Innehållsförteckning för March 2022 från BBC Sky at Night

While radio astronomers are used to handling some radio interference from terrestrial sources, and a few air or space borne transmitters, the new megaconstellations of internet access satellites - which number in the thousands - are a much greater problem. In the January episode of The Sky at Night I talked a bit about this new threat, but as it’s hard to explain the problem of these new satellite systems in a short TV interview, I will go into more detail here. It’s a complicated issue and it will help readers if I can give them a bit more background on the subject, so they can begin to understand the impact on the relatively young science of radio astronomy - a field which, after all, will have the greatest chance…

This month’s top prize: two Philip’s titles The ‘Message of the Month’ writer will receive a bundle of two top titles courtesy of astronomy publisher Philip’s: Nigel Henbest’s Stargazing 2022 and Robin Scagell’s Guide to the Northern Constellations Winner’s details will be passed on to Octopus Publishing to fulfil the prize Tweet Astro Mike @xRMMike • Jan 17 Tonight’s Wolf Moon (first full Moon of January), captured over Corsley, Wiltshire using a Celestron telescope with a focal length of 1,432mm. #WolfMoon #Lunar #Moon #MoonHour #astronomy @bbcweather @BBCSpringwatch @skyatnightmag Disc of mystery Thank you for your excellent magazine, I look forward to it every month. Could anyone help in identifying an object that I managed to image (above) in my picture? It crossed the face of the Moon on Friday 14…

Online Exploring Space and Astronomy through Philately 17 March, 7:30pm Join the Astronomy Society of Glasgow via Zoom for this talk from Katrin Raynor-Evans (pictured, above) on how stamps from around the world have marked milestones in spaceflight and astronomy. See www.theasg.org.uk for login details. Live Observing at Rosse Observatory Carleton Road, Pontefract, 1 March, 7:30pm All are welcome to drop in to West Yorkshire Astronomical Society’s Rosse Observatory on the first Tuesday of each month. Entry is £6 per adult, with under-18s free. There’s also a Young Astronomers’ evening on the last Friday of each month, 6:30pm. £5 per child; booking essential at: young.astronomers.wyas@gmail.com. Live Public stargazing Low Dalby Astronomy Centre, Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire, 4 March, 8pm Join Scarborough & Ryedale Astronomical Society to see the stars, planets,…

The Drake Equation came about in 1961, when Dr Frank Drake formulated it to estimate the number of active and communicative civilisations that might be present in the Milky Way. The formula takes a probabilistic approach, multiplying different factors, such as the number of stars born every year, the fraction of stars that have planets, the length of time that a civilisation might survive, and so on. Drake’s original motivation for crafting his famous equation was not to estimate the number of civilisations, but rather to frame the discussion during the first scientific meeting on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. The SETI Institute provides lots more information about the Drake Equation at www.seti.org/drake-equation-index. One feature of the Drake equation is that it can be adapted to address other…

MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) is the major European contribution to Webb, apart from the Ariane launch. A camera and spectrometer combined, it was designed and built by a 10-country European consortium led by the UK, in collaboration with NASA. MIRI’s high spectral resolution enables it to identify a huge range of molecules in star-forming regions, protoplanetary discs and exoplanet atmospheres. The instrument’s principal investigator is Professor Gillian Wright of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh. “MIRI’s capabilities cannot be achieved by ground-based telescopes,” she says. “The Earth’s atmosphere is too efficient at blocking mid-infrared wavelengths. Uncooled telescopes on Earth also emit their own mid-infrared light; for them to do MIRI’s work would be like looking for a match with a telescope that’s on fire. Webb is cold and far beyond…

There has recently been an uplift in dramatic aurora displays, which ties in with increased activity in the Sun’s latest solar cycle (see page 38). These beautiful photos, taken in Finland and Norway by Markus Varick in late 2021, are awash with aurora forms. Here, plasma scientist Dr Melanie Windridge explains the main forms to look out for in a display. Capturing the aurora Photographer Markus Varik explains how he shot his two images “The idea for the main picture came about in the early hours of 12 October 2021, when a G2 (moderate) geomagnetic storm reached Earth. The evening weather forecast was promising, so we headed to Finland and drove for three hours. We found these astonishing clear skies on the coast and didn’t have to wait long –…

DON’T MISS Venus, Saturn and Mars join the Moon for a morning meeting BEST TIME TO SEE: ALL month The morning sky is getting interesting this month as a trio of planets jostle for position. The group consists of Venus, Mars and Saturn, which all appear rather low when they are observed from the UK. Dimmer Mars and Saturn take advantage of the fact that they appear close to the bright planet Venus which, currently shining at mag. –4.4, is considerably easier to see despite its low pre-sunrise altitude. At the start of March, Mars rises approximately 90 minutes before the Sun, popping up above the southeast horizon while 5° south of Venus. Mars will be shining at mag. +1.3 on this date, and easy to recognise because of its…

Rupes Recta Type: Fault line Size: Length 120km, width 2-3km Longitude/Latitude: 7.7° W, 21.7° S Age: Approximately 3.2-3.9 billion years Best time to see: One day after first quarter (11 March) or last quarter (25 March) Minimum equipment: 50mm refractor Rupes Recta, also known as the ‘Straight Wall’, is a remarkable feature on the Moon’s surface. Illuminated by morning light, it looks like a dark scratch, low resolution photos making it appear like a hair has crept into the image. In the period up to last quarter, Rupes Recta takes on a different persona, appearing as a bright line. The variation is due to the fact that the Straight Wall forms a sloped transition from an upper surface level in the east to a lower one in the west. Viewed…

1. 86 Leo Starfield 10x 50 We’ll start this month’s tour with a colourful starfield. Locate the orange-yellow mag +5.6 star 86 Leonis between Denebola (Beta (β) Leonis) and Zosma (Delta (δ) Leonis), and compare its colour to brilliant-white 90 Leonis that is 2° back towards Denebola. There is also a multicoloured curved string of 7th and 8th magnitude stars that extends 3° eastward from 86 Leo, and the region encompassing 92 Leo and 93 Leo is also very rewarding if you like coloured stars. □ SEEN IT 2. R Leonis 10x 50 R Leonis is a Mira-type variable star, with a magnitude ranging from +10.1 to +5.9 over a 313-day cycle. To locate it, first identify the mag. +5.6 star 18 Leonis and mag. +6.5 19 Leonis. Next, 8…

An explosion of exoplanet discoveries has swept through astronomy in the last 30 years. Prior to 1989, humanity only knew of the planets in our own Solar System, but today the number of confirmed extrasolar planets is nearing 5,000 thanks to space telescopes like Kepler and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) scanning the stars for other worlds. The more exoplanets that are found, the greater the diversity of worlds we know about – from worlds meeting their ends by tumbling into stars, to infant planets just beginning to form. The study of these young planets and the circumstellar discs of dust and gas from which they emerge has blossomed as a field in recent years. Observatories such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have allowed astronomers such as…

Practical astronomy projects for every level of expertise The lunar surface is at its most striking when there are well-defined shadows. As well as being visually pleasing, the study of shadows cast by lunar mountains and craters can tell us a lot about these features. When we see a lunar crater from above it’s easy to think that the crater wall is uniform around the entire perimeter. However, if we look at the shape of the shadows cast by a crater wall, we can get a clearer sense of the peaks and troughs along the rim; and if the crater has a central peak its shadows will reveal its nature too. Here, we will show you a straightforward method to measure these shadows. By using some simple right angled triangle…

Your best photos submitted to the magazine this month Saturn Prabhakaran (Prabhu), Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, 21 November 2021 Prabhu says: “At the time of this capture, Saturn was only 40° above the horizon. Generally, when the planets are low in the sky the atmospheric seeing makes it difficult, but if the seeing is excellent then by using an ADC (atmospheric dispersion corrector) one can capture a lot of the subtle details. This image was taken next to the United Arab Emirates’ eastern coast in Fujairah, which has very good atmospheric seeing because of the stable temperature above the ocean. I was able to capture the planet’s beauty by taking short videos; many of Saturn’s rings and bands in its atmosphere are visible.” Equipment: ZWO ASI4620C camera, Celestron CPC Deluxe…

GEMINI SOUTH TELESCOPE, 20 JANUARY 2022 Snaking through space, these curvy jets come from a young rotating star 10,000 lightyears away on the boundary of the constellations of Sagittarius and Ophiuchus. With the aid of the adaptive optics instruments on board the Gemini South telescope at Cerro Pachón, Chile, which counteract the blurring effects of atmospheric turbulence, researchers have revealed these distinctive S-shape twin plumes continuously pouring from the protostar at the centre. The jets are called MHO 2147 and are a sign the star, cloaked in a fog of dust and molecular gas, is getting started in its formation. Scientists think the jets’ wiggly path may be the result of precession: the gravitational wrench of nearby companion stars causing the protostar to wobble slowly like a spinning top. MORE…

Eccentric mergers For the first time, astronomers have detected the merger of two ‘eccentric’ black holes with highly elliptical orbits using LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). The odd orbits are a sign they’re consuming other black holes, and could explain previously detected black holes that were much larger than expected. Monitoring space debris Kielder Observatory in Northumberland is joining forces with ‘space situational awareness’ company Northern Space and Security Limited to battle a growing problem of space junk. Four cameras are being installed at the observatory to track orbital debris from the dark-sky site to help avoid future collisions. InSight takes a break The InSight Mars lander was forced to enter safe mode in a Martian dust storm on 7 January. Thankfully, the skies cleared and it could return…

Whether it’s choosing your first binoculars, upgrading your camera or even investing in your very own observatory dome, you will find all the movers and shakers in UK astronomy gear at the Practical Astronomy Show. Manufacturers, retailers and astronomy organisations will all be gathered under one roof at Kettering Conference Centre for a free day of displays and demonstrations, alongside expert talks from the likes of astrophographer Damian Peach and BBC Sky at Night Magazine’s reviews editor Paul Money. Visit practicalastroshow.com to find out more.…

What’s behind the UK’s big aurora displays? This aurora season has proved a good one so far, particularly for aurorawatchers in the UK, with numerous newspaper reports of Northern Lights seen in the UK since September. This is likely due to an uptick in solar activity as part of the solar cycle, but before we go into that, let’s think about what causes the aurora in general. The aurora is an incredible light show caused by charged particles accelerated into our upper atmosphere. This acceleration process is driven by the Sun, so the changing power - or activity - of the Sun affects the aurora we see. When we are young we often think of the Sun as a uniform yellow ball in the sky, but look closely at NASA…

PICK OF THE MONTH Venus Best time to see: 1 March, 40 minutes before sunrise Altitude: 10° (low) Location: Sagittarius Direction: Southeast Features: Phase, faint shaded markings. Recommended equipment: 75mm, or larger Venus is a morning object at present, rising a couple of hours before the Sun at the month’s start and 80 minutes before the Sun at the end. The planet reaches dichotomy this month, passing from crescent through to gibbous phase. Dichotomy is the term used to indicate when a planet (or the Moon) reaches the 50 per cent phase. This month, dichotomy should occur on 21 March, but due to what’s known as the ‘phase anomaly’, through the eyepiece of a telescope Venus will appear half-lit a few days later than this theoretical prediction. The phase anomaly…

Asteroid 16 Psyche reaches opposition on 3 March when it can be found shining at mag. +10.4 in the belly of Leo, the Lion. At 00:00 UT on 1 March, Psyche appears at mag. +10.5 and forms the northeast vertex of an equilateral triangle with mag. +4.6 Chi (x) Leonis and the mag. +5.0 star 59 Leonis. It subsequently tracks west-northwest, brightening to mag. +10.4 on 2 March, a level it maintains until the 5th. It then starts to dim, ending the month at mag. +11.1. At this time, it will be located 1.5° eastnortheast of variable Rho (p) Leonis. This star exhibits a small brightness variation between mag. +3.8 and mag. +3.9. Psyche’s position at the end of the month places it around 3° to the southwest of the…

The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, rotating once on its axis in the same time it takes to complete each orbit. From Earth this means we get to see the same familiar features revealed and hidden as the Moon passes through its phase cycle. Looking at the Moon at higher magnification reveals that there is slight variation in this view. This month’s challenge is to take advantage of this effect to spot some tricky edge features. The variation is mostly caused by the Moon’s elliptical and tilted orbit. The ellipticity causes a variation in the Moon’s orbital speed which allows us to see slightly further round the eastern or western side of the Moon’s globe. The tilt causes the Moon to bob up and down relative to the plane…

How clouds of dust transform into fully fledged gas giants is one of the key questions for astronomers researching young exoplanets. “There are two competing theories,” says Jaehan Bae of the University of Florida. “The first is the ‘bottom-up’ process, where you initially form a small, rocky core that becomes more massive. It starts to collect gas from the disc and forms a gas giant like Jupiter. Then there’s the ‘top-down’ theory, where the disc becomes unstable due to its own gravity and collapses to form a planet. We don’t know which is right, even for Jupiter.” Both of these ideas have problems, however. In the ‘bottom-up’ model, regions of the disc far from the star are too cold for planets like Neptune to form within the 10 million-year window…

Our experts review the latest kit VITAL STATS • Price €21 • Delivery method Download • Manual Online PDF and videos • Updates Available online • System requirements Windows 10, Intel Core i5 processor or equivalent, 4GB RAM, ASCOM platform (latest),.NET 5.0 platform (not compatible with macOS) • Developer Pindusoft • Email via ‘Contact’ page on website (see below) • www.starhopmaker.com The fickle UK weather means that whenever there is an opportunity to observe, it is important to be prepared. However, despite the incredible number of celestial objects available for observation, it is all too easy to be caught out by an unexpected clear sky with no observing plan at the ready. In these circumstances Star-Hop Maker could be your best friend, as the software offers the opportunity to prepare…

Why is the Natural History Museum’s meteorite collection being used to test the spectral instruments for the Rosalind Franklin (ExoMars 2022) rover? London’s Natural History Museum houses one of the world’s best meteorite collections; there are over 2,000 meteorites with a variety of histories. This gives us an amazing range of samples to select from, which best mimic the samples we see on Mars, and the ones we’d love to find. We have set up an ExoMars testing set at the museum with instruments that emulate those on the ExoMars 2022 rover: AUP3 (Aberystwyth University PanCam Emulator), ISEM-E (infrared spectrometer emulator) and HRC-E (high-resolution camera emulator). These tests help us to understand how these instruments function, which is imperative to maximising the science we can do once on Mars. It…

Webb reaches its final destination The space telescope has saved most of its fuel on the journey, extending the mission The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) arrived at its final destination on 24 January at 7:05pm UT. Webb is an infrared telescope with a 6.5m-wide mirror, making it the largest one ever deployed in space when it launched on 25 December 2021. A month later, it arrived at the gravitationally stable second Lagrange point (L2), located 1.5 million km from Earth. JWST fired its thrusters for five minutes to add around 1.6 metres per second to its speed. Though little more than a walking pace, this was all that was needed to put it into its final ‘halo’ orbit, moving in an ellipse around the L2 point. This mid-course correction…

Our experts examine the hottest new research The planet with a sapphire sky HAT-P-7b (or Kepler-2b) is an exotic exoplanet. Discovered in 2008, it has a radius greater than that of Jupiter and an orbital plane so tilted relative to its star (108°) that it’s nearly in a polar orbit. But what makes the planet truly exceptional is how hot it is. HAT-P-7b hugs its bright, A-class star so tightly that its orbit takes less than three days - it’s over 20 times closer to its sun than Earth is to ours. Day-side temperatures on the planet are calculated to be regularly above 2,200°C - similar to many stars themselves. Fittingly, HAT-P-7b sits in a class of planet known as ‘ultra-hot Jupiters’. It’s also one of the darkest planets ever…

The Sky at Night team are taking a break this month and will return in April for more astronomy and spaceflight news and observing advice. In the meantime, young astronomers can catch up on Out of This World, a wonderful 10-episode guide to spaceflight hosted by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock and her daughter Lori. The series features special guests and covers spacecraft design, living in space, the search for extra-terrestrial life and the robotic rovers exploring the bodies of our Solar System. Watch the entire series via bbc.co.uk/iplayer…

25 December, 12:20 UT JWST launches from the Guiana Space Centre on an Ariane 5 rocket; after 27 minutes, it separates from the launcher’s upper stage to travel to L2 alone. 25 December, 12:48 UT Deployment of JWST’s 6m, five-panel solar array, which delivers about 1Kw of power. The telescope can now switch from battery power to its own power. 26 December Deployment of the high-gain communications antenna, which allows communication with Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network. 28 December The Forward Unitized Pallet Structure (UPS), which supports and contains the five folded layers forming the front half of the sunshield, is lowered into place. 29 December The Deployable Tower Assembly (DTA) is raised by 1.2m for better thermal isolation and to give room for the sunshield to unfold in…

To see the Northern Lights anywhere you need a spot looking north with a clear horizon, where there is minimal light pollution. In more populated latitudes, a good location is somewhere like a northern coastline, looking out across the sea. In general, the best places in the UK to see the aurora are the places furthest north. So, of course, Scotland is ideal, and there are some beautiful photographs of displays taken from Caithness (pictured, right), the Moray coast, Aberdeenshire, Shetland and the Western Isles. However, for more active aurora displays where the auroral oval spreads further south, many people have luck seeing the aurora in coastal areas of Northern England such as Bamburgh or Whitley Bay in Northumberland (both known for their dark skies); north Norfolk; Northern Ireland; and…

As a constellation, it has to be said that Cancer isn’t one of the most impressive. Yes, it contains the open cluster M44, also known as the Beehive Cluster, and there’s another fainter open cluster near Acubens (Alpha (α) Cancri) called M67, but the stars that form the Zodiacal Crab of Cancer are pretty faint. The brightest isn’t Acubens as you might think, but Altarf (Beta (β) Cancri) which marks the southwest point of the constellation’s inverted Y-shaped pattern. The name is from the Arabic Al Tarf meaning ‘the End’, and it represents one of the Crab’s legs. Altarf has a spectral type of K4III Ba1, a cool orange K4 class giant with abundances of barium (chemical symbol Ba). Its effective temperature is 3,717°C, which is much cooler than our…

1 M64 We start at M64, the Black Eye Galaxy, so-called due to a dark dust lane arcing around one side of its core. To locate M64 manually, start at mag. +4.2 Beta (β) Comae Berenices. One-degree west is 41 Comae Berenices and 3° west-southwest of this star lies 35 Comae Berenices. Mag. +8.5 M64 sits one-quarter of the way along the line from 35 Comae Berenices to 41 Comae Berenices. Smaller scopes show an elliptical glow with a prominent nucleus. A 150mm instrument reveals the dark patch, but it’s fainter than photos of M64 would suggest; more like a faint arc visible with averted vision though small scopes. A 250mm instrument shows the ‘black-eye’ best with direct vision at 200-250x power. M64 lies 17 million lightyears away and is…

The two main seeing scales are the Antoniadi scale (above) and the Pickering scale (below). Others exist but these are the two most commonly used by amateur astronomers. The Antoniadi scale has five values, indicated by Roman numerals, I being the steadiest, V being very unstable. From the UK, Antoniadi seeing types III and IV are most common, but periods of II do happen, typically at times when high pressure dominates the weather. Antoniadi I conditions are rare, occurring perhaps only on a couple of nights throughout the year. It is important to understand that seeing may vary considerably over the course of a single night. Initially, poor seeing conditions may give way to much steadier conditions over the course of a night or vice versa. The Pickering scale was…

The first direct image of an exoplanet was captured in 2004 by the Very Large Telescope. The planet, named 2M1207b, is around five times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting 42 AU from a brown dwarf star in the TW Hydrae association of stars, around 200 lightyears from Earth and a youthful 8 million years old. More exoplanets have been directly imaged since then, but the difficulty in seeing such distant worlds means many of these observations remain controversial. “In terms of exoplanet detections we think are solid, there are around 20,” says the University of Edinburgh’s Professor Beth Biller. “It’s something we fight about at conferences; the Exoplanet.eu database lists 100 or so directly imaged exoplanets, but some are pretty suspect.” One of the biggest controversies surrounds the planet ‘discovered’…

Expert processing tips to enhance your astrophotos Removing image noise, or unwanted artefacts, is one of the main aims of deep-sky astrophotography processing. The more we can reduce noise, the more freedom it allows us to process our images of nebulae and galaxies. This is particularly true for nebulae, where delicate gaseous details are easily overwhelmed or hidden. There are various noise reduction tools to help overcome the issue, but care needs to be taken applying them; use them too heavily and the target will look soft or blurry. In this article we will show you how to apply just the right amount of adjustment to the stars in a deep-sky image of the North America Nebula by using a plug-in. Stars are often one of the main causes of…

Our experts review the latest kit The StellaMira 90mm ED telescope on test this month is a triplet lens apochromatic refractor introduced by First Light Optics. We were especially interested to receive our review model, as the company has always been upfront on its website blog about any issues with triplet telescopes, with the promise of only releasing new ones when production methods allow consistently good results. It was fair to say, given that stance, that we had high expectations for the StellaMira 90mm ED. The packaging of the StellaMira 90mm ED is compact; it is supplied in a neat, lockable, black carry case. The telescope has a sturdy construction, with a glossy carbon-fibre tube and dew shield. It certainly looks and feels like a quality piece of equipment, with…