March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 1

Star Gazer News

Newsletter of the Delmarva Stargazers www.delmarvastargazers.org

Upcoming Events: Meeting ! Mar 5

th 7 PM Smyrna Church

Observing ! Mar 9th Dusk Blackbird & Eq. Cntr & Mallard

Mirror Making ! Mar 21st to 24

th Mallard Lodge

The Delmarva Stargazers are pleased to announce

Star Gaze XIX Star Party We'll be celebrating 20 years of Stargazing on Delmarva

and have some special events planned. Thursday, April 11, 2013

through Sunday, April 14, 2013 Tuckahoe State Park's Equestrian Center,

Queen Anne, MD. Bring a friend, family, and maybe your

optics and join the fun Check www.delmarvastargazers.org

For Registration!

March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 2

How to Join the Delmarva Stargazers: Anyone with an interest in any aspect of astronomy is welcome NAME_______________________________________________________________New_______Renew___________ ADDRESS_____________________________________________________________________________________ CITY, STATE & ZIP______________________________________________________________________________ E-MAIL ADDRESS (If any)_________________________________________________________________________ Do you need the newsletter snail mailed to you (Y/N)?___________________________________________________ Please attach a check for $15 made payable to Delmarva Stargazers and mail to Kathy Sheldon, 20985 Fleatown Rd, Lincoln, DE 19960. Call club President Chuck Jennings at 302-449-3330 for more information.

Mirror Making Update Don Surles As February winds down and March ap-proaches our attentions turn to mirror mak-ing. Mirror making is a disease...a very contagious and chronic disease. The only cure is to embroil oneself in glass, grit, cerium, foucault testing, ronchii screens, Ross-Null testing, courting the elusive pa-rabola, and surrounding oneself with others who share the MM malady. Once you get it, it will be with you for the rest of your life. There are several of us afflicted people and we will descend on Mallard Lodge Wednesday afternoon, March 20. We will delve into the science and the art of mir-ror making until Sunday afternoon, March 24. Mallard Lodge will be filled with tal-ents, expertise, personalities, glass, grinding tables, grits and opportunities for participants to learn, perfect and ex-pand the craft of mirror making. I am al-ways, yes, always amazed at the efforts and the results of this special single weekend. Some of the finest newtonian mirrors avail-able have been produced at our MidAtlantic Mirror making Weekends. This year should be no excep-tion...the tradition of pushing the amateur mirror making envelope continues. For the first time we will attempt to create 16” F-3 mirrors from slumped plate glass. We have 8 pieces of 3/4” X 16” glass that have been successfully slumped and annealed. Grinding has begun on two of them; hope-fully two more can be started very soon. The result should be a very thin 3/4” X 16” meniscus...or a very large contact lens...that can be used to make an astro-graph (a large, short focal length tele-scope used for astro photography). In addition to the 16” slumped mir-rors, we also have an assortment of 6, 8, 10, 12.5 & 16” mirrors for refiguring, a few new 6” and a couple of new 12.5”ers...and a 20” F-6.4 to refigure. So, this should be one of the best MidAtlantic Mirror Making weekends...but I have to admit each new one seems to improve over the previous.

If you are not participating in the event you are welcome to stop by and see what all the fuss is about...maybe even walk away with a bit of the glass pushin’ fever that results in your becoming a fu-ture MidAtlantic Mirror Maker. Oh...once you have looked thru a telescope with a fine figured primary and enjoyed the SNAP-TO SHARP focus vs the squishy rocking back & forth of commercial telescopes you will know what the amateur telescope mirror maker’s goal is about. Here are some pics from last week-end’s 16” grinding efforts. Don...

the first mirror ready to accept concrete…key learning…next time use 4 or 6 mill polyethylene vs wrinkly Saran wrap

Cal…the concrete finisher

March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 3

3 more concrete bases…we poured 2 convex and 2 con-cave…key learning…the metal form should have been the de-sired thickness so that it could have been used as a level-ing screed

Cal & Chuck checking for astigmatism with polarizing fil-ters...that could have resulted from slumping - none was de-tected

drying concrete con-cave base

Cal rough grind-ing 16" …MOT

Chuck rough grinding 16" meniscus

Cal finishing the rough grinding 16" meniscus

March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 4

Kepler Discovers a System of Tiny Planets Feb. 20, 2013: NASA's Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun.

The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, measuring about one-third the size of Earth. It is smaller than Mercury, which made its detection a challenge. The moon-size planet and its two companion planets were found by scientists with NASA's Kepler mission to find Earth-sized planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. However, while the star in Kepler-37 may be simi-lar to our sun, the system appears quite unlike the solar system in which we live. Astronomers think Kepler-37b does not have an atmosphere and cannot support life as we know it. The tiny planet almost certainly is rocky in composition. Kepler-37c, the closer neighboring planet, is slightly smaller than Venus, meas-uring almost three-quarters the size of Earth. Kepler-37d, the farther planet, is twice the size of Earth. The first exoplanets found to orbit a normal star were giants. As technolo-gies have advanced, smaller and smaller planets have been found, and Kepler has shown even Earth-size exoplanets are common. "Even Kepler can only detect such a tiny world around the brightest stars it observes," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The fact we've discovered tiny Kepler-37b sug-gests such little planets are common, and more planetary wonders await as we continue to gather and analyze additional data." Kepler-37's host star belongs to the same class as our sun, although it is slightly cooler and smaller. All three planets orbit the star at less than the distance Mercury is to the sun, suggesting they are very hot, inhospitable worlds. Kepler-37b orbits every 13 days at less than one-third Mercury's dis-tance from the sun. The estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Kelvin), would be hot enough to melt the zinc in a penny. Kepler-37c and Kepler-37d, orbit every 21 days and 40 days, respectively. "We uncovered a planet smaller than any in our solar system orbiting one of the few stars that is both bright and quiet, where signal detection was possi-ble," said Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Re-search Institute in Sonoma, Calif., and lead author of the new study published in the journal Nature. "This discovery shows close-in planets can be smaller, as well as much larger, than planets orbiting our sun." The research team used data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, which si-multaneously and continuously measures the brightness of more than 150,000 stars every 30 minutes. When a planet candidate transits, or passes, in front of the

An artist's concept of the new-found planet Ke-pler-37b.

March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 5

Your 2011-2012 Officers Office Officer Phone email President Chuck Jennings 302-449-3330 chuckjennings33@yahoo.com President-elect Don Surles 302-653-9445 don.surles@verizon.net Secretary Cal Estrada Treasurer Kathy Sheldon 302-422-4695 Past President Lyle Jones 302-736-9842 worm1647@comcast.net

star from the spacecraft's vantage point, a percentage of light from the star is blocked. This causes a dip in the brightness of the starlight that reveals the transiting planet's size relative to its star. The size of the star must be known in order to measure the planet's size accurately. To learn more about the properties of the star Kepler-37, scientists examined sound waves generated by the boiling motion beneath the surface of the star. They probed the interior structure of Kepler-37's star just as geologists use seismic waves generated by earthquakes to probe the interior structure of Earth. The science is called asteroseismology.

The sound waves travel into the star and bring information back up to the surface. The waves cause oscillations that Kepler observes as a rapid flickering of the star's brightness. Like bells in a steeple, small stars ring at high tones while larger stars boom in lower tones. The barely discernible, high-frequency oscillations in the brightness of small stars are the most difficult to measure. This is why most objects previously subjected to asteroseismic analysis are larger than the sun. With the very high precision of the Kepler instrument, astronomers have reached a new milestone. The star Kepler-37, with a radius just three-quarters of the sun, now is the smallest bell in the asteroseismology steeple. The radius of the star is known to 3 percent accuracy, which translates to exceptional ac-curacy in the planet's size. For information about the Kepler Mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

Production editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: http://science.nasa.gov/

This line up compares artist's concepts of the planets in the Ke-pler-37 system to the Moon and planets in our own solar system.

March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 6

Cancer—from Wikipedia Cancer is one of the twelve constel-

lations of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for crab and it is commonly represented as such. Its astrological symbol is ♋. Cancer is relatively small among the constella-tions with an area of only 505 square de-grees and its stars are rather faint. It lies between Gemini to the west and Leo to the east, Lynx to the north and Canis Minor and Hydra to the south.

Cancer is the dimmest of the zodiacal constellations, having only two stars above the fourth magnitude.

Cancer is best known among stargazers as the home of Praesepe (Messier 44), an open cluster also called the Beehive Clus-ter, 577 light-years from Earth. M44 con-tains about 50 stars, the brightest of which are of the sixth magnitude. ε Cnc is the brightest member at magnitude 6.3. Praesepe is also one of the larger open clusters visible; it has an area of 1.5 square degrees, or three times the size of the full Moon.

The smaller, denser open cluster Messier 67 can also be found in Cancer, 2500 light-years from Earth. It has an area of approximately 0.5 square degrees, the size of the full Moon. It contains approxi-mately 200 stars, the brightest of which are of the tenth magnitude. Cancer is said to have been the place for the Akkadian Sun of the South, perhaps from its position at the summer solstice in very remote antiquity. But afterwards it was associated with the fourth month Duzu (June–July in the modern western calendar), and was known as the Northern Gate of Sun.

Showing but few stars, and its brightest stars being of only 4th magni-tude, Cancer was often considered the "Dark Sign", quaintly described as black and without eyes. Dante, alluding to this faintness and position of heavens, wrote in Paradiso:

“Then a light among them brightened, So that, if Cancer one such crystal had, Winter would have a month of one sole day.”

Cancer was the location of the Sun's most northerly position in the sky (the summer solstice) in ancient times, though this position now occurs in Taurus due to the precession of the equinoxes, around June 21. This is also the time that the sun is directly overhead at 23.5°N, a parallel now known as the Tropic of Cancer.

The modern symbol for Cancer repre-sents the pincers of a crab, but Cancer has been represented as various types of crea-

tures, usually those living in the water, and always those with an exoskeleton.

In the Egyptian records of about 2000 BC it was described as Scarabaeus (Scarab), the sacred emblem of immortality. In Baby-lonia the constellation was known as MUL.AL.LUL, a name which can refer to both a crab and a snapping turtle. On boundary stones, the image of a turtle or tortoise appears quite regularly and it is believed that this represent Cancer as a conven-tional crab has not so far been discovered on any of these monuments. There also ap-pears to be a strong connection between the Babylonian constellation and ideas of death and a passage to the underworld, which may be the origin of these ideas in much later Greek myths associated with Hercules and the Hydra. In the 12th century, an illus-trated astronomical manuscript shows it as a water beetle. Albumasar writes of this sign in the work published in 1489 as a large crayfish. Jakob Bartsch and Stanis-laus Lubienitzki, in the 17th century, de-scribed it as a lobster. In Ancient Greece, Aratus called the crab Καρκινος (Karkinos), which was followed by Hipparchus and Ptolemy. The Alfonsine ta-bles called it Carcinus, a Latinized form of the Greek word. Eratosthenes extended this as Καρκινος, Ονοι, και Φατνη: the Crab, Asses, and Crib.

The Indian language Sanskrit shares a common ancestor with Greek, and the San-skrit name of Cancer is Karka and Karkata. In Telugu it is "Karkatakam", in Kannada "Karkataka" or "Kataka", in Tamil Karkatan, and in Sinhalese Kagthaca. The later Hindus knew it as Kulira, from the Greek Κολουρος (Koloyros), the term originated by Proclus.

In Ancient Rome, Manilius and Ovid called the constellation Litoreus (shore-inhabiting). Astacus and Cammarus appear in various classic writers, while it is called Nepa in Cicero's De Finibus and the works of Columella, Plautus, and Varro; all of these words signify crab, lobster, or scor-pion.

Athanasius Kircher said that in Cop-tic Egypt it was Κλαρια, the Bestia seu Statio Typhonis (the Power of Darkness). Jérôme Lalande identified this with Anubis needed], one of the Egyptian divinities commonly associated with Sirius.

In Chinese astronomy, the stars of Cancer lie within the The Vermillion Bird of the South.

March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 7

March 2013 Volume 19 Number 9 Page 8

Astrophotos by Members and Friends

Delmarva Stargazers Hosts

Annual Mid-Atlantic Mirror Making Seminar Delmarva Star Gazers will host the 13th Mid-Atlantic Mirror Making Seminar March 21 through Sunday March 24, at Mallard Lodge, Smyrna, DE. Mirror makers and other attendees should check into the Lodge before 11:00 AM Friday. Activities begin at Noon, March 23. The purpose of the Seminar is to introduce proven successful mirror making techniques and practices to those wishing to make their own mirrors. Special emphasis will be placed on successfully figuring the mirror. Members who would like to help with this event are welcome.

This is my image of the Jellyfish Nebula. It is a LHaRGB combina-tion taken through my AP 130mm refractor with a QSI 583wsg CCD camera. From Wikipedia, "IC 443 (also known as the Jellyfish Nebula and Sharpless 248 (Sh2-248)) is a Ga-lactic supernova remnant (SNR) in the constellation Gemini. On the plan of the sky, it is located near the star Eta Geminorum. Its distance is roughly 5,000 light years from Earth. IC 443 may be the remains of a supernova that occurred 3,000 - 30,000 years ago. The same super-nova event likely created the neutron star CXOU J061705.3+222127, the collapsed remnant of the stellar core. IC 443 is one of the best-studied cases of supernova remnants in-teracting with surrounding mo-lecular clouds." - Joe Morris