Badlands

As hot as it will get here next week in southeast Michigan, it won't feel like it did this day of the Big Hike. Toasty, crispy warm with a breeze that drew the sweat right out of your skin. We hiked straight up the crumbling clay, down again and then marched along the open dry plain, watching for rattlers and cacti, wondering how long the hike really would be, and wondering if our spare water jugs would still be somewhere south of boiling in the minivans.

They weren't. This was the day Allison and I gave our paper on the K-T boundary. After the Hike. After the seeming endless trek into hot winds, dry grasses and astoundingly desolate landscape.




We managed to recover our wits in the five minute drive to the spot where we could see the K-T boundary. This is the famous edge of life, the time spanning the age of the Dinosaurs, ammonites and about 65% of other species on earth. Above the K-T boundary, there are no dinosaur bones. There are no ammonites, there are no psauropods. All gone.



So what do we find in the K-T boundary? Weird stuff, mixed with a more-than-normal amount of the rare element Iridium. Ir is related to platinum, and it's that rare. Not so rare in outer space, however, and it is most likely that the relatively copious amounts of that element found in the K-T boundary is from outer space. Aliens? No, asteroids. Is that what killed the dinosaurs? A giant wad of stone and dust from outer space? It's possible. Asteroid collisions do nasty things to the earth.

I love the earth!

The little white thing you see in the crumbling clay is a deer's butt.

Look what else the earth looks like!


Here's what it looks like on the inside!



It was nice and cool in the cave. Yes, that's me wearing a flannel shirt. I was glad I brought it to South Dakota in July. Though it was in the high 90s outside, it was in the 50s in Rushmore Cave. I prefer the 90s, but that's just me.



Later on...



I was teaching everyone the "Happy George, Sad George" trick with a dollar bill. Luckily Jay had the whole gamut of bills in his wallet so we continued on in the same manner with Hamilton, Jackson, and Grant...what fun. It was even more fun watching Rachel laugh everytime we did it! Jay even had Ben Franklin! Go Jay- drinks all around!

Not fun: Dr. Murray handing me the van keys bright and early the next morning. First shift? Sweet.

Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing

7/30/06 – 8/5/06

By C. Zaitz

I looked at the Sun recently. I didn’t just glance, I stared at it. It wasn’t the mellow, orangey red, romantic looking sunset sun, it was the real deal. It was hot, bright, and burning high up in the noontime sky. I of all people should know better, but I couldn’t help myself. I was walking along the beach in Port Austin. There were high stratocirrus clouds covering the sky, but they were silky and see-through. They were transparent enough to create a gorgeous full circle or halo around the sun. I had sunglasses clipped over my regular glasses, but that’s no excuse. It’s just plain bad to look at the sun.

The sun halo was very striking. I looked as long as I could until my eyes started to water. Then I noticed a partial rainbow arc underneath the ring. I brushed the tears away and looked as much as I could. I began to notice people looking at me, and heard a whispered, “what’s she looking at?” I realized there were kids around and that I was setting a very bad example. But I kept looking up near the sun until things started to go pale. I knew I should stop, that I could be irreversibly damaging my eyes, but it was such an unusual sight that I kept sneaking looks.

I heard my mother’s voice in my head. “You’d better protect your eyes from the sun or you’ll end up with cataracts like your grandmother.” Yikes. To ease my conscience, I am now going to rant about protecting your eyes from the sun. I’m going to wallow in a hypocritical pool for one whole paragraph.

Eye damage is cumulative, like skin damage from UV rays. Eye lens cells are never replaced, so each time you expose them to the sun, you’re chipping away at your vision. You can’t see the damaging rays, and they don’t even hurt. When your eyes water, it’s more from the sheer amount of light trying to enter your eyes as your pupils try to shut down quickly. However, the damage really occurs when the ultraviolet rays enter your pupils. You can get cataracts and eye cancer from sun exposure, and it’s never too early to protect kids from the sun’s damage. Don’t be fooled by the kiddie sunglasses, either- make sure they have 100% UV protection. I most likely gave myself a bit of “sun blindness” or photokerititis from looking at or near the sun, and while the white-out effect goes away, the damage remains. I will most likely get cataracts, if I live long enough. No one will cry for me either, since I am admitting freely that I did a bad, bad thing.

That night, I looked up into the post-sun sky and saw three satellites overhead. They were moving at about the same speed like a small armada. Then I saw a meteor slash through the Summer Triangle. I was glad to have recovered my vision. I kicked myself for being so foolhardy with something so precious. I’ve had fairly bad vision my whole life, and you’d think I’d be more careful about protecting what I can. From now on I will. I promise, Mom.

Besides the distant stars, you can still see Jupiter in the evening. He is still King of the Evening, the brightest thing other than the Moon in the southern night sky. Venus can be seen around 5:30 am in the eastern sunrise.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

WHFR

I have an interview on WHFR, a local station this morning at 10:20-ish AM. You can stream it at http://whfr.fm. I'll be talking about the planetarium and education. I have all sorts of thoughts about it. I hope they come out in English.
Update: you can listen to the podcast on their website.

Somewhere in Time

7/23/06 – 7/29/06

by C. Zaitz

A single glance at the night sky can transport you back in time. The stars are very far away, and their light takes time to travel to us. Even the bright, steady light from Jupiter takes about a half hour to reach us. Starlight can take hundreds or even thousands of years to reach us. I realize that on the scale of our galaxy, which is what we see when we look at the night sky, a human lifetime is pretty short. But my recent week-long foray into geology of the Badlands and the Black Hills of South Dakota and Devil’s Tower in Wyoming left me feeling downright ephemeral. I was looking at rock formations billions of years old. I use the word “billions” all the time when talking about numbers of stars or distances to far away galaxies. But touching rocks that had been buried for billions of years and are now exposed and blowing away in the wind was something different.

The Earth is old, about 4.5 billion years old. The Badlands aren’t quite that old. About 70 million years ago, the rising Rocky Mountains and Black Hills dusted the lands to the east with sediments and sands. Back then the whole middle part of North America was covered with a warm, shallow sea. The sea grew and shrank over time. Dead sea creatures and dust built up layers of limestone, sandstone and clay sediments. Then, a few million years ago, the area of the Badlands began to rise, exposing 70 million year old sediment layers to the wind and rain. Once the clay and sand layers were dissected by rivers, the erosion process took over and created the incredible display of “badlands” that we see today. Hidden in the soft clays are fossilized bones of creatures that used to roam the Earth, such as the gigantic-headed Triceratops and three-toed horses that were smaller than Great Danes.

The granite intrusions of the Black Hills and Devil’s Tower are even older. They are Pre-Cambrian, at least 570 million years old, most likely over a billion years old. But some of the oldest rocks I touched were in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The pink quartzite found there used to be sand 2 billion years ago. Time, tide and great pressure and heat formed the sand into rock. The rock was hidden for billions of years by layers of sediments, and now has been exposed to the elements through erosion.
Some of the quartzite ended up in the local roads, giving them a particularly curious deep pink color. Both the quartzite and the gas we were combusting in the mini van have been hidden deep in the earth for ages, but now we’re using these resources up in a matter of decades.

I touched some really old rocks, but the Moon showed us the most ancient rocks we can see. I was annoyed at Luna for spilling her light over the night sky all week long. She washed out any chance of seeing a dark star-lit sky. But the 4 billion year old surface of the Moon reminded me of how old things are, and how we are just here briefly, somewhere in a long continuum of time.

The class was taught by Dr. Murray of the University of Michigan at Dearborn. It was an excellent class, and has forever changed the way I look at rocks. And now I don’t feel so old anymore!

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.

Close Knit Stars

7/9/06 – 7/15/06

I love to knit. I learned to knit at Mount Holyoke* College. If you say it fast, it sounds like “Mentally Ill College.” At least that’s what I thought when they called to accept me. I hesitated until I realized who it really was. Mt. Holyoke had a January term, where you could spend a month goofing off, learning to knit, or taking an internship somewhere like Nantucket Island at the Maria* Mitchell Observatory, plotting the light curves of a variable star called DL Cas in the constellation Cassiopeia. I chose the latter. I had already learned to knit watching Moonlighting on Thursday nights with the girls in Ham Hall.

On Nantucket I lived on hot dogs and sauerkraut, shivered along the frozen beaches of a deserted resort island, and studied glass photographic plates of a variable star. The big question I was there to solve: was the “light curve” (its dimming and brightening pattern) of this star changing or remaining stable. Plot after plot, I couldn’t conclude that the light curve was changing. How unsatisfactory. I read my article in the A.A.V.S.O. recently and I didn’t understand half the stuff I wrote. It sounded like a big non-issue.

But it is an issue. Many stars are somewhat variable for a few reasons. Supergiant stars sometimes get brighter and dimmer because they are huge and are shrinking or expanding, trying to survive by “burning” whatever they have left in them after hundreds of millions of years of hydrogen fusion, holding out against the inevitable crushing force of gravity. These are called Cepheid stars, and it has been found that the period of variability of these stars is directly related to how bright they are. Once you find a star’s period, you can figure out its distance by knowing its intrinsic brightness. Thus these stars act as celestial rulers in figuring out distances to objects.

Other stars have different excuses for being variable. Two stars can be knit together with gravity like those mittens held together by a cord. One star might be a medium sized star like the sun, but it might be in orbit with a massive star or a shrunken dwarf star. If it happens that a double star system is at the right angle, we can see the bright star dim for a few hours or even days as the companion star passes in front of it, blocking some of its light.

If you’d like to see a beautiful double star system, find the three stars of the Summer Triangle. The most northwestern star is called Deneb. If you look closely you can trace the shape of a cross, with Deneb at the top. The bottom of the cross is in the middle of the triangle, and is a “star” called Albireo. Through a small telescope, you’ll actually see two stars. One is a brilliant blueish star, and the other actually looks golden. Even though I didn’t go to U of M, I can appreciate the beauty of those two colors next to each other. (Sorry State alums, there are no green stars!) These close knit stars are one of the many beautiful sights to see this summer.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

(* - pronounced “Whole-Yoke”, and Maria rhymes with pariah. If the representative had pronounced Mt. Holyoke correctly, I wouldn’t have thought the funny farm was calling for me…)

Who Cares?

7/2/06 – 7/8/06

By C. Zaitz

My husband and I have a little motorboat called "Who Cares?" We bought it from an older gentleman who was suffering with Alzheimer’s Disease. By the time in life he was ready to sell the boat, his ongoing mantra was, “who cares?” We don’t have the heart to change it. But every time I see “Who Cares?” on the back of the boat, I wonder about that phrase. I suppose he was frustrated at the inevitability of things.

The Ensign Planetarium will be having Summer Astro Camp again this year. The junior camp, for grades k- 4, will go from 9am-12pm July 24-26. For grades 3-10, the camp runs July 31- August 4th. The younger campers will be hearing and seeing Native American stories and explanations of nature, along with our scientific views of how things work. We’ll look at the sky and tell stories and make lots of projects to take home. The second week of camp is all about our solar system, its planets and moons, and some crazy things that happen to them like volcanoes, earthquakes and asteroid collisions. We’ll have fun demonstrations and more great projects to take home.

Sadly, Astro Camp will be the last program here at the Ensign Planetarium. The district is feeling the effects of Michigan’s economy and the lack of support for education that districts all over the state have been feeling for several years now. The loss of my job effects me and my family, but the loss of the Ensign Planetarium affects not only the district, but a far wider community of Metro Detroit and Windsor including pre-k through college students and everyone else who has ever been inspired by the view of something larger and grander than we see on an everyday basis, namely, the Cosmos.

The year 2008 would have marked the 40th year of operation for the planetarium. In 1968, when the planetarium opened, our nation cared very much about finding ways to inspire children to go into math, engineering and space sciences. We were in a fierce race with the Soviet Union to get to the Moon. The National Defense Education Act was passed in 1958 for the direct purpose of aiding schools in their quest toward educating youth, and the money that built this place came from those funds and that quest. We did get to the Moon first, and we have become the most powerful and technological nation on the planet. While that does not guarantee our survival, I do think that inspiring kids to be engineers, scientists, designers and thinkers can only help our nation stay strong. I am sorry that the demise of the Ensign Planetarium is just one event in a continuum of changing values in education. As we homogenize and standardize our children’s education, sometimes we leave out room for creative thought, for different ways of learning, and most importantly, we find we have no room left for the inspirations that lead children to be lifelong learners. In short, we no longer value wonderful, special places like a planetarium.

I would like to thank everyone in the community who has ever come to a show or listened to their kids talk about their trip to the planetarium. I hope that some time in the future the planetarium will once again live and breathe, and inspire future generations to be educated and wonder about their universe. Because I do care, very, very much.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view! (And send the wee ones to Astro Camp!)

Dive In!

6/25/06 – 7/1/06

by C. Zaitz

We've passed the Summer Solstice, so now it's official. Let the brief Michigan summer begin! Hurry- we've only got about 14 weeks before we have to start bringing in the lawn furniture again. So find a lake and dive in!

People who don't live around the Great Lakes probably don't know that they are like freshwater oceans. You cannot see the other side, as you do in most inland lakes. You can travel for miles and miles and never see a bit of land. They are huge. They can be deep. And you can certainly get lost in them.

I recently bought a snorkeling set from Target. I wanted to see what was at the bottom of the lake. It's like a whole universe I hadn't explored yet. I was very excited to try them out- the mask, the breathing tube, and the flippers for the feet. I'm sure there's a technical term for them, but it amuses me to call them flippers. I had been cautioned by a friend not to put them all on at once, so I started with the mask. Ah!

Have you ever looked through a telescope? The first time you do, if it's aimed at something cool like Saturn or Jupiter, you get little chills and a jolt to the brain. It's really a planet, not just a bright point of light. It's a planet whose features you can see through the miracle of a telescope. When I first saw the Andromeda Galaxy through a small telescope, the idea that I was looking at a galaxy over two million light years from my eye blew me away. That telescope cost $300. The snorkel set cost $30. But I had a similar chill. It's beautiful under water.

I didn't see a single fish, nor any shells, but the sand was beautifully rippled and there were some interesting looking rocks and a Petosky stone. It was no Caribbean dive trip, but just the idea that I could see this underwater universe was a thrill. Then I tried the flippers, and I felt like James Bond sneaking up to the Disco Volante in Thunderball. The last piece was the breathing tube. Hearing myself breathe was another little jolt. How fragile life is.

How fragile indeed. When I looked into the midnight sky later that eve, I remembered the new universe that had opened up to me earlier, and the older, more familiar one that was above. Yet it was so vast and elusive that one could never really know it in a thousand lifetimes. How many sets of eyes have looked at those stars, at those constellations? In how many tongues had people told each other the stories made up in bursts of inspired tale-telling?

Twelve years ago, Jupiter was in the same spot as it is tonight. That is how long it takes the giant planet to orbit its star. When you see it, because you are bound to see it shining brightly in the early evening, think of the giant planet whose girth could engulf over 1300 earths. It holds enough gravity to shepherd 63 moons and counting, but you'll never really appreciate this giant globe of gas until you see it through a telescope. You'll see its largest faithful moons orbiting, and you may even see some stormy features of this incredible planet. Grab a telescope and dive in.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

The Great Dying

6/18/06 – 6/24/06

by C. Zaitz

Some scientists would rather look down at the ground rather than up at the sky. I’ve never been one to dwell among the dust and rocks, but lately I’ve grown an appreciation for the science of dirt. Here’s why.

Sometimes the sky comes down to earth. A crater found near the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico indicates that a 6 mile wide asteroid or comet hit the earth about 65 million years ago, and not long after, lots of plants and animals died. This was the K-T extinction (Cretaceous (K) and Tertiary (T) periods of geologic history), where about 75% of the world’s species were snuffed out, including the poster-critters of the time, the Dinosaurs.

But there was an even worse extinction in the distant past. About 250 million years ago, nearly 90% of all life on earth was extinguished by some mechanism. The so-called “Great Dying” is also known as the Permian -Triassic (P -T) extinction. When 90% of all life on earth dies, scientists want to know why. Until now, there was no smoking gun, other than the usual suspects of volcanism, plate tectonics, changing climate, etc.

The latest news in “astro-geology” is that the location of the impact of a giant asteroid has just been found. Now we see the smoking gun, and it looks like the bullet was about 30 miles wide! Unfortunately the gun isn’t really smoking anymore- it has had 250 million years to cool. The crater left by the impact is hard to see. Over hundreds of millions of years, the ocean floor has subducted (slid underneath a continent). New ocean floor is created by the upwelling of lava. Therefore, not much of the original impact is left. A 300 mile wide land mass was discovered in East Antarctica by measuring the difference in gravity from one spot to another. Scientists overlaid radar maps of the area and the huge land mass fit inside a circular ridge. There are other suspects, however; massive volcanic eruptions also took place around the P-T boundary. But now geologists can compare and contrast these major extinctions and the factors that may have caused them. It’s pretty safe to say that when giant rocks fall from the sky, things go badly here on earth.

In July I will be heading west to study geology with a small group of college students. We will drive to Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Wyoming: The Badlands, The Black Hills, and Mt. Rushmore. I will be able to see the actual K-T boundary. It’s a visible line in the rocks. There is a high amount of the element iridium in this layer. High amounts of iridium indicate asteroid collision, since normal rocks from earth don’t have as much. Finding high levels of iridium is another smoking gun in the killer-asteroid scenario, and makes a good case for finding ways to prevent space rocks from hitting the earth in the future.

Knowing that rock-scientists don’t have much time to look up, I have elected myself “official night sky guide.” I’m anticipating dark skies so I’m brushing up on the harder-to-find constellations. Maybe we’ll see some meteors. I’ve heard that when you’re out in the wilderness, you can almost hear them burn up. I hope they do burn up. I’ll dig into the earth to see the rocks from space, but I don’t want to be under one when it hits!

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Dead Reckoning

6/11/06 – 6/17/06

C. Zaitz

When I was a teenager I read the entire series of books by C. S. Forester about a 19th century British naval adventurer named Horatio Hornblower. In one story, Horatio had to go for his lieutenant exam and was cramming all the necessary navigation mathematics and trigonometry in his head. Unfortunately, he froze during the examination and was failing. As he stammered out his response, he caught a glimpse of a fire ship- a wooden ship set intentionally on fire to destroy other wooden ships. On instinct he abandoned the exam and valiantly dove into the water, swam to the fiery ship, climbed aboard and steered it to safety, away from the British fleet lying helpless in the harbor. He eventually did make it to lieutenant, and even Admiral, some 10 volumes later.

I have since learned more of the complex navigation about which Horatio was examined. Finding latitude has always been a snap, as long as you can see the North Star, Polaris and have a sextant or angle measuring device handy. It happens that the altitude of Polaris in the sky is equal to your latitude on earth. That is because Polaris lies almost directly over the north pole of the earth. You can prove this to be true with a diagram and a little knowledge of trigonometry. In Dearborn Heights, the height of Polaris in the sky is about 42.3 degrees, and we know that our latitude is 42.3 N. You can get out your sextant tonight and check it out!

However, finding one’s longitude at sea was never an easy feat. To find it you must find the time of your local noon, or when the sun crosses your meridian, and compare it to Greenwich Mean Time. Of course, if you don’t have a watch or a cell phone, neither of which Horatio had, this is difficult. Before the invention of an accurate chronometer in the 1750s, sailors used a technique called Dead Reckoning to find their positions. It was basically a process of extrapolation. If you know how far you’ve gone since your last accurate position, or at least know how fast you’ve traveled and in what direction, you can figure out where you are now or will be in the future. Of course you must correct for wind and waves and human error along the way. Is it any wonder that Columbus’ voyage was a bit hairy?

Nowadays we use satellites in space to accurately find our positions, whether we are out on a boat in Lake Huron or driving from The Heights to Livonia. The Global Positioning System, developed and maintained by the US Department of Defense, uses more than two dozen satellites to send radio signals to anyone with a GPS receiver.

Modern day navigators often use old and new methods to maintain their courses. It’s always handy to have a working knowledge of at least ten or so bright stars in the night sky. All three stars of the summer triangle are considered navigational stars. Planets like Jupiter, though they are bright and easy to find, are not used for navigation, since their position changes noticeably over the course of weeks and months. You can watch Jupiter in Libra all summer, however. His large distance from the sun makes him appear to move slowly in the sky. We can enjoy his bright glow until mid August.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Expecting the Unexpected

6/4/06 – 6/10/06

by C. Zaitz

Have you ever had those nights when you wake up for no apparent reason? I had one the other night, though I have my suspicions about certain pets helping me to consciousness. Once I was up, I wandered outside. The stars were magnificent. I sighed out a breath in awe. The Milky Way sparkled overhead, framed by the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle. Arcturus shone its bright orange light to the west.

I’ve seen this scene a hundred times before. Ever since I learned to recognize the constellations, I’ve known the summer sky. So what drew me out at 3 am to see it? It was the prospect of seeing something I hadn’t seen before. There’s so much to look at; the more you stare, the more you see. The summer sky is much richer than the sky at any other season because we are looking into the heart of the galaxy. Since we are about two thirds of the way from the center of the galaxy, we see the majority of stars as we look in toward the middle. They are so far away, however, that they look like a creamy, blurry swipe of light across the sky. There is also a lot of dust between stars which obscures part of the Milky Way, like dark islands in a sparkling river.

The more you look at the summer sky, the more your eyes play tricks on you. Sometimes I catch a streak of light out of the corner of my eye. Meteors are always an unexpected treat, especially when you happen to be looking at the right part of the sky to see them. The dazzling light is actually plasma, or hot glowing gas, created by the intense friction of falling space dust. The sun is made of plasma, as is lightning. Flames are not. Plasma is much hotter than a campfire; the stuff over which you toast your marshmallows is not in the same league as a plasma trail left by a meteor. It’s the plasma that allows a speck of dust from outer space to catch our eye.

Sometimes the steady motion of a satellite captures my attention as it tumbles across the sky. Invariably, I imagine that at any moment something completely bizarre and alien will come spiraling out of the heavens and prove once and for all that we are not alone. On any given night there are thousands of telescopes aimed at many places in the sky. If the galaxy was teaming with life, we probably would have seen it by now. I imagine aliens would be busily commuting from star to star, but we see no such traffic. Maybe the aliens are sneaky. Maybe they don't have lights on their spaceships.

So far I’ve never seen anything unusual or spooky, but the chance that it could happen, that some flying spaceship or spectacular fire ball could reveal itself to me, keeps me scanning the skies. I’m expecting the unexpected. That’s what draws me out at 3 am, and always has.

We may never find a flying saucer or glimpse an alien up close, but it never hurts to look, and you can watch Jupiter drift across your field of view all night long. If you see Venus in the East, you’ve stayed up all night and it’s time to go make the coffee.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Musings

5/28/06 – 6/3/06

by C. Zaitz

It’s hard to believe that the end of the school year is here. Graduation is upon us, and I’ll have to say goodbye and good luck to many graduating seniors I’ve known since I became the director of the Ensign Planetarium in 2001. Watching them grow and mature from the fun and silly freshman they were to the fun and more thoughtful young adults they are now has been an inspiration to me. I will miss them, but it is a joyous parting as they go explore their worlds and spread their wings. I wish my budding pilot, pastry cook, teacher, engineer etc. much luck and I hope their inspirations grow with their aspirations.

We all have muses- things or people that inspire us. My lovely sophomore friend Jaidaa inspired me to write about good people that come and go in our lives. Billy Joel wrote, “So many people in and out of your life, some will last, some will just be now and then. Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes, I’m afraid it’s time for goodbye again.”

Five years ago Mr. Richard Ensign said goodbye to the planetarium he helped build and take care of for over three decades. He had earned his retirement through years of hard work and passion that he puts into everything he does. I am inspired by him and I am glad to welcome him back on June 7th at 7pm to talk about his favorite things. I’d like to invite the community to come to the Ensign Planetarium in Crestwood High School that night to be inspired by him yourself. I’d also like to invite the community to support your planetarium so that we may continue to educate and inspire future generations of pilots and cooks and teachers and engineers.

In Greek mythology, the Muses had the task of inspiring humanity in the arts and sciences. Urania is the Muse of Astronomy, but also of Astrology and Universal Love. She was also known as a philosopher, and directed men's thoughts skyward, to loftier regions. She is sometimes depicted wearing a billowing blue dress tied with a broad sash covered in constellations. Urania’s name means “heavenly one.” Her name is related to the name of the god of the sky, Ouranos, or heaven, from which the name of the constellation Orion may also be derived. I think it’s interesting that the Muse of Astronomy is also the Muse of Universal Love, because when I look at the sky it makes me breathless with its vast beauty. I think of our planet and of everybody living on it as a connected, beautiful community. I guess it inspires a kind of universal love. Even as we come and go in each other’s lives, there is an ongoing connection between us. Goodbye is just a delayed response to hello, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, the time between goodbye and hello of the sun is getting very short, so we have to stay up late to see the daring duo of Mars and Saturn before they set in the west. Jupiter is up all night, but only early birds will catch a glimpse of the goddess of love, Venus. She’ll be basking in the lovely sunrise as you look out your east facing window.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Rubble Piles

5/21/06 – 5/27/06

by C. Zaitz

I was in the hospital waiting for my husband to have his one-inch kidney stone removed when I saw a show about near Earth asteroids and the threat they pose to us. There are lots of asteroids out there in uncomfortably close orbits to Earth. Some of these miles-wide mountains could annihilate life on Earth if they collided with us. But not all asteroids are whole. Some are collections of smaller rocks held together by their flimsy gravity. It turns out that these are the most dangerous threats to us because of the difficulty of destroying or deflecting them.

I thought of the giant stone in my husband’s kidney. Doctors slid a tube into his kidney, used directed energy to break the stone up, collected the pulverized bits into a net and pulled it out of him. Those little fragments would have caused more pain passing in a few days than the whole stone had caused sitting in his kidney for the past few years. Then I thought about those rubble pile asteroids. They are like garage-sized buckshot and would possibly do even more damage than a lone asteroid. How can we prevent such a collection of rocks from hitting the Earth? We don’t have anything in place to deal with such a threat – no rockets ready to go explode or deflect the asteroids, and certainly no nets to collect the pieces of any giant rubble piles heading toward us.

The truth is that we haven’t even located all the near earth asteroids. So far only 60% of them have been mapped, and even known asteroids can change orbit or character. Over the past few weeks, astronomers have watched comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 disintegrate into more than 30 fragments as it flew by some 6 million miles from us. That’s about 30 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. It was not a threat, but astronomers are convinced it’s a matter of time before another very large asteroid or comet finds us. I say “another” because it has happened in the past. The giant meteor crater in Arizona is proof that a falling rock can make a big hole in the Earth. About one hundred tons of interplanetary material fall onto the Earth on a daily basis.

It’s enough to give you the willies. NASA does have NEO, its Near Earth Object program. According to NASA’s website, http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/, NASA has five different programs concentrating on looking for NEOs, and Japan and Italy are also keeping an eye on the sky. I didn’t get a warm cozy feeling from their website since they do not address any capability of stopping NEOs that might impact the Earth. Necessity is the mother of invention, and there has been no immediate threat to spur the invention of Earth-protecting programs. However, if we are to have a chance at destroying or deflecting large Earth-bound boulders in space, early detection and action is the key. I hope we don’t wait until we are between a rock and a hard place, excuse the pun.

If these thoughts keep you awake at night, you can pass the time by watching for lovely Venus and the thin waning crescent Moon before dawn on the 24th. After sunset you can find Mars, Saturn and Jupiter spangled across the sky from west to east.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Why is the Sky Dark at Night?

5/14/06 – 5/20/06
by C. Zaitz

Technically, the sky it isn’t all that dark, especially in the Metro Detroit area. But let’s think about that glorious silky black sky we remember from our summers up North or some other dark place we’ve been. These are rare places where city lights are so scarce that you can see the hazy arms of our Milky Way Galaxy. The haze represents hundreds of millions of stars, but they are so distant and numerous they appear to cut a luminescent swath across the summer sky.

If you tear your gaze away from that beauty, you will find other parts of the sky that can look quite dark and devoid of stars. How can this be? You might wonder how there could be any dark places in the night sky if there are an infinite number of stars in an infinite universe. Since the time of Kepler people have wondered about this seeming paradox; if there are an infinite number of stars in the sky, then no matter where you look, even out to infinity, eventually you should see the surface of a star. It’s called Olbers’ Paradox.

As stated, the paradox is true. If there are an infinite number of stars, then the entire sky should be lit up as bright as the surface of the sun by their combined light. But perhaps they are not distributed evenly throughout the universe. We know they collect into spirals and blobs known as galaxies. But even so, the infinite number of galaxies should fill up every degree of sky we can see. So why is the night sky dark?

The answer has to do with the fact that universe is expanding, and that it isn’t infinitely old. That really means that it’s not infinite after all. Astronomers have figured out that the observable universe is about 13.7 billion years old. We can’t see anything that might lie beyond a radius of 13.7 billion light years away because the light just hasn’t had time to reach us yet.

The universe is also expanding. The light we get from very distant galaxies is dimmer than light from closer galaxies due to something called their redshift. Their light has traveled so far in something that is expanding on the way (space) that by the time it reaches us it’s pretty tired and weak (shifted toward the red end of the spectrum). The ultimate evidence of this is the Cosmic Background Radiation we find in everywhere in the universe. It is the radiation created in the Big Bang, but it is so weak and redshifted after traveling through expanding space that it is nearly invisible to us in any wavelength.

These are very short (incomplete) explanations to a question which is actually quite deep and somewhat interesting, so if you’d like to know more of the science behind Olbers’ Paradox, you can check out this website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox or Google “Olbers’ Paradox.” Meanwhile you can always enjoy the glorious rays of the planets shining down from east to west as the night progresses. Mars and Saturn chase the sun down to the northwestern horizon at sunset, and beautiful, radiant Venus entices the sun up in the northeast at sunrise, but steady, royal Jupiter, King of the Planets, stays out all night long.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Ich Spreche Kein Deutsch

5/7/06 – 5/13/06

By C. Zaitz

I usually pick up at least a FEW phrases of the language when I travel, but I couldn’t even get out “excuse me!” in German. “Entschuldigen Sie!” By the time I got my mouth wrapped around the syllables, the moment had passed. In Italian it’s “scusi” and can be said right on the spot, without preparation.

Perhaps “I speak no German” as the title indicates, but the beauty of a thin waxing moon needs no words. In Bebra, Germany overlooking a lovely view of rolling hills, sheep and the first night sky I've seen here, it is stunning. I've been waiting for a clear night so I could see the sky in this tiny little town tucked in the folds of Deutschland’s hilly terrain. I've experienced nearly every type of weather so far; der regen (rain), die wolke (cloud), der schnee (snow), der blitz (lightning), and even der hagel (hail). But no stern, mond, nor planet (star, moon or planet). I know why the german word for weather is “wetter.”

My clearest view of the sky was on the plane. At 39,000 feet I saw Jupiter so bright and bold he looked like a brilliant diamond. I saw Scorpius, Orion’s nemesis, stretched out luxuriously along the southern sky, and the teapot shape of Sagittarius the Archer right behind. As we flew into Frankfurt the morning sky was peach and rose and the tops of the clouds were glowing orange, with Jupiter beginning to wink goodnight in the west. It was the loveliest sight I've seen in a long time.

I sat next to an experienced pilot who was just shuttling back after an overseas flight. I asked him if he had ever seen anything strange in the sky. He said that pilots see things all the time, but they don't talk about it. He'd seen a fast-flying light once that he couldn’t explain. I asked him if pilots in general knew the stars or constellations, or were aware what planets they could see. He didn't think so. He didn’t know that the brightest “star” in view was really Jupiter. I was surprised, but I just assume other folks are as curious about the sky as I am. I spend a great deal of time looking at the sky compared to many people because of my job, but pilots must have to stare at the sky most of their working hours! He said the newer planes have big windows and when he flew across the North Pole he would see the northern lights. I was envious. I wanted to be a pilot after talking to him just for the perks- the great view of the sky!

My last evening in Bebra was pretty; the beautiful moon shone near Mars and Saturn, aglow in the orange-fringed azure sky. A few bright stars were scattered above high cirrus clouds as I had my usual repast of bread/beer, a cheese product, and coffee. (Being a vegetarian in the land of Bratwurst is not easy; every town sounded like a kind of hot dog.) But as I flew out of Frankfurt and began to get my six hours of earth's rotation back, I was happy to be above the clouds again.

It may seem funny to return from a wonderful trip to a foreign land and talk mostly about the flight there and back, but that is indeed where my view of the sky was best. And that’s where I learned the German word for “flying speed” – Reisegeschwindigkeit!

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

The Alternator

4/30/06 –5/6/06

By C. Zaitz

My grandma just turned 90 and I drove to NY to help celebrate. I had a lovely time with family, but it was a short visit and a 7 hour rainy, gloomy, and otherwise dreary drive back across Canada to Michigan. I noticed when I slowed down the battery light came on in my car. Yikes. But when I sped up it disappeared. Hmm.

I was halfway through Canada when it got dark. Was I just tired or were my headlights flickering?

60 km from the Ambassador Bridge, I noticed the windshield wipers slowing and the console and head lights dimming. Hours before, my spider sense had told me to shut off the radio, giving me plenty of quiet time to listen to the symphony of knocks and pings from my aging Sunfire. Every few minutes I heard a “thwap” from under the hood. I told myself it was just the wind, but I knew something was afoot.

Around 10pm I saw a star; a brilliant blue-white star twinkling and snapping in an otherwise black and gloomy sky. I knew it had to be Sirius; no other star would be so bold on a night such as this. I was glad to see Sirius. I thought it meant that the rain would end and I wouldn’t have to use the battery-draining wipers anymore. No such luck. A convoy of semi trucks roared by me flinging greasy road spew onto my windshield. Sirius disappeared, rain squalls started, the wipers wiped furiously, and within 15 minutes the car was completely dead. I sat there contemplating things while sitting in a little truck pull-off. One kind truck driver looked under my hood, but we agreed there was little to be done. It was the alternator. So while I waited for the tow truck, I scanned the clearing skies over Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

It was well after 11pm and Sirius had already set, but Procyon twinkled at me instead. Procyon is the brightest star in Canis Minor, the Little Dog. The Gemini twins appeared nearby as did Saturn, and then I caught a glimpse of Regulus, the brightest star in Leo the Lion. Now there is an amazing star- it’s nearly 4 times bigger than the sun but it spins once every 16 hours. It spins so fast it’s flattened out like an egg. If it spun only 16% faster it would tear itself to shreds.

I thought about that as I sat in my little car. It was a dwarf among the giant trucks at the little pit stop and I felt rather nervous at times, but Jupiter crept up behind me from the east and made me smile when I saw him. He looked very bold and confident.

My knight in shining tow truck eventually arrived, took my car to a garage to await the morning, and very kindly chauffeured me to a motel where I did the same. The sky was once again socked in with clouds, but I am forever grateful for the comfort of the clear moments when I saw my old friends. And I’m also grateful to all the folks who are out there at the dead of night helping out other folks who need assistance.

The sun came out the next morning, the alternator was replaced and I crossed the Ambassador Bridge, happy to be back home. Now I journey to Germany but I will be back with more adventures, hopefully of a jollier nature.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Trockne Blumen

4/23/06 –4/29/06

By C. Zaitz

This week, in honor of my upcoming sojourn to Germany, I thought I would mention some Germans who throughout history have contributed to the science of astronomy. I’m sure when we think of German astrophysicists we all remember the image of crazy white hair and rumpled clothes- the inimitable Albert Einstein. He was only one of many great German astronomers, though one of a few not named “Johannes" or "Heinrich.” Here’s a short list: Johannes Bayer (1564-1617) first named stars by assigning them to constellations and giving them Greek letters in order of decreasing brightness. He also published a detailed star chart/catalog called the Uranometria in 1603. It’s a classic!

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a clever mathematician who realized that the planets go around the sun in elliptical orbits though he hated to admit it. (He liked perfect circles.) He authored "Kepler's Three Laws of Planetary Motion” that mathematically describe the orbits of the planets. Everyone who has taken Astronomy 101 has heard of Kepler, and probably has cursed his name. (“I didn’t know we had to do math in astronomy!”)

Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) was a wealthy brewer, but also owned a big telescope and published the first detailed moon map and a celestial atlas introducing many faint and hard to find constellations such as Canes Venatici (hunting dogs), Lacerta (lizard), Scutum (shield), and more. He just made them up, published them, and now they are part of the 88 official constellations. Thanks!

Johann Bode (1747 – 1826) popularized a relationship giving planetary distances from the Sun, which became known as “Bode's law.” He also predicted an undiscovered planet between Mars and Jupiter, where the asteroid belt was later found.
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers (1758-1840) was an astronomer and physician who published Olbers' paradox. The paradox asks, “why is the sky dark at night?” If space is infinite, then no matter where you look, you’ll eventually see a star. So why is the sky so dark? For the answer stay tuned for a future column! Heinrich Schwabe (1789 – 1875) was an amateur astronomer who discovered the 11-year sunspot cycle. He looked at the sun nearly every day for over 40 years. In an example of serendipity, he was actually looking for a planet near Mercury, but instead discovered a lot about sunspots and the solar cycle.

Karl Schwarzchild (1873-1916) was the first to solve Einstein's equations of general relativity and also made some of the first studies of black holes. He figured out that the sun would have to shrink down to a 3 km sphere to become a black hole. Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German/American physicist. He revolutionized our conception of the universe with his theories of Special and General Relativity, also a topic for future discussion. He also has reached pop-icon status as no other scientist has done.

Because I also love music, I must mention the great German composers: Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Herr Bach and all the little Bachs, Strauss, Schoenberg, Wagner, Handel, and even the almost forgotten Hildegard Von Bingen, a brilliant musician and astronomer of her time (1098 – 1179). Schubert wrote the haunting and lovely song after which I entitled this week’s column. It means “Wilted Flowers.” I’ll report back on the German cathedral built out of rocks embedded with glass from a meteor impact after I see it with my own eyes.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Empty Glass

4/16/06 –4/22/06

By C. Zaitz

All my life I’ve looked at the Universe as if it were mostly empty. Blackness upon velvety blackness, interrupted by sprinkles of brilliant diamond stars, on and on with no end to the emptiness. I knew that the Milky Way alone contains hundreds of billions of stars and that it is one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. It sounds pretty crowded, but the truth is that there is lots of room. One of our nearest neighbors, the Andromeda Galaxy, lies well over 2 million light years from us. Andromeda is home to massive numbers of stars, like the Milky Way, and furthermore, she is headed toward us. Scientists think that in no less than 3-4 billion years, our two galaxies will collide! But there is so much nothing in these galaxies that they can pass right through each other without a single star ever colliding. That’s what I mean by the universe being pretty empty – even the most densely packed regions, the galaxies, are generally made of nothing.

Now astronomers think that the nothing is actually something and that most of the universe is made of this something that looks and feels like nothing: dark matter and dark energy. Together these mysterious dark nothings add up to filling the universe. Though we aren’t clear about the nature of dark energy and dark matter, I’m sure we will figure it out soon. I feel like a paradigm shift is coming, as when people had to stop thinking of the earth as being the center of the universe and admit that we were orbiting a much larger star. Now instead of this vast empty universe, we are in fact apparently embedded in a rich and connected fabric of spacetime whose weft and warp are made of dark matter and energy.

Pete Townshend of the rock band The Who wrote a song called Empty Glass. He said it was an allusion to the fact that you can’t come to the Universal Bar with a full glass and expect to get something in it. You have to have an empty glass. I think he meant that if you want to gain some sort of knowledge or insight you have to have an open mind, not one full of preconceptions. Our conception of the Universe as being empty perhaps distracted us from the fact that it was full of stuff, only it was stuff we couldn’t see. Now astronomers are hard at work looking for the invisible. Some say that dark energy may be a kind of “quintessence” or a vacuum energy of empty space. Dark matter seems to be embedded in the galaxies themselves, giving them more heft and explaining why the spiral arms don’t wind themselves up after a few rotations of a galaxy. I am very much looking forward to the day that we have a better description and explanation for dark matter and dark energy. I’d like to know what the universal glass is full of.

Our evening sky will be peppered with the stars of spring and two evening planets. Mars is still the westerly member of the duet and Saturn hangs high in the south in the early evening. Jupiter rises later in the evening and is best seen starring opposite Venus in the morning sky.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Big Star

4/9/06 –4/15/06

By C. Zaitz

I’m not talking about the band from the 70’s, I’m talking about the sun! Lately it has come to my attention that the sun is not the same sun I grew up with. That sun was round and yellow, kind of dull and regular. It featured prominently in all my drawings, sporting long yellow fins and spikes. It came up in the morning and went down at night, though in my drawings it usually was hanging right over my house and smiling. Nobody paid too much attention to it, it was just the sun.

Lately the sun has turned into a big star. It’s in the news a lot, because scientists are increasingly turning to the sun to explain changes in the earth’s climate. We’ve learned that the sun goes through cycles of activity, usually lasting eleven years. 2006 marks the lowest amount of activity or solar minimum during the current cycle, known as cycle #23. Studies have correlated sunspot activity with temperature and climate changes on the earth. When the sun is regular and boring, going through its cycles of maximum and minimum activity, everything seems to be fine. But sometimes the sun stops acting like a big star and goes quiet. The most recent example is the Maunder Minimum, which occurred from 1645 to 1715. In a 30 year period during this solar anomaly, scientists observed 50 sunspots rather than the more usual 50,000. 93 million miles away, people of earth suffered the loss. The Maunder Minimum occurred during the middle and coldest part of what we call the Little Ice Age. Much of Europe and North America suffered brutally cold winters while glaciers advanced, crushing farms and villages. There was widespread crop failures and famine, plagues and death. Art and literature of the time reflect the harsh climate; the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware depicts an ice-clogged river, which rarely happens nowadays that far south. In 1776 it seems the Delaware indeed was an icy river and the painting is correct.

While scientist agree that the earth’s climate is complicated and that volcanism and ocean currents also drive aspects of climate, it’s becoming more apparent that the sun is a rising star in studies of global warming and climate changes. You can keep an eye on the sun daily at http://www.spaceweather.com. Already we are seeing more and more spots and storms on the sun. Some say that the sun had its minimum early and therefore the solar maximum may come early and hard as well. Sometime between 2010 and 2012 we may have the strongest solar activity we’ve seen in 50 years. For stargazers, it means pretty aurorae (northern lights) but for all of us it may mean loss of cell phone signals, power outages and our TV satellites knocked out of orbit. Hopefully the sun will behave itself like a big star and not go quiet as it has done in the past.

When the sun goes down, you can look for Mars and Saturn in the southwestern evening sky. Jupiter rises around 10pm but is easier to see once it is higher in the sky. Try in the wee morning hours right before sunrise. Venus will also be up in the east, as Jupiter will have migrated to the west by morning.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Goodbye, Orion

4/2/06 –4/8/06

By C. Zaitz

This month we say goodbye to Orion, the mighty Hunter. He’s been with us for months, and he will be missed as the most famous star group of winter. Orion is one of the boldest constellations in the sky due to the seven bright stars outlining his body. Especially noticeable are the three stars of his belt, and the lack of stars in his head. Maybe his head is faint because he can’t see. He was said to have been blinded as a punishment for repeatedly getting into trouble over women. He wandered around blind for awhile until the Sun restored his vision. If that is true, Orion is now wandering toward the Sun to regain his sight. Each night you will see Orion take another step into the western sunset. Perhaps next fall when he once again rises in the morning his vision will be restored.

Crouched behind Orion is the constellation of Leo the Lion. He will take the place of Orion as the center of attention in the evening sky. The big cat’s head looks like a backward question mark and the rest of him is marked by three stars that make a triangle. Behind Leo toward the east is the bright star Arcturus. You can find this star by locating the Big Dipper, which is high in the northern sky. The handle of the dipper makes a curve or an arc, and if you follow that arc with your finger, it will gracefully swing down to Arcturus. “Arc to Arcturus,” then straight down from there to another star called Spica, the grain of wheat. Spica is the brightest star in the constellation of Virgo. It’s handy to use a good star map and/or visit your local friendly Ensign Planetarium! For star maps try http://www.skymaps.com.

Constellations can be like old friends, once you get to know them. What are they but points of light in the sky, scattered through the galaxy? They would look completely different from some other distant solar system. Orion and Hercules, Virgo and Andromeda are only figments of our imaginations. But maybe they are something more, something deeper. Maybe when we see the stars of Orion disappear into the evening twilight we remember that time is passing, seasons are changing, and even the stars must flow with the current in the river of time. There is an old saying attributed to Heraclitus: you cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are ever flowing onto you. It is the same with the stars; though Orion will be back next fall, time will have passed and it will be a different sky, or perhaps a different you looking at it. That is an exciting and daunting thought.

Time has not yet dimmed the appearance of the lovely Venus in the eastern morning twilight. Jupiter also still can be seen in the early morning hours in the west. Mars and Saturn however need to be seen right at sunset. Mars is straddled between the horns of Taurus the Bull and Saturn looks like it is making the Gemini twins into triplets. For both planets look toward the south and southwest. The pretty waxing crescent moon will be growing into first quarter by mid week and then gibbous as it heads toward full phase on the 13th.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!

Till the Sun Falls From the Sky

3/26/06 –4/1/06

By C. Zaitz

Recently some first graders came to the planetarium to learn about the Earth, Sun and Moon. I asked the little ones to show me where the Sun would go during the day. They pointed first to the east, tracked their tiny fingers across the sky and ended up pointing to the west. I turned on the planetarium Sun and they saw for themselves what they had just predicted. Then as the Sun went down, they began to see the stars and planets. One little girl pointed to the dot that represented Saturn and said, “There’s the Sun!” I am usually not surprised by the things I hear students say when the stars come out; in fact I usually let them talk out loud so I can hear any misconceptions they may be harboring. But I hadn’t come across anyone thinking that the Sun was back in the sky disguised as a planet. My planetarium Sun may not be as bright as the real Sun, but it is pretty accurate in size. I had to ask my young guest why she thought the Sun had returned after she watched it go down. She said that sometimes the Sun falls out of the sky and then it switches and comes back up in the sky. I was momentarily speechless, but I decided to go over the spinning of the Earth once more.

In the absence of science, human imaginations can come up with very poetic explanations of every day phenomenon. I’ve always wondered what those crazy Greeks were thinking with their stories of Helios carrying the Sun across the sky in a chariot pulled by winged horses. But sitting face to face with a six year old trying to make her understand that the Sun wasn’t moving, that the Earth was actually spinning at 800 mph under her very feet made me feel like I was the crazy storyteller. Her explanation of the Sun falling down and magically coming back up made more sense than my ardent testimonial that the Earth was moving. Luckily first graders will remember what I said and generally regurgitate it accurately though it may be a few more years before developmentally they will be able to understand it.

On Wednesday, March 29th, the motion of the moon will be seen, if not felt. Lucky folks in parts of S. America, Africa and Asia will experience a rare and beautiful total solar eclipse. The Moon will pass directly in front of the Sun, blotting it out for a few minutes. Some might think that the Sun has fallen from the sky or that the event portends evil or upcoming joy. That evening you can come to the Ensign Planetarium and eat, drink and be merry with us. We will have internet footage of the eclipse from Turkey. Telescopes will view Saturn and Mars and we’ll have activities for the whole family. Admission is $3 adults and $2 students and seniors. Doors open at 6pm for open house and the show is at 7pm. I welcome everyone to come and see for yourselves if the Sun will fall from the sky. I predict it won’t. And we have something the Greeks didn’t have- pictures from space to prove it.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!