Observation 2/25/11

Tonight, I went outside to look up at the stars from my driveway in Sarasota at about 9:00 pm.  I could not see the moon from where I was at that time, but I know that it would be in its waning crescent phase.  I could, though, see a few stars.  Most of them were located in the western portion of the sky, and I'm pretty sure that I saw Antares and the rest of the Scorpius constellation.

APOD 3.6

For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called Mammatus Clouds Over Olympic Valley.  It is a picture of a different type of cloud, which were above Olympic Valley, California in August.


These clouds are different than normal clouds.  Regular clouds are flat on the bottom, which is a result of the moist warm air rising and cooling to condense into water droplets at a set temperature.  These actions typically correlate with a very specific height.  Then, the water forms and the air becomes an opaque clouds.  At other times and under certain conditions, however, clouds develop containing large droplets of water or ice that will fall into the clear air as they are evaporating.  These types of cloud pockets do not occur in regular clear air, but rather in more turbulent air like during or near a thunderstorm.  This can be seen at the top of an anvil cloud.  An anvil cloud has a flat bottom, and contains small droplets of water and ice.  It has an anvil shape from the upward air reaching a stable atmospheric layer.  The pockets that form near thunderstorms result in the making of mammatus clouds, which can look really dramatic if the sun is hitting them from one side.    Mammatus clouds, specifically, are pouch-like cloud structures and are a rarely seen type of cloud that looks as though it is sinking in air.  These clouds are not harmful, and if anything, show that the brunt of the storm has passed.  They extend from a cumolonimbus cloud, but can also be found under altocumulus, altostratus, stratocumulus, cirrus, and volcanic ash clouds.  Mammatus clouds tend to clump together in groups, which vary from a couple clouds to over hundreds of kilometers of them being organized along a line, that are usually composed of either unequal or similar-sized lobes.

Biography On Antonia Maury

Antonia Maury

Antonia Maury was born in Cold Spring, New York on March 21, 1866.  Her full name is Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Maury.  Both of her parents had connections to science.  Antonia’s dad (Mytton Maury) was a protestant minister.  He educated her until she ended up going to Vassar College, where Maria Mitchell then got her interested in astronomy.  Her mother was Virginia Draper Maury, who was Henry Draper’s sister.  Maury graduated with honors from Vassar College in 1887 and was a student of Maria Mitchell.  Maury graduated in 1887 with honors in astronomy, physics, and philosophy.  Then, her father asked Pickering to employ Antonia in her work, and she was added to his staff of women “computers.

            Pickering hired Maury in 1888 as a computer; because of the endowment to Harvard College Observatory for the Henry Draper Catalogue protect her aunt Anna Draper.  Her job was to compute, record, and catalogue stellar spectra for the stars in the northern hemisphere.  But, this job proved too monotonous for Maury because her interest leaned more towards theoretical work.  She found that stars were more complex than previously thought, and she found that OBAFGKM was too simplistic for what she was dealing with.  So, Antonia replaced it with her own system of 22 groups based on a sequence of descending temperature.  Within the groups, she noticed that two stars with the same pattern of lines and color were portraying differences in line width and sharpness.  So, Maury began to make subdivisions for the star groups with these properties.  Unfortunately, Pickering frowned upon theoretical work in his computers.  So, the relationship between the two became tense.  This, in turn, caused her intermittent employment during her years at Harvard College Observatory.  She soon proved to be one of Pickering’s most original thinkers, but he was only annoyed, instead of proud, about her independence. So, Antonia ended up leaving his group in 1892 without completing her studies because she could no longer stand having her original thinking mind enduring Pickering’s tunnel vision.

            Although Pickering might not have appreciated Antonia’s uniqueness, one person did take notice of her classification skills.  Danish astrophysicist Ejnar Hertzprung objected strongly to the omission of Maury’s classification in the completed catalog.  He thought her separation of the c and ac stars was a very important advancement in stellar classification.  So, Hertzprung went on to make the Hertzprung-Russell diagram, in which her thoughts were incorporated.  There were many star catalogs published, but only Maury’s classification provided the distinction that Hertzprung was searching for.  Pickering might have misjudged the importance of Maury’s work, but her work for spectral analysis was finally recognized in 1922.  This was when the International Astronomical Union modified its official classification system based on Antonia Maury’s system to include the prefix c-to a certain spectral type defined by narrow and sharp lines. 

            Maury continued to work on her spectral project , even after leaving Harvard Observatory.  Pickering made her choose between completing her work, or turning her work over to somebody else.  She did want to finish her project, but she wanted to be recognized for her work.  Antonia even told Pickering herself that nobody else should do her work, because they were her own ideas and she wanted to be acknowledged for them.  Maury wanted full credit for her theory of the relations of the star spectra and also for her theories in regard to Beta Lyrae.  Pickering wrote back crudely, wanting her to settle for standard acknowledgement, which Maury would not settle for.  But, in the end, she got her way.  Her catalog became the first issue to have the name of a woman on the title page, in volume 28 of the Harvard Annals in 1897.  She had 4,800 photographs of which her work was based on, with 681 northern stars classified according to her system.

            Antonia continued to study spectroscopic binary stars.  She returned to Harvard over a decade later, after the publication of her catalog.  Maury started to focus more attention onto the complex spectroscopic binary, Beta Lyrae.  She apparently examined almost 300 spectra for this star, and published her results in a treatise published in the Harvard Annals in 1933. 

            Maury taught a lot in the 1890s.  She taught in Massachusetts and New York.  She then went on to give lectures on astronomy at Cornell and other such colleges, to different groups of people.  Antonia then went back to Harvard in 1918 as an adjunct professor, and she was able to work better with Pickering’s successor, Harlow Shapley.  Up until she retired in 1948 she examine the spectra of Beta Lyrae. 

            Antonia Maury was also an accomplished ornithologist and a conservationist.  She fought to save forests and became a member of societies such as the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the National Audubon Society.  Maury then died at a hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York on January 8, 1952.

            After Maury passed, Cecilia Pyne-Gaposchin, who worked at the Harvard Observatory starting in 1923, talked about her and her work habits.  According to Payne-Gaposchkin, Maury enjoyed talking a lot as an outlet, and nobody would ever listen to her scientific questionings, as far as she knew.

Star Gazing Session 2/20/11

Tonight, I went to the star gazing session at 7:30 pm at Pine View.  We went through the identifications of constellations and major stars.  We were able to identify the winter constellations.  This included Orion, Taurus, Lepus, Columba, Eridanus, Lynx, Auriga, Fornax, and Canis Major.  And, we were able to pick out major stars such as Aldebaren, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Capella, Sirius, Polaris, Hyades, and Achernar.  In the western portion of the sky, Jupiter could be seen until about 8:30 pm, when it began to set.  With the telescope, we were able to see Jupiter.  Through the set of binoculars, we viewed Hyades.  We were showed where the equator line was in the sky.  Overall, it was a good experience and I learned where objects were in the sky so i can more easily identify what I see in the night time sky while I am out in my driveway making observations by myself.

APOD 3.5

For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called X-Class Flare.  It is a picture of a very powerful explosion on the Sun that occurred on Valentines Day, but was updated on February 17, 2011. 


X-class flares are very large.  They are major events that can trigger planet-wide radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms.  This particular flare happened to be the biggest flare so far in Solar Cycle 24.  Solar Dynamics Observatory was able to give us this extreme ultraviolet image, where they successfully captured the flare occurring.  The flare is said to have erupted from AR1158, one of the active regions in the Sun's southern hemisphere.  Active regions are areas on the Sun where groups of sunspots lie.  The flare is an intense burst of radiation, which temporarily overwhelmed pixels in the observatory's detectors, which caused the vertical streak on the lower right half of the Sun in the picture.  The flare wasn't the only thing that happened on the Sun that day.  A coronal mass ejection also occurred, which is a huge cloud of charged particles traveling outward at about 900 kilometers per second. Basically, erupting filaments are lifting off of the active solar surface and blasting enormous bubbles of magnetic plasma into space.   Aurora were said to have occurred later that night. 

Works Cited: Antonia Maury

"AMaury." The Woman Astronomer. Web. 04 Feb. 2011.

 <http://www.womanastronomer.com/amaury.htm>.

"Antonia Maury Biography, Life and Career Facts, Invented « Info." Free Articles Base. Web. 13 Feb. 2011. <http://pagerankstudio.com/Blog/2010/09/antonia-maury-biography-life-and-career-facts-invented/>.

"Antonia Maury." Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2nd ed. Vol20. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 252-254. Gale Virtual Reference Library.  Web.  4 February 2011.    <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CCX3404707636&v=2.1&u=fl_sarhs&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w>.

"Antonia Maury." NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Web. 13 Feb. 2011. <http://www.nndb.com/people/496/000170983/>.

Observation 2/13/11

Tonight, I went out and looked up at the sky from my driveway in Sarasota at about 7:30 pm.  I saw the moon shining almost directly above in about the east-west region of the sky.  It is in its waxing gibbous phase, and about 75 percent of it is illuminated.  I saw a few stars around the moon.  I think I was able to make out three stars of Orion's Belt from the Orion Constellation.

APOD 3.4

For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called Iridescent Clouds from the Top of the World Highway.  It is a picture of a cloud that has many different colors to it.  This particular picture of an iridescent cloud was taken last year from the Top of the World Highway, which is right outside Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory in Northern Canada.  This highway was given its name because of its length, as it is 79 miles long.  It also skirts the crests of hills, giving a great sight on the valleys below.


These types of clouds are either known to display unusual colors vividly, or to show a whole spectrum of colors at the same time.  They are made of small water droplets which all have about the same size.  What happens is, when the Sun is in the right position and mostly hidden by big clouds, these thinner iridescent clouds can diffract sunlight, with different colors being deflected by different amounts. So, observers will see the colors in different directions.  A lot of these types of clouds start with having uniform regions of iridescence, but they rapidly become too thick and/or mixed up, or they are too far from the Sun to give off striking colors.  The colors are essentially in corona fragments.  Another name for iridescence is irisation, which is derived from the Greek language as well.  The bands and colors are usually seen at the clouds' edges, or in coronal rings in the clouds.  As the clouds evolve, the colors and bands come and go.  Iridescence occurs mostly in altocumus clouds, but can also occur in cirrocumulus and lenticular clouds.  Although some iridescence is seen far away from the Sun, it is more often seen close to the Sun.  One can also find iridescence in most rocket exhaust trails.

Observing 2/4/11

Tonight, I went outside to look up at the sky from my driveway in Sarasota at around 9:00 p.m.  I could not see the moon from where I was, but I am guessing it would currently be a small crescent in its waxing crescent phase.  I did see quite a few stars though.  I am pretty positive that I saw the four bright stars of the Pegasus constellation once again in the southeastern portion of the sky.  And, in the western portion of the sky, I saw an object shining brightly, which appeared to be the planet Jupiter.

APOD 3.3

For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called Moon and Venus Over Switzerland, uploaded on February 4, 2011.  It is a beautiful picture of a chilly-looking Switzerland, with Venus and the Moon seen high above in the right corner of the picture.


This picture was taken just before sunrise on this past Sunday.  It was taken from a snow-covered slope in the eastern portion of Switzerland.  The village of Trubbach lies under a vast stretch of clouds, which appear to be a blanket over the land.  Mittlerspitz Mountain is seen, covered with ice and snow, in the upper left of the image.  Just below the sun, the Alps Mountains are seen on the right.  But, in the upper right is the subject of the image.  The moon is seen as a small crescent, and up above it is Venus.  Venus is a morning planet for the month, but probably won't be found in such a serene setting as this one.