Oakland Unified teachers assembling Galileoscopes at Chabot

Through a generous donation by a concerned citizen (concerned that kids today aren't seeing enough of the sky), Chabot just completed a pair of workshops for Oakland teachers that places in their capable hands and in their classrooms "Galileoscopes"—special telescopes designed and manufactured for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. The Galileoscope is a low cost, simple, but good-quality telescope designed to simulate the power and field of view of Galileo's original telescope, which opened up the universe in such a profound way.

In September and October, a total of 23 Oakland teachers received training, activities, and one Galileoscope each (plus tripod), enabling them to share the experience with their students and, hopefully, spark their imagination and curiosity about the world around us in a way that nothing but astronomy does.

A look through a telescope—any telescope, big or small—does put a spark in the eye and the imagination. At least, that was my experience. Growing up in Oakland back in the 60's, I didn't have access to any small telescopes, but Chabot Observatory was only a couple miles away, and my family often went up on a weekend night for a classroom demo, a planetarium show, and thoroughly enjoyable viewing through the two antique telescopes, Leah and Rachel. Something about the actual light from Saturn or Jupiter or a distant galaxy tickling the receptors in your retina places you out there—or puts those objects directly into your brain.

The Oakland teachers now armed with their Galileoscopes will use these simple but effective tools to show their students the difference between seeing Saturn as a spot of light and Saturn as a disk with "ears" (the appearance of its rings through a Galileoscope), or the difference between Jupiter as a brighter spot of light and Jupiter as a world with a giant storm in its clouds and four smaller "worlds" (moons) in orbit around it, or the difference between the Moon as a disk with light and dark areas that make interesting shapes in our imaginations and the Moon with mountain ranges, vast plains, thousands upon thousands of craters, and shadows stretching across the landscape.

By the way, Galileoscopes can still be ordered, through the Galileoscope website, for a short time still, in case you're interested in getting your toe into the door of a much bigger universe….

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Three views of Jupiter before, during, and after the disappearing act by its four large moons. Credit, Conrad Jung, Chabot Space & Science Center

What am I talking about? About a week ago a relatively rare alignment of Jupiter and its four Galilean moons—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—made for a brief time in which the moons disappeared, hidden behind and in front of their massive parent planet. For that brief time, Earth, Jupiter, and all four Galileans coincided on a nearly perfect line.

The event took place late in the evening on September 2nd, a little after 10:00 PM. Ganymede (the Solar System's largest moon) and Europa (the "snowball" with the probable deep liquid water oceans under its icy crust) crossed in front of Jupiter's disk, and the other pair, Io (the volcano moon) and Callisto passed behind it.

It's not uncommon for one of these moons to be out of view for a time when you aim a telescope at Jupiter. Even Galileo, on his first telescopic look at Jupiter, saw only three of them.

The disappearance of two or three of them at once is more rare, however, and a vanishing act by all four only happens a few times in a lifetime—every century, there are about 20 such alignments. The last such event prior to last week's was back in the 1980's; the next one won't happen until 2019. This event was not only observed on September 2nd by Chabot Space & Science Center astronomer Conrad Jung, but also in 1913 by then Chabot Observatory director Charles Burckhalter.

When Galileo took his newly made telescope and became the first person in history to look at Jupiter through the new invention, he saw three star-like points of light positioned around Jupiter, roughly on a common line that passed through the planet. At first he thought they might be stars, but on subsequent nights he observed that not only did these "stars" follow Jupiter's own movement through space, they changed position relative to each other. This led to Galileo's hypothesis that these were satellites in orbit around Jupiter.

The rest is history (oh, and lifelong house arrest for Galileo for suggesting that there was something in the Universe that didn't revolve directly around the Earth…).

I'm sure that if Galileo had first looked at Jupiter on one of these rare nights and saw no moons, he would certainly have discovered them the next time he looked at Jupiter—so maybe it wouldn't have changed the unfolding of historical events much. But I wonder which would have been more surprising to him: seeing the moons on the first look, or observing them to appear out of nowhere after the initial observation of a solitary Jupiter….

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David Lindberg, Professor of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, and Steve Croft, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley

How do you connect seemingly separate historical events? Team an astrophysicist and an evolutionary biologist of course. David Lindberg, Professor of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, and Steve Croft, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley will tie these great anniversaries in a unique lecture this weekend.

Starting 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang, Steve will trace the evolution of the universe, from scorching hot gas forming galaxies to the continued birth and death of new stars. David will step in and discuss how the history of our special little planet is inexorably tied to material raining down from space. The water in our oceans, the formation of some organic molecules, and even mass extinctions on this planet have largely been determined by extraterrestrial events. And let's not forget Area 51 (that's a joke!).

Astronomy and Evolution: From the Death of the Dinosaurs to the Stardust in your Bones

When: Saturday, August 15^th 11AM – 12 PM

Where: 100 Genetics & Plant Biology Building, UC Berkeley Campus

Cost: Free

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Depiction of Galileo demonstrating his astronomical telescope.

(Almost as famous as this act of opening our eyes to wonders we'd never witnessed, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition for pointing out that there were more things in heaven than were imagined by Church doctrine–but that's another story altogether…)

It's an intriguing fact that, beyond the Sun merely being a bright disk, the Moon a not-so-bright and slightly mottled disk, the stars pinpoints of light and the planets pinpoints of light that move, everything we have learned about the universe and the objects in it we have learned in the last four centuries, since the invention of the telescope and Galileo's putting it to it's most famous use: astronomy.

Galileo saw on the Moon craters, mountains, and valleys, and likened the "uneven, rough… depressions and bulges" to Earth's geographical features. Venus was revealed to undergo lunar-like phases, which provided controversial insight into the layout of the Solar System. Jupiter had four small "star-like" moons that moved around it–which defied Church doctrine holding that everything in the universe goes around the Earth. And Saturn possessed jug-handle-like protrusions, whatever those were!

It may be difficult to imagine what Galileo was feeling when he made these discoveries of things we take for granted. How exciting to peer through that celestial peephole and discover that the Moon is another world, and that there are worlds out there that had never been seen or imagined before. Sure, new discoveries about Mars keep rolling in, and we're finding a new extrasolar planet about every month–but the excitement about these discoveries is tempered by the fact that we already suspected things like these as possibilities. For Galileo, the magnified astronomical sky was practically a blank canvass.

Back to IYA 2009–what's going on? Who's promoting this, and what is being done to celebrate?

NASA is promoting it, and many different organizations (including Chabot and the Eastbay Astronomical Society) are participating in a number of ways: star parties, special programs, special events, and good old fashioned put-your-eye-to-this-telescope-and-gawk public observing activities.
Honestly, there's nothing like looking through a telescope–and it doesn't have to be a large one. I don't doubt that I first became inspired into astronomy when, as a child, my family would take me to Chabot Observatory to look through the telescopes.

When the new Chabot Space & Science Center reopened the telescopes after the move to our present site, I found all of the childhood wonder flooded back when I put my eye to the eyepiece to regard Saturn. There's an excitement that simply can't be achieved by looking at photographs. You just have to experience it for yourself, as Galileo did four centuries ago…

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Extreme close-up of the Sun's visible surface,
showing 'bubbling' cells of convecting gas–each the size of
Northern California. credit: Hinode JAXA/NASA/PPARC

First things first: what is a solar cycle, and why is this one number 24? You've probably heard of sunspots and solar flares and disturbances in radio communications caused by solar activity, but had you noticed NOT hearing much about these things in the last two or three years?

The Sun exhibits a cyclic rise and fall in its level of magnetic activity. Being an enormous ball of roiling, circulating plasma (electrically charged gas), the Sun generates powerful magnetic fields in a way similar to how the circulating electricity in an electromagnet creates one.

Over the course of a solar cycle, the intensity and amount of magnetism generated by the Sun increases, like soup warming up on the stove, reaching a violent climax in which twisting, tangling magnetic fields break loose and release their energy in the form of solar flare explosions, coronal mass ejections, and tremendous heating of the solar atmosphere.

Sunspots are surface features formed by the presence of strong magnetic fields, and in general the number of sunspots that can be seen and counted indicate the level of magnetic activity on the Sun. For 400 years, since Galileo first started counting sunspots through his telescope, observers have kept track of sunspot counts, and over time a pattern in their number emerged. On average, the number of sunspot activity peaks every 11 years at a time called solar maximum.

I remember when I first started working at Chabot Space & Science Center, back in 1999/2000, during the last solar maximum. Using our Sunspotter telescopes on public observing days, in teacher workshops, and in my solar summer camp, we could easily count many sunspots-sometimes as many as 20 or more! Those were the days!

In the past two or three summers, however, it's a lucky week to spot just a single sunspot! Most of the time, the Sun's face has been a bland disk with few discernible surface features.

That status quo should start to change, now that we have allegedly reached solar minimum and are stepping onto the uphill slope toward the next maximum, which should happen sometime around 2011 or 2012. If you want to keep tabs on the rising solar activity, and you like lots of graphs and numbers and stuff like that, check out the Solar Cycle 24 website.

Oh, why is this Cycle 24? A 19^th Century astronomer who studied the then newly discovered sunspot cycle, Rudolf Wolf, established the cycle that spanned 1755 to 1766 as Cycle 1…and they've been counting up ever since.

But even in this "nap time" of the Sun, today's modern solar observatories and spacecraft, with their arrays of high-tech cameras and sensors, see plenty on the Sun to keep them busy.

Japan's Hinode spacecraft, launched in 2006, has returned libraries of amazing pictures and movies of solar flares, activity around sunspots, circulating hot gases, fine details of the life and times of magnetic fields…and all of this during solar minimum! I can't wait until the Sun really gets going and Hinode becomes like a camera-happy tourist in Tahiti….

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.