Hi Friends of the Copernican Observatory and Planetarium at CCSU. We will be in this Saturday December 20th from 2:00 PM until 10:00 PM for our regularly scheduled public program starting at 8:00 PM with our science fun activities starting at 7:30 PM. We will try to eat up in the Geological Sciences Conference room up on the fifth floor if there are no other students in it. Otherwise we will eat in the planetarium again. If you can’t get in call our office at 860-832-2950 and leave a message if no one answers. I will try to keep checking on my phone for messages just in case the building is locked on Saturday. Our semester is over but our winter intersession is already holding classes so there are classes this Saturday but I have no idea if the building will be open to get into in the afternoon or not. Don’t let this deter you from coming, just call my office and I will and let me know which door you are waiting at and I will try to get to you within five or so minutes. Hopefully the building will not be locked and we won’t have to worry about any of this. There are no other programs booked into the planetarium during the Holiday weeks which is unusual for us. It might give me the time to get some other work done, or take some much needed time off too. Our next program will be the public show on Saturday January 3rd. I plan to be in from 2:00 till 10:00 on that Saturday too and I mention it now just in case I take some days off in the next few days and don’t get another planetarium news off to you before then. I also have to apologize for not mentioning the Geminid Meteor shower which peaked on the night of December 13th. Thankfully we had a scout program here last Saturday and were observing with our rooftop observatory and saw quite a few bright meteors. Enough to remind me that there was a meteor shower that night. One of the strange things we observed here was that it seemed to peak right around 9:00 PM, which is well before midnight. Mostly meteor showers peak after midnight but not the Geminids this year. So even though there were no planets to see with our telescope the scouts, parents, and siblings, had a grand time watching the sky show that these meteors put on in the sky that night. I still think the best meteor shower I ever saw was the Leonid Meteor Shower of November 11, 2001. That one had at least a meteor every three or four seconds on average and they were brighter than most meteors. Many looked like Fourth of July sparklers being tossed across the sky and they made very distinct shadows in the ground. Because the meteors were moving rapidly across the sky the shadows the trees were making in the woods we walked through to get to the field where we observed them were moving across the ground. It was very fascinating and very eerie all at the same time. The guest Speaker at the Greater Hartford Astronomical Society Meeting on Wednesday night (Dec. 17th) was Dr. Cynthia Peterson from UConn. She gave a great talk that I will use as the basis for a few short astronomy subjects in the next couple of issues of our planetarium news. If you may all attend these talks even if you are not members of the Astronomical Society of Greater Hartford and many of them this year have been very good. Look at the < asgh.org > web site for information about future speakers over the next few months and please take advantage of the information you can glean from their talks if you can come to them. Anyhow Dr. Peterson started out with the new information from the European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta mission. The program scientists from the ESA have proprietary rights to the information so they will release it as they get to study it before anyone else does so the information might take a little while to filter down to the rest of us astronomers. One thing we learned from the mission already is the water ice on the comet is much richer in deuterium than anyone suspected. This has broad implications since we don’t see as much deuterium in the water we have here on Earth. Some of the ESA scientists are interpreting this to mean that it water we have on Earth didn’t originate from comets hitting the earth after its crust started forming. There have been two competing theories as to the origin of our planet’s water. One says it all came from gaseous emissions from molten magma as it vented into the earth’s atmosphere from active volcanism. Another said it all came from comets colliding with the earth and depositing their water onto our planet. Problem has always been that either of both theories can explain the amount of water the Earth has. Which means if both mechanisms supplied the Earth with its water we should have twice as much as we have today. So why didn’t the asteroids that made up the earth by accretion early in its existence not have as much deuterium in them as the comets do today, if you buy into the idea that all comets have water with high amounts of deuterium in them like the one Rosetta is exploring? Well the early results are beginning to point to a non-cometary origin for the Earth’s water. Another thing that Dr. Peterson mentioned is that we have been accurately mapping the lunar surface for the past five decades and we have found that its surface is not as “dead” as we thought. There is more geologic activity going on than we first thought. We have seen evidence of the surface of the moon pulling apart and causing portions of it to sink between two bordering faults. Also some of the lunar features have shifted their position over time so the crust of the moon is moving. Not like the plate tectonics here on Earth, but there is motion nonetheless. For years we thought the lunar surface was unmoving. Well now we know better. There will be more from Dr. Peterson’s lecture in future installments of the Planetarium News. She gave us lots to think about. Well that is all for this week. If per chance there is no Planetarium News next week I will wish all of you have the merriest of holidays and safe traveling if you are traveling over the holidays. Have a great day. Craig Robinson, Copernican Observatory and Planetarium at CCSU.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 07:17:06 +0000