Skyward by our guest blogger, Dr. David Levy

 

Skyward 

By

 

David H. Levy

 

The sky reborn

            Ever since I read Bart J. Bok’s foreword to Rose Wilder’s and Gerald Ames’ The Golden Book of Astronomy,   I have marvelled at what the night sky had to offer and how much of that has changed.  “Such wonders,” Bok wrote,  ”fill this book.” I have never forgotten those beauties, in particular Bart’s favourite:  The Eta Carinae nebula, deep in the southern sky. 

 

On Tuesday, July 12, 2022, NASA released the first light pictures from the Webb telescope.  One of them is the Eta Carinae nebula.  If Bart Bok could come back to us for one minute, he would be thrilled and elated beyond expression.   The image is unadulterated joy.  It shows so much more than anyone has ever seen before. It tells  how this faint star suddenly became the second brightest star in the sky in 1843, the year of a great comet, and it had a second eruption near the end of the 19^th century.  If Eta Carinae should one day become a supernova it may become as bright as, or even much brighter than, Venus.

 

The other picture that really got to me was Stephan’s Quintet. It was the first compact group of interacting galaxies ever discovered.  First observed from France by Éduard Stephan, it consists of four galaxies interacting with one another; plus a fifth, NGC 7320, which is much closer to us.    I have seen this cluster many times. Seeing these images from the new telescope pierced my eyes, and warmed my heart.  But my mind kept returning to the image of Eta Carinae, and to Bart and Priscilla Bok and their lives together.  

 

Bart loved to tell the story of how he and Priscilla attended the opening of the Flandrau planetarium in November 1975.  They arrived early that morning, and they walked toward an exhibit in the back, in the galaxy room.  Suddenly Priscilla stopped.  “Bart,” she said softly as she gazed upon a picture of Eta Carinae, “When I am gone, I will be in this nebula. Whenever you look at the nebula, you will see me there.”

 

Priscilla passed away just four days later.  In  her memory Bart funded a beautiful concrete bench in the aviary at the Desert Museum.     Bart often visited the museum and always  enjoyed her bench.  “Another audience with the roadrunner soon took place,” I wrote later.  “As he watched this roadrunner, Bart’s thoughts wandered off to a far off place and time.  A memory of Priscilla, happy and alert as she fed a group of magpies, filled his mind.  Slowly the image faded, and he imagined once again the exquisite swirls of the nebula in Carina.”

The James Webb space telescope belongs to the world. In January 1610, Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter.  Over the course of a few nights, he discovered four moons orbiting the solar system’s biggest planet, and the night sky has not been the same ever since.

 

In July of 1994, the Hubble space telescope also pointed at Jupiter.  It recorded the crash of a comet on the solar system’s biggest planet, and the night sky changed again.

 

On Tuesday, July 12,  the world saw the James Webb Space telescope’s first view of the Eta Carinae nebula.  The night sky will never be the same.

The two pictures are both courtesies of
NASA, the European Space Sgency and the Canadian Space Agency and show
the first light images from JWST of the Stephan Quintet and Eta
Carolina regions. 

 

Skyward for July 2022 The Meteor Shower that wasn’t, but not so much - Our Guest Blogger, Dr. David Levy

 

Skyward for July 2022

 

The Meteor Shower that wasn’t, but not so much

 

By

 

David H. Levy

 

The second of many images I took that night captured this brightr Tau
Herculid dropping in Hydra, just south of Corvus.
Photograph by David Levy.

On May 30 observers all across the western hemisphere were outside, hoping to see a wonderful “new” meteor shower.  The shower is actually not new.  It is called the Tau Herculids, and it sends us dust particles from Comet Schwassmann-Wachman III.  In 1995 this normally faint comet brightened dramatically as it split into several parts, releasing huge amounts of dust into space.

 

            On May 30, at 10 pm Mountain Standard time, the Earth plowed through the debris released in 1995.   We were hoping for a possible meteor storm of hundreds of thousands of meteors.  Wendee and I sat outside at Jarnac observatory, waited, watched, and waited some more.  There was one bright meteor that seemed too far from the direction  my camera was pointing for its lens to detect.  Ten o’clock came and went, and we counted a few shooting stars here and there. Over the course of the evening we counted 18 meteors. But a meteor storm?  To use the Yiddish word that means what you think it means, we saw bupkis.  Somewhat disappointed, we went indoors and completed a quiet evening.

 

            The next day, I examined the pictures I took.  I have found that it is very difficult for a camera to record all but the brightest meteors, even from the major showers.    But the second picture I saw captured the bright meteor  I saw just south of  Corvus in Hydra, and the third frame  recorded a fainter one.   All in all, the camera counted five meteors, only the first of which I actually saw.  And one frame displayed two meteors!

 

            Even though these meteors were generally faint, they moved so slowly that they showed up nicely on the camera.  So this crazy little shower produced more meteors on camera than any other meteor shower I have witnessed.  The experience proved to me that meteor showers, while poorly predictable, do offer surprises , and this one certainly did.

 

There was more.  In Electronic Telegram 5125 of the International Astronomical Union, Daniel Green suggested that “a very faint glow from scattered sunlight may be visible in the sky centered …  in Leo.”    I had no difficulty at all seeing that glow in Leo, particularly when I used averted vision,  and I also noted its absence on the following night.  (I saw a similar glow during the strong Perseid meteor shower in 1992.)

 

The best (by far) meteor shower I saw was the Leonids, from near Alice Springs, Australia, in 2001.  During that night Wendee and I counted 2406 meteors.  This year’s Tau Herculids might have been less than stellar, but the sky was clear, the night was beautiful, and we enjoyed being outside as planet Earth raced through the emptiness of space, picking up cosmic dust on its windshield along the way.