Nov 21: Constellations R Us

This week, Irene Pease guided the audience through the constellations on the sky. Irene Pease has works as an astrophysics educator and leads astronomy classes as a Brooklyn’s Friendly Neighborhood Astronomer. During the lecture, Irene Pease showed us the distributions of constellations on the dark night sky in well-populated cities (e.g., New York) where city light has been a plague. Ancient sky across different cultures, such as Egyptian, European and Chinese, were compared, which amazingly showed great similarities in the definitions of constellations. She then introduced the modern constellations which were defined by Interactional Astronomical Union (IAU). The celestial sphere are divided into 88 official constellations, most of which inherit their names from their Graeco-Roman predecessors (e.g., Orion, Leo), while those in Southern sky have more modernized names (e.g., Microscopium). By using a ball and a cartoon paper to mimic the earth and horizon, Irene also explained the rotation of the celestial sky relative to the earth and the different paths of stars across the sky as viewed by observers at different latitudes. 

After the lecture, a video “The First Earth-sized World of Alpha Centrauri” was shown to the audience. This 7-minute long video introduced the first earth-sized planet orbiting around the star Alpha Centauri. On the roof, observations of double-star Alberio, open cluster Pleiades were led by graduate student, Jose Zorrilla. 

-- Yong Zheng (graduate student)

March 21-23: Stargazing with BAM

In partnership with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Columbia Astronomy Public Outreach put on a trio of stargazing sessions in Brooklyn over spring break. These "star parties" were a complement to another event at BAM on those same nights entitled Planetarium - a musical collaboration between Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Sufjan Stevens. The three musicians produced an collection of songs by the same name inspired by the Solar System. 

We transported four telescopes (three Dobsonians, and a Celestron) from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn and set them up on the roof of the new Fisher Building. Even though it was quite cold and windy, the skies were extremely cooperative, allowing for a full hour of observing on all three nights. Our celestial targets included the Moon, Jupiter, the Orion Nebula, and the Mizar-Alcor star system. 

Huge thanks to BAM for reaching out to us and to all who attended. Special thanks to all our volunteers - undergraduate: Doug Thornhill; graduate students: Lia Corrales, Ximena Fernandez, Erika Hamden, David Hendel, Duane Lee, Jenna Lemonais, Steven Mohammed, Dan D'Orazio, Adrian Price-Whelan, and Munier Salem; and post-docs: Josh Peek and Matt Turk. 

--Summer Ash (Director of Outreach)

(Photo credit: Ed Lefkowicz)

March 28: A visit to PS 282 in Park Slope, Brooklyn

Today, March 28, 2011, in the morning three Columbia University Astronomy Department graduate students and one undergraduate visited PS 282 in Brooklyn with two telescopes in tow. As the moon was a few days past third-quarter phase, it was possible to see both the sun and the moon! 120 first graders braved the cold and waited patiently for their turn to take a look at each of these celestial objects. Many of them had never looked through a telescope before and were very excited that they could see dark and light spots and even a few craters on the moon's surface as well as sunspots on the Sun. At the end of the visit, each class was presented with 3D images of the Sun, posters, and some CD-ROMs for distribution among the students.

Many thanks to the volunteers who made the trek out to another borough to help raise astronomy awareness.