, it is simply more like fireworks, to me.

However, today I am in a particularly gaffy mood. I have not been able to coordinate two telescopes for a parallax study. Hence, I am not entirely pumped up for a fireworks display. And this is to your benefit, as we get to get a closer look into not what a cepheid variable is, but the more pedantic reason as to the how, or why the light intensity is periodic in the first place. And when we’re done, please do not think the lesser of me, when I suggest, now, that Cepheid Variables are reminiscent of first light in the Universe. Oh, come on now! Keep an open mind for my cat’s’ sake?

I started to draw upon reference to laboratory exercises, on Cepheid Variables and the Cosmic Distance Scale (1). And within their reprint, lurking on a page, I find Shapley’s Calibration. A formula of M = m + 5 – 5 log d. I can’t express my happiness in finding such consolation in a mathematical formulae. That is, having used it, previously in magnitude calculations essays’ of old, it is like stumbling across an old friend. I never knew that math could be that way. I understand, at least from the froth of a good cup of coffee, why professional mathematicians get all gawky eyed. Like adolescents at their first dance party, they see and appreciate simple quantifications.

I’ve read the article, and didn’t want to mess up the virgin grid, provided in the fold-out. Hence, I didn’t forge forward to Baades’ Calibration. Frankly, I didn’t want to get further distracted by how the early distances to Andromeda were poorly estimated. I recall, from recent memory, how I’ve been off by more than 20 percent, in my own error. (Ok, for those of you that remember my early asteroid VT calculations, it had more error than our ancestral astronomers, not named above.) And why should I drag you to the depths of our earliest primordial history, too? Instead, let’s hop over to “The Universe Around Us”, by Sir James Jeans.

Sir Isaac Newtown, gave us gravity with an explanation left to the likes of Einstein, 228 years later. Sir James, it appears, went the same route. “Whatever their mechanisms may be [cepheid variables], observation shews that these stars possess a certain definite property, which proves to be of the utmost value.” (2) Published September 1929, perhaps we are making some progress, as our musing are now only 90 years apart? The Universe(s) may be vast, and the study of its Cosmology appears to us in the blink of an eye. Two shakes of a lambs tail? A blink of thine eye? No, just kidding. Almost a century passes us by, and still it falls upon the shoulders of the amateur to breach the dam, bypass the scholastic, and come to the point! If ye be bored, tarry here, no more. I’ve got more interstellar molasses to wade thru, before I blow up my birthday balloon.

It is a tantalizing read, that is, on the light curves of variables. Especially so, when I muse out loud, “As we go from the ultraviolet to the red end of the spectrum for any particular Cepheid, the light curves flatten out, indicating that the range of variation in luminosity is much wider in the ultraviolet than it is in the infrared” (3). Ah, music to my ears, a delight to the mind to read. Almost, we get the tantalizing taste of a spectrum of color, from the less human visuals of ultraviolet (bugs be damned, as they can sense UV quite well!) to the lovely warm cloaca of infrared. And as we stumble across the work of A.H. Joy, on the interesting characteristic of the period of W Virginis stars (2 to 75 days – ibid p214), a probability occurs to that author. That some “material” is going thru an expansion and contraction. Oh, so close! So close, indeed.

As I peruse The AAVSO Variable Star Atlas (4), a tome, titled, “Sky and Telescope”, pops out onto my table, before me. Ever so hopeful to study matter, over time. Mattei, Mayer and Baldwin, bring to my attention that more than 25,000 stars are variable. (as of the time of their editing, circa 1980). And their time scales ranged from fewer than minutes to centuries. I would be remiss not sharing with you my opinion, that time does not matter, here. That the curtain of gas, that periodically hides the light from my telescope, is what is of importance. Here, it is matter, and not time that I seek. And what is that, which matters most? How do I find it? Do we set the stage, and let Shakespeare determine both our entrance and exit? Let us move to the beginning, and bring to life the Boatswain. He sweeps us aside during the tempest, and conveys that we have enough room to run around the storm!

I crawl from under the weight of my books, my tempest, and key into Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_variable (5). It’s author(s), brings to light so simply that it is the veil of Helium that obscures our light. That during the due course of ionizing helium, the ionized gas becomes opaque, even more so, when both electrons are stripped off. The trapping of heat, that is an increase in temperature, causes an expansion. And with this expansion comes a subsequent cooling; it becomes less ionized, permitting contraction, and allowing starlight to escape. It is known as the Eddington Valve (or kappa-mechanism).

I leave you with the pedantic solution we agreed upon, at the beginning, where I suggested that Helium sucks light. If you were to stay the course, with me, to this point – I shall now beg your forgiveness over the time-length of the essay, as the books, were truly so heavy that they imbued their own gravitational effect and were a cause of space-time dilation. Just ask Einstein.

Citations and References:

1) Pasachoff, J. M., & Goebel, R. W. (1979). Laboratory Exercises in Astronomy – Cepheid Variables and the Cosmic Distance Scale. In Reprinted from Sky and Telescope (pp. 241-244). Cambridge, MA: Sky Publishing. p243 referenced, in the essay.
2) Jeans, J. (1934). The Universe Around Us p62 (3rd ed.). NY: The MacMillan Company.
Sir James Jeans, M.A., D.Sc., Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S.
3) Motz, L., & Duveen, A. (1967). Essentials of Astronomy. p415, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
4) Scovil, C. E., & Robinson, L. J. (1980). The AAVSO Variable Star Atlas (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Sky Publ., with The “Sky and Telescope” Guide to the Heavens, Edited by Leif J. Robinson, Sky Publishing Corporation, 1980.
5) Cepheid variable. (2018, June 27). Retrieved July 4, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_variable. detail: Smith, D. H. (1984). “Eddington’s Valve and Cepheid Pulsations”. Sky and Telescope. 68: 519. Bibcode:1984S&T….68..519S. Eddington’s Valve and Cepheid Pulsations Smith, D. H. Abstract. Please note: No abstract found. Publication Sky and Telescope, Vol. 68, NO. 6/DEC, P.519, 1984 Pub Date: December 1984 Bibcode 1984S&T….68..519S