Telescope Installation for School Completed

Phase two of the telescope and mount installation for Sacred Heart School's observatory in Kingston, MA is now complete. This past week Insight Observatory staff members Harry Hammond and Michael Petrasko completed the tasks of balancing and polar aligning the telescope, as well as configuring the Losmandy Gemini 2 GOTO system that controls the Losmandy G11 equatorial mount. After many attempts at the planning phase, 2 have failed due to the unstable weather conditions during this New England summer, there was finally a nice cool front that pushed through allowing good seeing conditions to align the telescope with the north celestial pole and achieve first light through the Celestron 11 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope that was physically installed a few months ago.

Insight Observatory staff member Harry

 Hammond configuring Gemini 2 GOTO system.

While taking advantage of daylight in the early part of the evening, the IO staff used the opportunity to balance the telescope with the additional counterweight needed to offset the weight of the 2" eyepiece that was provided with the telescope by the manufacturer. Once the telescope was perfectly balanced, the sky started to darken so they could then polar align the telescope. Once Polaris (the North Star) was visible, they were successful with the polar alignment. First light with the new telescope was the red star Arcturus in the constellation of Bootes. It was confirmed that the polar alignment was accurate by viewing Arcturus in the eyepiece over a time period of about five minutes. The star never drifted out of view as the tracking was perfect.

The next and final step was configuring the Gemini 2 GOTO system that would allow observers to slew the telescope to any astronomical object in the system's database of thousands of deep-sky objects. Once the Gemini 2 was configured with the latitude and longitude of the observatory's location and other required information, the IO staff's first GOTO deep-sky target was to be M13, the great globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. Once the target was entered into the LCD hand controller, the telescope slewed its way directly to the open cluster. The view of this celestial object was amazing! The stars across the plane of the cluster resolved nicely and as Harry commented, the object was "Very defined."

M13 - Globular Cluster in Hercules - Image by Michael Petrasko

The Sacred Heart Observatory is now ready for hands-on observational astronomy education. This new contemporary telescope and the mounting system should provide students with an awe-inspiring portal to the universe.

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Wide-Field Galaxy Imaging

The night sky in the spring is packed with a plethora of galaxies just waiting to be observed and imaged. Recently I was browsing through my copy of Sky and Telescope's "Pocket Sky Atlas" by Roger W. Sinnott. I came across the pages that cover the constellations Virgo and Coma Berenices. After noticing how many "red" symbols were on the page representing galaxies in the area of these constellations, I had the idea of remotely imaging a particular area that would be condensed with some of these galaxies with a wide-field telescope.

Galaxy Group in the Virgo Cluster with NGC 4461 in the Center Image by Michael Petrasko and Muir Evenden

I then accessed the planetarium software on my computer, "Stellarium", to determine the best time to image a cluster of galaxies. After surveying the night sky in New Mexico in the software, setting the time of night roughly an hour and a half after sunset there, I found a grouping of island universes in Virgo that would be worth giving a shot at. I found a galaxy in the grouping that would be the "targeted center galaxy" for the image frame. This galaxy would be NGC 4461, a spiral galaxy in Virgo. I ended up taking a series of ten luminance images over a period of two nights on T14, a Takahashi FSQ Fluorite 160mm telescope with an SBIG STL-11000M CCD camera via the itelescope.net remote robotic telescope network. My associate, Muir Evenden, then processed the raw image files using the CCD image processing software PixInsight. What I found interesting about the results was all of the different types of spiral galaxies that were caught in the image.

This type of data gathering could be a fun and interesting exercise for students participating in astronomy education projects. Students could be tasked with identifying the designations and galaxy types in the image field utilizing astronomy software and/or star atlases as I did.

The galaxies caught in my image are located in the Virgo Cluster. This cluster of galaxies whose center is about 53.8 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Comprising approximately 1300 (and possibly up to 2000) member galaxies, the cluster forms the heart of the larger Virgo Supercluster, of which the Local Group is an outlying member.

Many of the brighter galaxies in this cluster, including the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, were discovered in the late 1770s and early 1780s and subsequently included in Charles Messier's catalog of non-cometary fuzzy objects. Described by Messier as a nebula without stars, their true nature was not recognized until the 1920s.

The cluster subtends a maximum arc of approximately 8 degrees centered in the constellation Virgo. Many of the member galaxies of the cluster are visible with a small telescope. Its brightest member is the elliptical galaxy Messier 49; however, its most famous member is the also elliptical galaxy Messier 87, which unlike the former is located in the center of the cluster.

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The Great Fireball of 1966

At around 7:15pm on Sunday, April 24, 1966 - forty-eight years ago tonight - I was 8 years old and just passing by the open front door to our house, which faced due west, at 55 Haddon Ave., Falmouth, Mass. I remember that the sky was still light and absolutely cloudless (about 30 minutes after sunset) when I noticed a ball of light about the size and brightness of the full moon approaching from just slightly to the left, or, south. I remember feeling frozen in place as I watched this thing – I thought it was maybe a burning aircraft – moving parallel with the rooftop of the Hall School which was about 200 ft. away, directly across the street from the house. My brother, Barry, and cousin, “Binky”, yelled over to us as they crossed the front yard later that night, that they had seen a “flying saucer” earlier, just above the Falmouth Public Library, which was just across the street to the south. Something was mentioned about the Lawrence High School just across Shiverick’s pond to the west, and the Falmouth Fire Department was mentioned also. Funny that I did not connect these two events! (This is the night I had run out the front door into the street and stubbed my big toe!)

Sky and Telescope Magazine Cover - June 1966

The object was very bright and seemed to have what I thought of as “sparks” coming from the trailing end, which was teardrop-shaped. It had a long, even, white train of smoke trailing behind it, much like a thick contrail, which crossed the entire length of the sky. At times, the object's trailing edge became greenish in color, the leading edge yellow-orange, while the main body remained white. It seemed to pulse slowly several times, brightening with each pulse and I wondered if something else was going to happen to it. During these moments of brightening, the “sparks” separated from the main body and trailed it by at least two or three diameters. I remember thinking how strange it was that these sparks, or fragments, were detaching from the object and that they became visible only after they were some distance behind it. The fragments themselves alternated green and orange and left short trails of their own. I distinctly remember thinking that I couldn’t account for what it was I was seeing and I was especially boggled by the fragments trailing behind the object, seems to ignite only after they were some distance away. I wished that I could predict what was going to happen to the object next but I had had no similar prior experience with anything like this. I felt quite at a loss for an explanation for what I saw. Later that night, I heard my mother on the phone, tell someone that there had been an announcement about the object on TV, about halfway through The Andy Griffith Show. I don’t know what channel it was or what the station call letters were.

The object seemed to move perfectly parallel to the school rooftop, which was just a degree or two below the object, as it moved in a South to North direction. I was struck by the object's slow speed – about the speed of any plane I might have seen on the horizon at any other time. It seemed to take a long time to move across my entire field of view, which was clear all the way from the south to the north, except for the low school rooftop. The rooftop spanned almost the entire length of the western horizon but was itself only about five degrees in height and perfectly flat. I don’t remember hearing any sound at all. I remember thinking that the thing was going to explode at any time after it had swelled again and again. I remained quiet the whole time, not wanting to call out or call attention to the thing, but just watching and waiting to see what was going to happen next. I don’t remember anyone else being around, anyway. Again, it seemed as if the event was endless and it struck me how the object seemed to go through many changes during its flight. I estimate the duration of the flight at about 30 seconds. Finally, it seemed to break apart completely and fade out just before disappearing below the tree line in the NNW.

A similar, nearly identical incident occurred in the summer of 1979 or 1980, during the late afternoon (I don't remember the date), which I also witnessed while at work at Quickset Harbor. A similarly sized object had entered the atmosphere - I estimated somewhere over Maine or Nova Scotia - at the NNE tree line and disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean, at roughly the SE tree line. I was able to time the duration of this object's flight - or as much of it as I had witnessed - at 45 seconds. The object's train, speed, and its color approximated that of the 1966 incident. My sister, Linda, claimed to have seen the object while in a friend's boat on Vineyard Sound, just outside of Falmouth Harbor.

I feel very lucky to have seen such rare and wonderful things.

Almost three months after the 1966 incident, on Friday, July 1st, Barry and Binky’s band, “The Beau Brines” opened for “The Animals” at the Cape Cod a-Go-Go, in Yarmouth, MA. On Christmas of that same year, I received my second telescope, a 3-inch Newtonian reflector. It had a white cardboard tube with a screw-clamp ball-and-socket tripod mount. I saw the moon for the first time with this instrument. I also had a black-tubed 3-inch alt-azimuth reflector a year or two earlier, but other than burning my retina with it trying to locate the sun, I only remember using it to try to locate the moon. I didn't find the moon but I did find the sun! This was also the year that I got to sit in the pilot’s seat of John Glenn's Mercury space capsule, “Friendship 7”.

Dale Alan Bryant
Senior Contributing Science Writer

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