Observations - Intro

OPENING QUESTIONS: How do you suppose that we determine the location for objects in outer space (especially for the hundreds of billions of objects OUTSIDE our solar system)?

OBJECTIVE: I will be able to navigate through the Stellarium program during today's class.

I will be able to pick an object in the sky above the city/town on the date I was born using Stellarium during today's class.

WORDS FOR TODAY:

  • Right Ascension
  • Declination
  • Sidereal Time
  • Transit
  • Meridian Flip
  • Magnitude
  • Size

LINKS:

GHHS Observing Program

WORK O' THE DAY: 

Jack and Ashley are filling in for me today! (YAY!!!). Hopefully they were able to print some flash cards for equipment for you today. If not, let's try to get those started, if not, we'll start with that tomorrow!

I'll pass out a written copy of our class 'Observation Plan' tomorrow, but for today, Jack and Ashley will help you explore how to find objects in the sky as if you were going to do an observation.

We're going to dig right in and imagine we are doing an observation TONIGHT on the Pinwheel Galaxy. It just so happens it is in a very good position in the sky to do that!

Jack & Ashley: Please introduce Stellarium and the various steps we use Stellarium for when we plan an observation:

      • Why Declination matters (especially in relation to Gig Harbor latitude is 47 degrees 10 minutes
      • How Right Ascension (RA) changes
      • How we have to be aware of what Meridian Flip is and when that occurs
      • Various other settings and options in Stellarium

Our goal over the next few days is to develop an observation plan to find an object in the sky above the city you were born in on the day you were born!!

We'll fire that up online (that's not quite a strong as the stand-alone program).

Find the Pinwheel Galaxy and see if you can determine if it is dark enough to take picture of that object.

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Stellarium is a fantastic planetarium program that we can use right on our computers, tablets and smart phones.

That's the good news.

The somewhat more difficult part of things is that Stellarium is a fairly complex program to learn.

For that reason we're going to spend our first day or two getting our feet wet with that program and learning how to do basic navigation and such with the help of our observation team.

Our goal over the next few days is to develop an observation plan. The weather is really not good at the moment, but we'll pretend that it is actually not the case

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