Alex Herwig Project & Photo

51 years ago on April 12th, 1961, the Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history as the first human to enter outer space. Exactly 20 years later, the United States innovated the space age by launching the Space Shuttle (April 12th, 1981).

Yuri’s Night, which commemorates these events, aims to celebrate humanity’s past present and future in space launches Yuri’s Night celebrations this week around the world. The Bay Area has already started festivities with the inaugural San Francisco SpaceUp unconference. There are also options for celebrating Yuri’s Night in the East Bay, San Francisco and San Jose on April 12, 2012 and throughout next week.

SpaceUp

SpaceUp is an unconference all about space exploration. Participants decide event topics, schedule, and structure. I put on my Yuri’s Night hat and attended the first San Francisco installment of SpaceUp over the weekend of March 31st to April 1st and had a great time.

The unconference approach let a great diversity of people engage and network in a way that led to long conversations after the conference as well as intersection points you never would make at a normal conference. Highlights for me were reconnecting to contacts from NightLife, hearing the sheer enthusiasm of the Kepler Center director as he conveyed results of the mission, seeing the results of a moon-bounce, learning how crowdfunding can let the average person tour around space with the website launch of Idreamofspace.com, and understanding how synthetic biology will play its own part in longer missions and settlement.

East Bay

Kid friendly and family activities will be taking place the day of April 12th from 12pm to 4pm at Chabot Space and Science Center. You can find out if you have the right stuff to be an astronaut in their Astronaut Lab and Beyond Blast Off exhibit. Activities include building a rocket and blasting it into space or trying to keep your heart rate down while being subjected to extreme pressure. Hand-eye-brain coordination can also be tested using black hole goggles.

The Yuri’s Night activities are part of Chabot’s Break into Spring programming and more activities for the week can be found on their website. If you want to stare into the further reaches of space, the observatories are open for extended hours for both daytime and evening viewing throughout the week and weekend.

San Francisco

My museum alma mater, the California Academy of Sciences, will once again feature Yuri’s Night programming for the 21+ crowd at the Space Oddities NightLife on April 12th from 6pm to 10pm. Highlights of the night include: music by the San Francisco favorite DJ collective Space Cowboys, meeting researchers from UC Berkeley Space Science Laboratory, hands on activities at the Surfin’ the Solar Wind Booth, a NASA Kepler Mission presentation by Dr. Steve B. Howell at 7:30pm in the Forum Theater, and special showings of Dawn of the Space Age in the Planetarium. I’m sure cameras will be flashing as Yuri’s Night at Cal Academy has a history of inspiring great intergalactic costumes. Loretta Hildago Whitesides who co-created Yuri’s Night came the first year as a very convincing Princess Leia!

San Jose

Until April 15th, The Tech Museum is featuring a temporary exhibit– NASA’s Destination Station. It tells the story of the International Space Station (ISS) within a multimedia exhibit. You can learn about the 24/7/365 space-based research and how that research affects everyday life on Earth. The exhibit has hands-on activities, imagery and audio-visual technology connecting visitors to the destination of space.

If there are other events that should be highlighted, leave them in the comment section below or register them on the Yuri's Night website.

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, also known as SOFIA. (Photo: NASA)

The new SOFIA observatory isn't your average NASA project. Engineers took a 30-year old 747 airplane, cut a hole in the side and installed a 17-ton telescope. Most telescopes are either on the ground or somewhere in orbit, but SOFIA falls somewhere in the middle, flying around at about 40,000 feet.

I got the chance to hitch a ride on one of its recent research flights as the plane left Moffett Field at the NASA Ames Research Center. It's definitely not the kind of flight where you get a bag of peanuts and movie.

The researchers take advantage of the nighttime sky, so we left at dusk for 10-hour tour flying zigzags across the Pacific Ocean. Each leg of the journey is carefully calculated so the telescope can pinpoint a far away star. The plane interior is packed with computers and equipment. It also lacks insulation since much of it was removed to install the telescope, so it's both cold and loud inside.

At four in the morning, the astronomers are still hard at work. If they're as tired as I am, they certainly aren't showing it.

"For me, this is very exciting," says Ian McLean, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He usually works on the ground. "All my career has been ground-based astronomy. So, it's only my second flight."

McLean says there's a good reason to do astronomy in the stratosphere. The atmosphere is thinner, which means it's easier for the telescope to see the stars. "It's almost as good as space," says McLean. "Not quite, but almost."

And unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, this telescope lands everyday, which means the scientists can update and fix the equipment. "By the time you get a mission into orbit, the technology you're using is relatively old. Here we can stay state of the art all the time," says McLean. NASA began developing SOFIA in 1997 and almost cancelled the project at one point. It flew its first science mission in November 2010 and now costs about $80 million a year to operate.

Searching for a "Holy Grail"

McLean says the SOFIA telescope could show astronomers something that's considered a Holy Grail in their field: seeing a star being born. It happens in huge, dusty clouds – stellar nurseries, as Mclean calls them. "The cloud is huge, light years across and it's gradually contracting to form a whole nursery of stars."

Inside NASA's SOFIA Observatory, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

But there's a problem. Astronomers can't see what's happening inside the clouds because, once again, they're made of dust and it's hard to see through.

"We don't mean dust bunnies, but we mean little, tiny little grains of solid material. Doesn't matter how big a telescope you have, you can't see inside it," McLean says.

That's why SOFIA looks at a special kind of light called infrared light. If you look through a telescope on the ground, you're looking at the visible light from space – the light our eyes can see. Infrared light is invisible to us, but it penetrates space dust, which means the telescope can see through the dust too.

"You get to see what you can't see with your eye. It's like a window has been opened," says McLean. They're looking for exactly how stellar nurseries give birth to young stars. McLean says catching a star as it's forming can reveal clues about how own solar system formed.

But star birth isn't the only thing these researchers want to see. They're also looking at the way stars die.

A Star on the Way Out

As the plane makes as sharp right turn, the telescope focuses on an object called NGC 7027. It's a planetary nebula – also known as a dying star. McLean and his team are capturing an infrared image of the nebula, which is about 3,000 light years away. They can also see what it's made of.

"It has a distinctive shape. It's oval. There's a hole in the middle and that's because it literally is a shell of gas that came off the star," says McLean.

7027 is dying because the star has run out of fuel – the same fate that our sun will face in about five billion years. As it dies, the star casts off its outer layers, shedding huge amounts of material to form a cloud around it. But it's not entirely a sad story.

"It won't be wasted," says McLean. "The material that was thrown off by that star in its dying phase, somewhere, millions, perhaps billions of years from now, will find its way into a new star and the planets that form around it."

From dead stars come new stars – and planets like our own. The oxygen and nitrogen in our bodies were once formed inside a star. "The cosmos is within us," as astronomer Carl Sagan once said. "We're made of star stuff."

As sky begins to lighten, we descend towards the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in the Mojave Desert, where the plane is based. The SOFIA telescope is now undergoing service upgrades and then will return to the skies three times a week. Astronomers from around the world are lining up to get on board.

Kepler 22B compared to the solar terrestrial planets

It's 600 light years from Earth, orbits a star very similar to our Sun in a period of about 290 days, and has a diameter about two and a half times that of Earth. What is it? It's the NASA Kepler mission's most recent exciting confirmed discovery, the extrasolar-planet (exoplanet) Kepler 22B.

Another real, Earth-sized planet to imagine? Cool! I'm on it….

It's fun to play around with the planetary possibilities, as science fiction writers have done for decades, but having a real find out there to pin our thoughts on is something more. On that blank ball-shaped canvass we can paint whatever atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere–and who knows, biosphere?–we care to imagine, at least until scientific observation starts to fill in those details.

But, Kepler 22B offers something more to our fancy than a mere Earthoid dress-up doll. Being somewhat larger than our world, though still smaller than a Neptune or a Uranus, places it in the category of "super-Earth," a type of planet that we have very little experience with.

What do we know of Kepler 22B beyond the barebone figures revealed by the Kepler spacecraft? In a word, not much. Kepler—a really big camera orbiting the Sun and staring at a patch of 150,000 or so stars in the constellation Cygnus—was designed to detect the presence of Earth-like exoplanets. Using the "transit" method of exoplanet detection, Kepler watches unblinkingly for the slight dimming of a star's light as one of its planets "transits," or moves across, its face.

That dimming can tell us exactly three things: the approximate diameter of the planet by how much of the star's light is blocked, the orbital period of the planet by how often it transits, and the distance between the planet and its star (because once you know the orbital period, you can calculate that distance–or visa versa–as long as you know the mass of the star the planet orbits…which we do).

Being relatively close to the size of the Earth makes Kepler 22B an important find, but maybe more important is the fact of the planet's distance from its star. Kepler's mission isn't merely to find Earth-sized planets, but ones that are within their stars' habitable zones: the right distance so that, given a sufficient atmosphere, liquid water could exist on their surfaces.

Kepler 22B is at that correct distance. Though it is closer to its star than Earth is from the Sun, that star is slightly cooler than the Sun, so its habitable zone is closer in. (Earth is obviously in the Sun's habitable zone; if you're not sure, go get yourself a glass of water.)

But back to what we know, and don't know, about Kepler 22B. Not having a super-Earth in our own Solar System, we don't have an up-close example to study. Is it like Earth, a rocky sphere from the core right up to the visible surface, with an apple-peel thin layer of gas and liquid on top? Or is it more like Uranus, with a solid core deep down with massive layers of fluid and gas upholstered around it? Or something between?

We don't know. Future observations may reveal more about this planet, and others. One day we might know more about Kepler 22B's atmosphere (if it has one) through spectroscopic measurements. If we can make a measurement of the planet's mass, we could calculate its average density and better place it on the spectrum between super-Earth and infra-Uranus.

Were we to travel there, could we land, step outside and breathe the air (as well as strain under a super-Earth's gravity)? Would we sink into the fluid envelope around the hidden core, falling to ever greater depths and atmospheric pressure? Would we find ourselves surrounded by human-sized chimpanzees?

That adventure is yet far in the future…but a lot of fun to imagine in the meantime….

Moon today and during the Cretaceous

Although I am a lifelong fan of science, I've also been a lifelong fan of science fiction—so I sometimes experience conflict in the DMZ where the two meet.

Having been raised on Star Trek, where the science and technology routinely violate known scientific principles (faster than light warp drive, for example), I learned to have leniency on some of those violations—at least, the ones that exist in order to make the story work.

But the stories that get the science completely wrong, for no good reason, get my militia up in arms….

Such was my reaction when, a few weeks ago, I happened upon the last two minutes of the series premiere of a new television show—the one that involves time-traveling colonists going 85 million years into the past to live among the dinosaurs. (Don’t ask me any more about the plot; I’ve only ever caught the last two minutes of each show when I change the channel to wait for House. All I know is each episode seems to end with people creeping through a jungle at night carrying torches….)

So what irked me so badly? Scene: colonists in settlement in Cretaceous jungle, night time, looking up at the starry, Moon-adorned sky. A child muses, "Is that the Moon?" (never having seen it before). "It’s so big!" Indeed, the Moon aloft in these prehistoric skies was depicted as truly huge—I’d estimate ten or fifteen degrees across, about the width of your hand spread wide at arm’s length (20 to 30 times the size of the Moon we know).

Enter "brainy" teenage girl to explain: The Moon is moving away from the Earth a few centimeters each year, so here, 85 million years in the past, it’s much closer to Earth.

How much closer was the Moon to Earth 85 million years ago? Do the math, brain: The Moon is currently moving away from the Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year, so 3.8 cm for 85 million years equals 323 million centimeters. Sounds like a lot, right? 323 million of just about anything seems like a lot. 323 million centimeters is 3,230,000 meters, or 3,230 kilometers. Or a little over 2,000 miles—which, coincidentally, is about the diameter of the Moon itself. Since the Moon is presently 240,000 miles from Earth, being 2000 miles closer to us in the past (about 0.8%) would not have made it perceptibly larger—let alone appearing as big as a cantaloupe!

The Moon has been moving away from the Earth since its formation, which took place about four and a half billion years ago. Through tidal interactions with the Earth, the Moon has "stolen" some of Earth’s rotational momentum (spin) to gradually boost itself farther and farther away, slowing the Earth’s spin as a result. Back in the day when the Earth and Moon were young and fresh—and much closer together—the Earth spun much faster: maybe once in 8 hours. (But that was WAY before life existed, so try not to imagine the dinosaurs experiencing much shorter days, please.)

Oh yeah, in that same two minutes of the show premiere, the "brainy" girl (it’s not her fault; it’s the show’s writers, of course) also had an answer for why all the stars in the Cretaceous sky bore no resemblance to the constellations we know today. The Universe is expanding, she said (correctly), and so in 85 million years that expansion has caused the stars to change position" (not so correctly). The Universe is expanding, yes, correct; the stars in Earth’s skies 85 million years ago would have looked completely different, yes. But the two have nothing to do with each other.

The Universe is expanding and carrying all of the galaxies and galaxy clusters farther and farther apart. But this has no effect on the stars gravitationally bound within each galaxy. At the scale of a single galaxy, like our own Milky Way, the gravity binding the stars together in that great spinning spiral overpowers the effect of space expanding.

The stars we see in our skies are all inside of our galaxy, to which they are gravitationally bound. It is merely the motion of those stars within the galaxy as they orbit the center that change their relative positions, and so the patterns of constellations that we perceive. Analogously, continental drift on Earth may move a pair of land masses away from each other, but that large-scale motion won’t cause the trees within either of those lands to move apart.

Nit picking? Yeah, maybe. But I even do it to Star Trek on occasion….

NASA's Juno spacecraft is shown in orbit above Jupiter's colorful clouds in this artist's rendering. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Even though NASA is no longer in the business of deploying manned-missions to outer space, they continue to explore the cosmos in ways that have never before been possible.  Their next target is Earth's bigger, gassier neighbor: Jupiter.

On August 5, 2011 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in conjunction with the Southwest Research Institute launched the Juno mission,  which NASA says will, "improve our understanding of the solar system’s beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter."

This is a pretty big deal in the world of astrophysics.   NASA scientists theorize they will be able to determine the origin of The Giant Planet, "and thereby the solar system" by measuring the amount of water and ammonia in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio explains the significance of the mission:

"Jupiter is the Rosetta Stone of our solar system.  It is by far the oldest planet, contains more material than all the other planets, asteroids and comets combined, and carries deep inside it the story of not only the solar system but of us. Juno is going there as our emissary — to interpret what Jupiter has to say."

But scientists will have to wait a few years to test their theories.  Even though Juno is traveling at a relative speed of over 13,000 miles an hour, it is not scheduled to reach its final destination until July 2016.

And the ride to Jupiter is not exactly a clear path.  Juno will face many obstacles – including large mentors – that can potentially derail the $1.1 billion project.

Thankfully, scientists can rely on old "maps," or astro-photographic images of the night sky to plan a flight path that will steer the spacecraft away from debris.

Dr. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, says the astro-photographic plates housed at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) contributed directly to the success of the Juno mission;

"Juno, for example, in order for it to be successful they have to design it.  And one of the things they have to design it for is to protect it from meteoroids out in space.  Well we never measured meteoroids around Jupiter, because we don't go there very often, right?  So we have to take what             we've learned here at Earth to help us design that spacecraft to go to Jupiter and those negatives [at the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive] helped formulate the model we used to design that spacecraft to go to Jupiter.

Dr. Cooke is referring to a collection of nearly 150,000 old astro-photographic plates and film known as APDA, or the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive.  The APDA collection is stored at PARI's secure facility in Western North Carolina.

Dr. Cooke became aware of the collection a few years ago and has quickly become on of its biggest advocates:

"The photo archive which contains a lot of the photographs that form the basis of modern meteor science are housed … at ADPA.  They collected them from around the country, but those old photographs, that data, formed the basis for everything we know now in regards to meteors.  So it's kind of like visiting a treasure trove of ancient data.  The great hieroglyphic inscriptions out there in APDA."

Brendan Fallon of the American Meteor Society examines film in the APDA collection.

The connection between APDA and the Juno mission came full orbit during this year's annual NASA Fireball Workshop, which took place at PARI's Rosman, North Carolina campus.  Attendees were able to watch the Juno launch and then walk into the archives to hold the original pieces of film that helped Juno's engineers develop a safe flight path.

By relying on old astronomical plates and film – some of which date over 100 years old – today's astronomers can safely stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and reach for the stars, without fear of being knocked down by meteors.

For more info check out NASA's website for the JUNO mission:

twitter: @NASAJuno

http://missionjuno.swri.edu/

Dr. Michael Catelaz at work on the GAMMA II imaging machine, at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) in North Carolina.

Dr. Michael Castelaz, the Science Director at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, knows GAMMA II is a sleeping giant.  He just needs a little help waking up the beast.

GAMMA II and its sister, GAMMA I, are legendary imaging machines that were used to create the 19-million strong Guide Star Catalogue for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).   Think of the Guide Star Catalogue as a souped-up GPS, enabling the Hubble to set its scope on stars thousands of miles away.

Four years ago, the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University announced it was retiring the image-makers after nearly 20 years of service.

The news swept across the astronomy community and Castelaz and his colleagues at PARI jumped at the opportunity to bring the GAMMA machines to their Western North Carolina campus and reconfigure them for a new cataloging gig.

“It’s old, but it’s still state of the art.  It’s incredible what was done in terms of designing these instruments and getting them going,” Michael Castelaz.

But why bring this beast to PARI? PARI houses a collection of old photographic plates known as the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, or APDA. Those analog plates contain invaluable data of the night sky, but are not easy to share and use. Catelaz and ADPA director Thurburn Barker believe the re-commissioned GAMMA II can help convert those plates– some of which date back to the 1890s – into new digital maps for future astronomers.  The maps will unlock data on thousands of unclassified stars known to exist in the APDA collection that can then be cataloged by their size, temperature and distance.

When PARI finally obtained the machines they were in pieces: three-tons of granite and lasers awaiting their next mission.  The sheer mass of the machines was intended to absorb vibrations from the floor as well the Earth.  In order to effectively serve the Hubble, GAMMA precisely mapped stars down to the exact micron.  That’s a thousandth of a millimeter to you and me. Castelaz and his cohort eventually reassembled GAMMA II and got all the electronics up and running.  However, do to the jerry-rigging and hand-written code used to reconfigure the original machine, they have not been able to recreate the imaging capacity … yet.

As soon as PARI can get GAMMA humming, the APDA collection will no longer be a black hole.  The meticulous work by generations of astronomers will be ushered into the 21^st century, bringing analog data back to the future.

Herbert Mehnert a Cline Scholar at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute spent his summer researching Comet Photometry and Morphology. Herbert was introduced to PARI by one of his college professors and jumped at the opportunity to work at the former NASA research institute.

"People don't look up anymore," explains Herbert Mehnert.

Herbert spent the summer of 2011 working at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute as a Cline Scholar student comet photometry and morphology.

"I think it's partially because the exposure to space and astronomy is much less than it used to be, with government programs being cut and all. When you take someone out here to a dark sky sight and tell them you can see the milky way, they get excited."

When Herbert was introduced to PARI by his college professor, Don Smith, who took them on a field trip to the remote research institute in Rosman, NC, Herbert was excited to know there was a community and research institute full of people interested in the same topics as him, particularly optical astronomy.

Herbert studies Comet Photometry and Morphology. Comet Photometry uses telescopes and cameras to measure the brightness of a comet, which provides scientists with information about its surface, craters, pits, valleys and mountains. The brightness of comets are more difficult to map than stars because the data involves using the nuclear condensation, surrounding cloud or coma and one or more tails extending outward from the comet. Comet Morphology studies the projected velocity and direction of a comet, based on its orbit, trail and size.

What's the difference between a comet and a meteorite? A comet is a structure composed of ice, dust, and elements such as ammonia, carbon dioxide and methane, that orbits around the sun. As it comes close to the sun, the nucleus begins to melt and turn into gas, forming a coma, or cloud. The radiation from the sun pushes this cloud away from the center of the comet, forming a dust tail. The most famous comet, comet Halley, travels around the sun every 76 years, and will reappear in the year 2062. Meteorites on the other hand are solid rock formations found in space. When meteorites enter the earth's atmosphere they heat up and turn into a fire, and appear as a shooting star.

Visit the PARI Sky center for more information and up-to-date celestial news. Also recommended are NASA's page on comets or the Comet Photometry website.

 Capturing the Night Sky: Past and Present Educator Guide

Which begs the question, how did they do that before cell phones? As the saying goes, behind every good digital astronomy app is an analog photographic plate. Beginning in the mid-19th century, astronomers began utilizing the art of photographic emulsion to capture images of celestial objects. For the first time, astronomers were able to etch their discoveries onto thick glass plates ushering in a new era of data analysis that would help unlock the mysteries of the universe.

But don’t take my word for it. If it’s good enough for Einstein, it’s good enough for me.

Photographic plates helped scientists determine the size, distance and composition of celestial objects such as stars, comets, meteors and planets. Galileo Galilei would be proud. By the early 1990s, the once highly esteemed “analog” plates had fallen out of favor for images captured by new, charged-coupled devices such as digital cameras. Many of the old plates were put on the shelf and stored in basements and barns.

PARI to the rescue: the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) is a non-profit astronomy, research and education facility located in western North Carolina. PARI scientists recognized the archival value in saving the old astro-photographic plates and created the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, or ADPA, to be housed at PARI’s vast campus.

I recently had the opportunity to visit PARI, poke around their archives and find out why it’s worth saving the old data. What I discovered was that these plates – which a lay-person like me can easily mistake for a dirty windshield {include pic here} – contain a lot data that’s not only historic, but vital to today’s research.

During our visit we spoke with scientists from NASA (link to web extra) as well as the European Space Agency who attribute the success of current and future space missions to data gleamed from APDA.

It turns out there is no expiration date on these invaluable snapshots of the night sky. The plate’s spectral images act as a time-stamp for what the night sky looked like before it was polluted with what one NASA scientists described as “space junk.”

The scientists at PARI compared their collection to the Library of Alexandria. Science Director Michael Castelaz told me, “If that library hadn’t been destroyed, the knowledge that could have been passed on from the philosophers and the Greeks from three millennia ago would just have benefited us greatly. So I think we’re in the same situation.”

Castelaz believes the hidden potential inscribed in the plates have yet to be fully realized. He and his PARI colleagues are stewards of history, preserving the pates for future generations and ensuring that the next Einstein has the resources to turn the world on its axis once again. After all, the proof is in the plates.

Multi-spectrum composite image of the galactic core. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI .

Attention Galileo guys and gals – download any one of these astronomy apps for your smartphone and you can stop star-guessing and start star-gazing like a pro!

Popular astronomy apps for your iPhone or iPad

Star Search
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-search/id324408084?mt=8

Redshift
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/redshift-astronomy/id390436752?mt=8

Pocket Universe
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocket-universe-virtual-sky/id306916838?mt=8

Star Walk
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-walk-5-stars-astronomy/id295430577?mt=8

Distant Suns
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/distant-suns-3-unleash-your/id363418936?mt=8

SkySafari, aka SkyVoyager
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skysafari/id319159213?mt=8

GPS Astro
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gps-astro/id369884042?mt=8

Delux Moon HD
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deluxe-moon-hd/id428453273?mt=8

Starmap Pro
http://itunes.apple.com/app/starmap-pro/id309367681?mt=8

Star Chart
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-chart/id345542655?mt=8

GoSkyWatch Planetarium
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/goskywatch-planetarium-astronomy/id284980812?mt=8

Solar Walk 3D
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/solar-walk-3d-solar-system/id347546771?mt=8

Popular astronomy apps for your Android

Google SkyMap
http://www.appbrain.com/app/google-sky-map/com.google.android.stardroid

Astro Tools
http://www.appbrain.com/app/astro-tools/com.rafdev.astrotoolsalpha1

SkEye

http://www.appbrain.com/app/skeye/com.lavadip.skeye

Star Chart
http://www.appbrain.com/app/star-chart/com.escapistgames.starchart

Star Odyssey
http://www.appbrain.com/app/star-odyssey/org.randyl.starodyssey

Space Junk Pro
http://www.appbrain.com/app/space-junk-pro/us.xyzw.star3map

Space Junk Lite
http://www.appbrain.com/app/space-junk-lite/us.xyzw.spacejunk

Zenith Mobile Telescope
http://www.appbrain.com/app/zenith-mobile-telescope/com.mobilizy.zenith

SkyORB
http://www.appbrain.com/app/skyorb/com.realtechvr.skyorb

Vortex Planetarium
http://www.appbrain.com/app/vortex-planetarium-astronomy/vortex.planetarium.app.vortex

Planetariax Pro
http://www.appbrain.com/app/planetariax-pro/com.digitaloranges.planetariaxfull

Mobile Observatory PRO
http://www.appbrain.com/app/mobile-observatory-pro/com.kreappdev.astroid

Messier Objects
http://market.android.com/details?id…redale.messier

Clear Sky Droid
https://market.android.com/details?id=org.jtb.csdroid&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsIm9yZy5qdGIuY3Nkcm9pZCJd

Where is Io
https://market.android.com/details?id=net.dague.astro&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsIm5ldC5kYWd1ZS5hc3RybyJd

Fremont Peak is renowned for its views of Monterey Bay to the west and the Hollister Valley to the east. All photos by Andrew Alden.

I often think of the Bay Area as a series of regions dominated by a particular mountain. San Francisco is under the sway of Mount Tamalpais, of course, and the East Bay is Mount Diablo territory. Farther south the skylines feature Black Mountain on the west and Mission Peak on the east, then Loma Prieta and Mount Hamilton respectively. And the area stretching from Gilroy to Monterey is the land of Fremont Peak. It makes a good focus for a day trip.

Let's have a look at the area in the online Geologic Map of the Monterey Quadrangle.

Map from California Department of Conservation

The San Andreas fault slashes across the area southwest of Hollister. To its east are young (Miocene and Pliocene, 7 to 4 million years old) sedimentary rocks that correlate with the huge young sequences in the Central Valley. To its west (on the north side) are older sedimentary rocks mostly dating from the Eocene and Oligocene epochs around 35 million years old. The southern part of the map area, where Fremont Peak lies, is granite and related rocks making up the Gabilan Range. You reach the peak through the town of San Juan Bautista, located directly under the "San Andreas fault" label.

If you have the time to find Anzar Road, north of San Juan Bautista, pay a visit to Anzar Lake, one of the best-developed sag ponds on the San Andreas fault. These form where fault movement causes the ground to sink below the water table.

Anzar Road runs right along the fault trace pointing straight toward San Juan Bautista, where the old Spanish mission sits next to the fault overlooking the fertile soils that once formed the bottom of ancient Lake San Benito. The uplifted ground here made a desirable location, but the mission has suffered several large earthquakes during its history. The town is a good place to acquire lunch, visit the GeoZeum, and admire Fremont Peak from below.

Fremont Peak, formerly known as Gabilan Peak, is the centerpiece of Fremont Peak State Park. The road up the mountain offers eastward views over Hollister Valley to the southern Diablo Range. The vegetation changes as you leave the sedimentary rocks and enter the granite zone. The granite of the Gabilan Range is part of the geologic province called Salinia. It's a segment of the Sierra Nevada that has been carried northward along the San Andreas fault. Other pieces of Salinia occur in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Point Reyes, and as far north as Bodega Head in Sonoma County.

The San Andreas fault runs in front of the chaparral-covered hill at center. Note the change in vegetation as the bedrock changes.

The peak itself is not made up of granite, but rather of the much older metamorphic rocks that lay on top when the granite was emplaced from below. The most distinctive of these rocks is marble. The rock has been so thoroughly squeezed that it contains no fossils from which to determine its age. On the map it's the blue zone labeled "PzMz" or Paleozoic-Mesozoic, the scientific version of "beats me."

The peak itself bears a plaque commemorating the famous stunt pulled by Captain John C. Frémont to taunt the Mexican authorities in early 1846, raising the American flag within sight of the capital in Monterey and Mexican troops gathered to the east. He soon took the flag down, blaming the bad weather, but his point had been made: the United States was coming into the country. The peak itself is a tumble of big marble boulders, worth a close look even if the views are good.

On a clear day the whole sweep of Monterey Bay is visible. The western spine of the mountain consists of marble and beautifully displays the difference that topography makes to plant communities. The cool, sheltered north face is forest while the south face is parched grasslands and wildflowers.

The rock is riddled with small barite mines, and visitors with black lights will get a nice show inside them. At night, the park allows stargazers to view the sky through a 30-inch telescope.