HAIL to ATK’s Liberty Transportation System, under development by a U.S.-French team. Combining a first stage from the company’s Utah complex and a French second stage, Liberty may be the vehicle to get America back into the crewed rocket business.

The 300-foot rocket will be capable of ferrying astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station –- and even to an inflatable orbiting habitat designed by Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nev.

[Liberty would be built largely with existing components, as shown in this illustration provided by ATK]
Mike Jacobs, ATK program manager for Liberty, and Paul Karner, ATK program manager for avionics and control, briefed members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society on the project. About 90 members and guests attended the meeting Thursday night in the University of Utah’s Warnock Engineering Classroom Building.
The famous French Ariane 5 rocket will provide the second stage, while the first stage will be a stack of five shuttle booster segments. In the now-ended shuttle program, two solid-fuel boosters of four engine segments each would lift the craft to the edge of space, before ignition of the liquid-fueled main engine.

ATK’s partner in the venture is Astrium, the largest aerospace company in Europe, Jacobs said. “We’re also working with ESA, the European Space Agency, to get Liberty developed.”

[Mike Jacobs, ATK program manager for Liberty, speaking Thursday night. Photo by Cory Bauman]

Liberty will have “more performance than any commercial vehicle out there now,” capable of delivering 44,500 pounds to low-earth orbit. It may begin lifting cargo into space in 2016.
“We’re a complete service provider,” he added. The system will provide financing, schedule assurance, safety, integrated vehicle and ground system, and will launch the craft and monitor quality.
In addition, Liberty could carry one of the winged shuttle-like vehicles under development, as well as “U.S. military or commercial satellites.”
With 211 consecutive successful booster launches and 46 consecutive flights of Ariane 5, “We’re convinced we have the safest system,” he said.
“These elements were all built from the inception to launch humans.” The booster’s Reusable Solid Rocket Motors were designed for the Space Shuttle, while Ariane 5 was originally intended for a crewed program. Although it has not been used for astronauts, Jacobs said Ariane has “human rating built into it. …
“The way our philosophy is, to reduce risk on this transportation system, we start with a component, go to sub-assembly …. We test on the ground to reduce risk.” Among testing elements is an engineering development lab in Clearfield with a full-scale mockup of the system.

“We’re leveraging what was built for the shuttle down at the Kennedy Space Center” in Florida, including the launch complex and the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building, he said. “It’s the quickest and most effective path” to a commercial crew-launch capability.

[Holly Lamb, communications manager at ATK, helped take questions from the audience. Photo by Cory Bauman]

“It’s not a design project, it’s an integration project,” with work being done to wed the two stages, according to Jacobs. ATK is working on a guidance package for Liberty.
On the first series of flights, booster motors will be recovered from the Atlantic, as the shuttles’ were. But in later flights, which may number about two a year, Liberty won’t carry the gear needed to make the boosters recoverable, such as huge parachutes. Instead, that area will be converted to cargo space, allowing the system to carry 48,000 to 50,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit.

The improvement in cargo space outweighs the value of recovered boosters.

In the later flights, the boosters will sink in the Atlantic, in a region off-limits to ships and aircraft during the launch period. The Ariane will be heading to a similar section of the Indian Ocean.
“The LTS (Liberty Transportation System) leverages NASA infrastructure” and its work force at the Kennedy Space Center. Material and expertise there including the assembly building and the mobile launch platform will be rented under a contract with NASA.
“We have a great amount of talent down at Kennedy Space Center,” he said.
“Our plan is to get to our test flights in 2015 and then in 2016, after several test flights, to put the first crew –- the first manned crew -– on Liberty.” Jacobs added that from the onset, the first priority is safety.
Eventually NASA will develop an “advanced booster” to carry heavier payloads, possibly trips to Mars and the asteroids.

[Paul Karner, ATK program manager for avionics and control, helped explain the Liberty project and later possibilities. Photo by Cory Bauman]

Karner noted, “If we win the advanced booster (contract) we will go to higher performance,” most likely with a motor whose casing is made of composite material. For crewed deep-space exploration, a large vehicle would be built in low-Earth orbit, as was the International Space Station.
Several launches would be needed to complete a Mars explorer carrying humans.
After all, a six-astronaut capsule called the Orion could be put into space with one launch. But, “six people in that spot for a two-year trip -– even if you’re my best friend ….” he joked.

[Rendering of Liberty on the mobile launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, courtesy of ATK]

***
FAREWELL to Nightly News. I began this blog three years and four days ago and it has had an interesting run. I hoped to cobble together some of the entries for a book about one amateur’s experiences and observations about astronomy, “life, the universe and everything.” I still might do that.
But I think I’ve said about all I know or feel about the subject and continuing could become repetitious. I’m kind of tired of astronomy, frankly. Maybe that will pass and maybe not.
My expectations were too high, as this blog hasn’t caused much of a ripple in the space-time continuum.
Deepest thanks to the Deseret News, which has sheltered and nurtured me since 1971; has fed and housed my family and clothed us and allowed me to report fascinating stories, and paid for my travels; and, after my retirement, has graciously published this blog. And special thanks also to my wife, Cory, who has encouraged my astronomy and writings, and has been a wonderful photographer for the blog. Thank you too to our son Sky, the physicist who has corrected errors in the blog and suggested topics.
And so, unless I feel invigorated someday and decide to revive Nightly News, good-bye.

The Lagoon Nebula is one of the grandest deep-space objects. Never extending high above the horizon from our vantage point, this patch of nebulosity and stars lurks toward the center of our galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, best seen in the summer.

It’s so large and bright that in dark skies it can be seen by naked eye as a dim gray patch, if you’re not distracted by the riot of nearby stars and dark patterns in the Milky Way. Through the smallest telescope or pair of binoculars, it shows interesting details. With instruments of larger aperture, the Lagoon that provides its nickname —- which looks more like a dark canal than a lagoon —- is easily visible curving through the nebulosity. So are dark dust clouds and complex folds and rumples of gas.

The nebula is a star nursery where gravity is pulling together gas and compacting it to form new stars. As a Sept. 22, 2010, press release from the Hubble Space Telescope team and the European Space Agency notes, “Clouds of hydrogen gas are slowly collapsing to form new stars, whose bright ultraviolet rays then light up the surrounding gas in a distinctive shade of red.” Hubble experts and ESA say the wispy tendrils and “beach-like features” develop as ultraviolet radiation erodes and disperses gas and dust.

The formal designation is Messier 8, because in the 1770s it was the eighth object that comet-hunter Charles Messier added to his list of fuzzy sky blobs that aren’t comets. But it must have been noticed previously, innumerable times.
M8 is a huge object 5,000 light-years away, 100 light-years across. Because of my telescope’s long focal length and my camera’s small chip, the Lagoon Nebula is far too large for me to take in at one glance. But Tyler Allred’s superb equipment did it on the night of July 2-3, 2011, at Bryce Canyon National Park.

[View of the Lagoon Nebula by Utah astrophotographer Tyler Allred, taken the night of July 2-3, from Bryce Canyon National Park. The so-called "lagoon" is the darker rift curving through most of the central region. For a high-resolution version of this remarkable photograph, click HERE.]

In my view, made the same night, only the central region is visible. My view is approximately 13 light years across, left to right, while the nebula itself covers 100 light-years.

[Photo of Messier 8 that I made the early morning of July 3, 2011, from Bryce Canyon National Park's Rainbow Point, the same night and location as Tyler's picture. This is only a small part of the midsection of the vast nebula; the view is about 13 light-years from left to right. A larger image of my photo is posted HERE.]

By zeroing in on the heart of the nebula, we can make out the bright “Hourglass” feature, a little to the right of center. A hot star dubbed “O Herschel 36″ makes the Hourglass shine.

“Twisting near the center of the Lagoon,” reads the explanation of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for Aug. 8, 2010, “the bright hourglass shape is the turbulent result of extreme stellar winds and intense sunlight.” (The APOD information was written and edited by Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell.)

The Hourglass appears as two separate lobes because this bright area is bisected by something NASA calls a “twister.” On Jan. 22, 1997, the space agency released a Hubble photo that shows the region in unprecedented detail. “This Hubble telescope snapshot unveils a pair of one-half light-year-long interstellar ‘twisters’ — eerie funnels and twisted-rope structures … in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula…” says its release.

[Hubble image released by NASA on Jan. 22, 1997, showing the Lagoon Nebula's hot central star and "twisters" of dusty material that are swirling around the Hourglass. The agency labeled features in this view.]

If I enlarge my own image of the Lagoon’s heart, rotate it to match the orientation of the Hubble view and work on contrast and brightness to bring out details, I can just barely make out the twisters. Of course, my telescope is no Hubble so the view is fuzzy, with the star O Herschel 36 bloated by my optics, which are astronomically inferior to Hubble’s.

[My picture of the heart of the Lagoon, cropped, enlarged and rotated to match the Hubble view's orientation. It's no Hubble picture, but with the proper adjustments to contrast and brightness, it's just barely possible to make out the "twisters."]

My image is nothing to brag about — yet I find it satisfying that these mysterious twister features show up in it.

The planetary nebula NGC7048 floats in the midst of the star-swarm of the Milky Way, part of the summertime constellation Cygnus the Swan. From our vantage, it’s about 60 by 50 arc-seconds in size; its magnitude is 11.3.
Announcing its discovery in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, astronomer Heber D. Curtis wrote in September, 1919, that NGC7048 is “a rather faint oval, with slight traces of ring structure…. The brightest portions are at the east end of the minor axis. There is a very faint central star.”
Curtis said its spectrum indicates NGC7048 is gaseous, which stands to reason as we now understand such nebulae to be the material blown off by a sun-like star when its atmosphere puffs out during its death throes.
G. Huemer and R. Weinberger of the Institut fr Astronomie der Universitt Innsbruck, Austria, estimated that the nebula is about 5,218 light-years away, give or take 1,630 light-years. The paper, copyrighted by the Southern European Observatory, was published by the Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement Series in March 1988.
The nebula posed for me on Sept. 3, when I was set up at Lakeside, Tooele County. From 2:44 a.m. until 5:06 a.m., I took 100 exposures (not counting the flat-field images and darks that I continued making), which I later combined.

[Planetary nebula NGC7048 in the midst of the Milky Way, taken Sept. 3, 2011, from the site Utah astronomers call Lakeside, Tooele County. The brighter stars, like the ball above the nebula, appear larger than dimmer ones. That's just an artifact of the optics, as this telescope can't discern the disk of any star except the sun. Photo by Joe Bauman]
Yet none of this dry description encapsulates the beauty of the nebula itself. It shimmers with pinks, reds, blues and purples; spikes and dots of structure show in the interior; curving bright edges outline the somewhat irregular globe — it’s a glorious ornament surrounded by myriad stars. I am reminded of one of my favorite Walt Whitman poems, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.
“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
“When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
“When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
“When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
“How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
“Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
“In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
“Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
***
Regardless of its violent origin when it roasted any planets in its habitable zone, despite its pedestrian designation, NGC7048 is beautiful to me. And I wonder, Why is that? Why can I recognize anything so distant and unearthly as beautiful?
If I had to guess, I would suppose that an intelligent being residing on a planet of another star might examine NGC7048 through some kind of instrument and conclude that it is beautiful. I also find beauty in the grand slow-swirling arms of spiral galaxies and in the shining tails of comets, and I imagine these things project a universal beauty.
Our ability to find beauty in natural forms is ingrained, and I wonder how that came to be. A principle of loveliness must permeate the universe. What was the origin of these feelings?
When I think of the start of the universe I’m filled with wonder and awe. Was this idea of beauty born, fully-formed, in the instant of the Big Bang? And what about the natural laws -– were they in place in that same instantaneous flash of subatomic particles and energy?
It’s hard for me to believe that natural laws developed gradually. Take the simple situation of the distance between two points. If we were to anchor one of the points and spin the other around it on a plane until it reaches its starting place, that trajectory would be the circumference of a circle. Take two of those lengths together (two radii of the circle) and multiply them by pi and you get the measurement of the circumference. As we all learned in school, C = 2 r times pi.
Pi is an endless number, starting with 3.1415926535897932384. It must always have been that bizarre value. I can’t imagine a time, even just a few moments after the Big Bang, when pi was incomplete or experimental. There was no period when pi happened to be exactly 3.
So it must be for all natural laws. Universal laws governing interactions of atoms –- bonding, electron shells, valence — must have existed, somehow, before atoms themselves did. That too I find beautiful.
In the beginning there was beauty and it’s still here.

This is a good time to remember the joys of midsummer astronomy, if only to divert our minds momentarily from hurricane-force winds, wrecked fences, downed giant spruces and snow.
I spent the balmy night of July 28-29 at the site in Tooele County that Utah astronomers call Lakeside, complaining to myself about the heat — with the air at 60 degrees, my camera’s temperature regulator could only get down to the freezing point. The cooler the camera is, the less noise is generated by its electronics and the cleaner the images.
I took sets of photos of the Draco Triplet galaxies until they sank low in the north-northwest and dawn was beginning to crack.

[Image of the Draco Triplet made the night of July 28-29, using my SBIG camera and LX200GPS telescope, from Lakeside Tooele County. For a larger version,click HERE. Photo by Joe Bauman]

The trio is about 100 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Draco. They present a fine selection of types. From the top of my picture to bottom, they are: a spiral galaxy, NGC5981, seen edge-on; an elliptical galaxy, NGC5982; and a special type of spiral showing us its full face, NGC5985. They are “all within this single telescopic field of view spanning a little more than half the width of the full moon,” reported NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site.
Amusingly, the site posted pictures of the Draco Triplet three times in about the last decade: June 8, 2001, May 6, 2006, and July 1, 2009, with captions that are nearly identical in places. Well, there are some differences. For example, one caption says these are called the Draco Trio because they are in “(you guessed it) Draco,” while the other captions say they are called that “(quite reasonably)” — those are NASA’s parentheses.
The number of galaxies bunched together is “far too small to be a galaxy cluster and has not been cataloged a compact group,” the captions add.
They are “all within this single telescopic view spanning a little more than half the width of the full moon.” Nevertheless, they’re apart far enough that with my telescope’s high magnification I had to take the images in two sets, first the upper section of the triplet, then the lower, and assemble them into a mosaic. Otherwise they wouldn’t have fit in a single view.
The lovely spiral at the bottom, NGC5985, is special because it’s a Seyfert galaxy, meaning its bright nucleus is believed to harbor an active, supermassive black hole. Seyfert galaxies are identified by unusual spectra of light from the center suggesting furious motion by hot gas.
Despite the grandeur of the three island universes, I’m much more awed by a pale dot that appears to the lower left of the upper galaxy, the edge-on NGC5981.The dot is a quasar, that is, a quasi-stellar radio source – something so far away that it looks like a star but really is an immensely strange object, a gigantic, feeding black hole. This one is designated SBS 1537+595 1.

[The dot indicated above is the quasar SBS 1537+595 1. This is a cropped version of the Draco Triplet image earlier in this blog. Photo by Joe Bauman]
Describing another quasar that was imaged recently, one called AMP 08279+5255, NASA said in a July 27 press release that is surrounded by “the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water [in the form of water vapor], equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.”
The release explains that a quasar “is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy.” The quasar the press release refers to “harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion sons.”
The name quasar indicates a radio source, but that’s only a holdover from the first examination of quasars by radio telescopes in the early 1960; these were found because they are powerful radio sources. But NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says most quasars are radio-quiet. “We also now know that many (perhaps all) quasars are small regions of intense activity within otherwise normal galaxies,” according to Goddard.
They seem to be a property of the early universe. No quasars are known nearby, but some astronomers speculate that the supermassive black holes in many galaxies, including the Milky Way, may have been quasars in their youth.
How far away is the quasar I photographed? The distance to these objects is judged by their red shift; according to consensus thinking among astronomers, the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from Earth and everything else.
When a train approaches blowing its whistle, the sound waves are compressed, giving it higher frequency and a shriller sound. When it passes and recedes, its sound waves are stretched out, making the whistle sound lower. This Doppler effect operates with light too: the faster something approaches, the bluer it is; the faster it recedes, the redder.
The red shift is used to measure the distance to far-off objects like quasars. (A minority school of thought holds that quasars may be material expelled violently from galaxies and only show a great red shift because they were thrown out at immense velocity.)
My view’s quasar has been measured with a red shift of 2.125120, according to the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database. If the majority opinion is right about red shifts, that means the light has been traveling toward Earth for 10.23 billion years. It started on this incredible journey, traveling 186,000 miles every second, when the universe was only 3.069 billion years old.
Astrophysicists calculate that the Big Bang happened 13.299 billion years ago and the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. The light captured by my camera blasted out of quasar SBS 1537+595 1 when the universe was about 23 percent of its present age. Our world would not begin to form for another 5.73 billion years.

The icy moon Europa may prove the most exciting destination in outer space that NASA could explore.

[Europa, in a photo from the Galileo spacecraft. Image reprocessed by Prof. Ted Stryk of Roane State Community College, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.]

One of Jupiter’s horde of at least 65 satellites, Europa is second out from the planet and its third-largest. Slightly smaller than our moon, it’s big enough that Galileo spotted it and three fellow satellites when he peered at Jupiter through his crude telescope in 1610.
On Nov. 16, NASA announced that images taken years ago by the Galileo spacecraft indicate that less than two miles below the surface, giant lakes may exist — one studied apparently has as much liquid water as the Great Lakes’ total volume — in addition to the enormous saltwater sea believed lurking much deeper below the ice. Warm water apparently rises through the ice like a volcano’s magma through the ground; the water forms subsurface lakes and eventually causes massive bulges of chaotic terrain on the surface.
Orbiting Jupiter 483 million miles from the sun, Europa’s surface temperature is estimated at 100 Kelvin — that is, about -280 degrees Fahrenheit. But tidal forces emanating from Jupiter cause flexing throughout the moon, and this friction warms the interior ice. Another source of warmth may be the decay of radioactive elements in Europa’s core, just as in Earth’s.
Speaking of the earlier discovery of the ocean deep under the surface, NASA officials noted that one of Galileo’s most significant discoveries, before it was sent into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003, “was the inference of a global salt water ocean on Europa. The ocean is deep enough to cover the whole surface and contains more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
“However, being far from the sun, the ocean surface is completely frozen. Most scientists think this icy crust is tens of miles deep.”
The new discovery refines the picture, however, positing lakes within the ice, much closer to the surface. Rugged chaotic ice terrain seems to show that water raises slabs of ice and reaches the surface between the cracks, then freezes over.

[Schematic of one of Europa's suspected great lakes. According to the University of Texas at Austin, "Researchers predict many more such lakes are scattered throughout the moon's icy shell." Credit: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel VFX/University of Texas at Austin.]

The space agency reported findings published online Nov. 16 by the journal Nature. An abstract of the Nature article says, “Our results suggest that ice-water interactions and freeze-out give rise to the diverse morphologies and topography of chaos terrains. The sunken topography of Thera Macula [an uplifted region of chaotic ice blocks] indicates that Europa is actively resurfacing over a lens comparable in volume to the Great Lakes in North America.”
Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, the lead author, said in a release from that university, “One opinion in the scientific community has been, ‘If the ice shell is thick, that’s bad for biology — that it might mean the surface isn’t communicating with the underlying ocean.’ Now we see evidence that even though the ice shell is thick, it can mix vigorously. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable.”
Coauthors are Don Blankenship, also of the Austin institution; Wes Patterson of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory; and Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston. Blankenship commented in the Texas release, “This new understanding of processes on Europa would not have been possible without the foundation of the last 20 years of observations over Earth’s ice sheets and floating ice shelves.”
The researchers compared the round areas of chaotic terrain with features on Earth found in ice shelves and in glaciers that are above volcanoes, according to the Texas release.
For decades, scientists have suspected that Europa was capable of harboring life; as it was running out of fuel the Galileo spacecraft was sent into Jupiter, where it vaporized, because of concern that otherwise it might eventually crash on Europa and cause contamination.
Rising plumes of warm water might be a sign of venting on the ocean floor. Maybe these vents are comparable to the hot, sulfur-laden vents on the floors of our own oceans that support ecosystems without access to sunlight. The water’s churning would be expected to wash out nutrients and other chemicals from the mantle.
The problem with getting a better look was the impracticality of drilling through, say, 40 miles of ice.
Now, to sample a lake on Europa, a robotic probe might need only melt through a couple of miles — still a daunting task, but not one that seems impossible.
Even better, remains of Europan life might be available right on the surface. With water welling up from the interior and freezing on the surface, perhaps frozen organisms cover Europa. Or maybe they’re available in the cracks and chaotic terrain that mark the moon.
Either way, a lander laboratory might be able to find evidence.
Of course, a landing on airless Europa would be more challenging than recent landings on Mars, which used parachutes to slow the rovers. But NASA landed on our equally airless moon four decades ago.
Curiosity, the car-sized Mars Science Laboratory — set to launch next Saturday from Cape Canaveral — will utilize parachutes as well as a rocket-powered descent.
A small lander sent to Europa, something on the scale of the Rangers of the early phase of lunar exploration, would be an inexpensive investment in a search that could deliver stunning returns.

What would nights be like if Earth were located in the galaxy Messier 77? Say it’s not too far from the galaxy’s nucleus; close enough to see the fireworks.
As we gaze toward the galactic center, the way we look to the beautiful star clouds of Sagittarius low in the south on a clear summer night, an incredible scene presents itself. A monstrous, thick, glowing structure reaches outwards, a vast tunnel of energy that changes in brightness within days. It’s a tornado of hot plasma with brighter swirls and blobs creeping along it, moving out from the base.
At least, that’s how I imagine it might look, based on observations by radio telescopes and two great NASA orbiting facilities, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Here’s how I actually saw M77, based on more than three hours’ work with my telescope and camera, set up in Jerry and Cindy Foote’s driveway a few miles outside Kanab.

[Galaxy M77, taken through my Meade 12-inch-diameter telescope, night of Oct. 29-30, near Kanab. Photo by Joe Bauman]
M77, also known as NGC1068, is one of the closest examples of a Seyfert galaxy, that is, the type that possesses an active galactic nucleus. It’s near enough — an estimated 50 million light-years away — to serve as a convenient target for many studies.
The galaxy is in the constellation Cetus, the sea monster, which is floating high just now. The active nucleus is a source of intense X-rays and radio rays, both generated by the supermassive black hole in the middle of the galaxy. The bright spiral shape at the center is surrounded by much dimmer, fluffy-looking extensions of the arms.
In 2006, NASA estimated the galaxy is 60 million light-years away, which would make its disk more than 100,000 light-years across, bigger than the Milky Way. Last year the agency said M77 is 50 million light-years away, which would make the diameter somewhat smaller than the earlier estimate.
The black hole’s size seems hard to pin down, since StarDate, maintained by the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, claims it is “about 15 million times the mass of our Sun” while the National Radio Laboratory estimated in 2000 that it is “about 10 million times more massive than the Sun.” It may be twice as large as the black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy but it’s far more active, devouring gigantic amounts of matter.
The black hole is pulling in material from shredded stars and other victims. As the gas swirls around the drain at 1 million miles an hour, much is sucked into the hole, vanishing, drawn to a single point of incomprehensible density and mass.
But outside the black hole, the speed of the whirling gas is so great that this torus heats up to 180,000 degrees F., magnetic lines of force form, and some of the material shoots away from the center in a gigantic jet, according to the Chandra site operated by the Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA.
A Chandra study shows that each year, “several times the mass of our sun is being deposited out to large distances, about 3,000 light-years from the black hole,” reads a Chandra press release dated March 3, 2010. “The wind likely carries enough energy to heat the surrounding gas and suppress extra star formation.”

[The box drawn in the middle of this photo of M77 by the Palomar Digital Sky Survey shows the location of the following view. The box is about 7,000 light-years across. Credit: Pal.Obs. DSS]

[This view of M77 would fill the square above. It is a composite of X-ray imaging by Chandra, radio signals gathered by the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, and false-color optical photos by Hubble. Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/ MIT/C.Canizares, D.Evans et al), Optical (NASA/STScI), Radio (NSF/ NRAO/VLA]

I’m grateful to live in a time when we can begin to comprehend the terrible beauty of the universe.

Jupiter, king of the planets, rules the night sky during October. The gas giant rises in the east-northeast around 6:30 p.m., reaches its zenith around 60 degrees altitude by 1:30 a.m. and at dawn remains visible near the western horizon.

The best Jupiter photos by a Utah amateur astronomer, that I’ve ever seen, were made by my friend David Rankin on the night of Oct. 22. He took them at Lakeside, Tooele County, and they are stunning.

[Photos of Jupiter by David Rankin. In the second view the Great Red Spot, actually a sort of salmon-colored storm larger than Earth, has rotated into view at the lower left. For more of Rankin's work, click HERE.]

Rankin, a student at the University of Utah who comes from Big Water, Kane County, wrote the next day, “Seeing last night was fantastic, 9/10. Atmosphere was like looking through glass. When the seeing gets great, the details come out.”

A NASA web site offers this description of the planet: “Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system — with dozens of moons and an enormous magnetic field — forms a kind of miniature solar system. Jupiter does resemble a star in composition, but it did not grow big enough to ignite. The planet’s swirling cloud stripes are punctuated by massive storms such as the Great Red Spot, which has raged for hundreds of years.”
How massive is it? With a diameter of around 87,000 miles (compared with Earth’s diameter of a little less than 8,000 miles), it has a circumference of 272,946 miles. Earth’s circumference is only 24,900 miles. Jupiter is so huge that it contains more than 1,300 times Earth’s volume, according to NASA.
The solar system has been called the sun, Jupiter and a few odds and ends that didn’t make it into either.
Hundreds of millions of miles away in the far reaches of the solar system, Jupiter fills an important role as Earth’s protector. Its enormous gravity attracts comets and asteroids that otherwise might loop inward toward our environs. The effect was obvious to all of us who witnessed, through a telescope, the clobbering that Jupiter took from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994.
On a swing past Jupiter, the comet broke into fragments. After circling the sun, their orbit again took them close to Jupiter. This time they slammed into the King in a string of atmospheric detonations. They hit the planet’s far side but soon the impact sites rotated into view.

Holes punched through the upper cloud layers were big enough to see with moderate-size telescopes.

Although Jupiter consists mostly of hydrogen and helium, its composition isn’t entirely gaseous.

NASA points out, “Deep in the atmosphere, the pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid. At depths of about a third of the way down, the hydrogen becomes metallic and electrically conducting. In this metallic layer, Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field is generated by electrical currents driven by Jupiter’s fast rotation. At the center, the immense pressure may support a solid core of rock about the size of Earth.”

The rotation is so fast that centrifugal force gives the planet a big bulge at the equator.

Setting aside size superlatives, Jupiter is a joy to the astronomer because it is large and beautiful, a place where something is always happening. Its four largest moons slide through their orbits, sometimes crossing in front of the planet, sometimes casting a shadow upon it, sometimes strung out to its sides. Starting with the innermost, they are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

They are bright enough that an ordinary pair of binoculars can show these satellites.

A useful technique in astrophotography is to take a series of images of the same object and electronically stack them, which reduces noise and renders the view sharper. But there’s a problem with that in imaging Jupiter: it moves fast. The surface makes a complete rotation in less than 10 hours, compared with our own 24-hour day. When you consider Jupiter’s vast girth, that’s incredibly fast, with features traveling around 27,000 mph.

Jupiter rotates so quickly that I’ve had trouble taking photos of it to stack; within 10 or 15 minutes features have moved and no longer line up with their images in earlier pictures. And I have spent hours watching places like the Great Red Spot move across the surface and disappear over the horizon.

Bands of varying darkness and widths, white and salmon-colored and reddish spots that are furiously churning storms, festoons that stretch within bands, brilliant moons, cloud swirls and streaks — Jupiter delights the eye and mind.

The University of Utah’s Adam S. Bolton is using an effect predicted by Albert Einstein to assess galaxies billions of light-years away.

[Adam S. Bolton speaks at the October monthly meeting of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, Oct. 18, 2011. Photo by Cory Bauman]

An assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Bolton spoke Tuesday at the monthly meeting of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, held in the U.’s Behavioral Science Auditorium. About 65 members of the group and guests attended the talk.
Bolton is a leader of the Sloan Lens ACS Survey, which searches for and analyzes this effect, dubbed Einstein rings. Sloan refers to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, using a telescope in New Mexico, while ACS stands for the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
In 1936, responding to a letter from a colleague asking what would happen if one star lined up exactly behind another as seen from Earth, Einstein calculated that gravitational lensing would occur, Bolton said. This is the appearance of a ring around the foreground object, caused by gravity of a massive closer object bending the light from a more distant object.
An “Einstein ring” is “a luminous circle of a particular radius around the center of the other (foreground) star,” Bolton said. “As a focusing device it’s a very poor optical instrument,” with the distant figure highly distorted.
Starting in 1979, more than 40 years after Einstein’s prediction was published, astronomers began finding Einstein rings in space. The first showed two views of a quasar — an ancient, extremely powerful light source — around a massive closer galaxy. “So there were two images of the same quasar,” he said.
Since then, the Sloan Lens ACS Survey has discovered hundreds of such rings. Many are formed by pairs of galaxies.

[Einstein Rings discovered by the Sloan Lens ACS Survey, shown in a 2005 release. Credit: NASA, the European Space Agency, Bolton (who was with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astronomy at the time) and Sloan Lens ACS Survey Team]
Through mathematical transforms, scientists are able to dig out information about both foreground and the more distant objects, describing mass and even shapes.
When he showed a view of an Einstein ring, Nightly News asked how far the galaxies are from Earth. “It’s probably a few billion light-years [for the closer one] and a few more billion light-years [for the farther one],” he said.
Because of their immense distance, these faint objects are so small that — if you pretend they are actually physical rings — it would take some 500 to stretch across the face of the full moon.
“It’s certainly a beautiful phenomenon,” Bolton said. But the scientists must analyze this material in numbers and graphs. He and his team consider how far the light is shifted in the spectrum because of distance, the angular sizes of the foreground galaxy and the ring, how much space has expanded since light left the galaxies and how faint the objects are.
“Galaxies today don’t look like galaxies in the distant past of the universe,” he added. Spiral galaxies like our own tend to merge with other galaxies, eventually becoming absorbed into giant elliptical galaxies. The ellipticals are largely formless other than their general elliptical shape, which is brightest at the center.
The many mergers forming elliptical have “sort of destroyed the detailed structure you see in a spiral galaxy structure,” he said.
Discovering new facts about early galaxies could help in understanding galaxy evolution.
A telltale mark of an Einstein ring is a spectrum where two different red shifts — indicating distance — show up in what seems one object. When one of these is detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico, the Hubble Space Telescope can snap a more detailed view from orbit, confirming the presence of a ring.
In turn, that photo is used to calculate a range of information about the galaxies.
An intriguing aspect is the presence of so-called “dark matter,” which has never been seen, but whose gravitational effects can be detected. Dark matter contributes to the lensing effect in Einstein rings.
Even stranger is dark energy, which is speeding up the expansion of the universe. Bolton said ordinary matter making up stars, people and planets amounts to about 4 percent of the stuff of the universe. Dark matter makes up about a quarter and dark energy the rest.
One of the founders of the Sloan Lens ACS Survey, Bolton is working to expand the project to use smaller foreground galaxies instead of only the giant ellipticals measured before.
His Web site notes, “With this new program, we will determine whether the structural regularity that we see in massive galaxies extends to lower masses, or whether there is a characteristic mass at which new trends arise (as has been suggested by other lines of evidence).”

For two years I’ve been wooing a real beauty, without success until now.
It’s the lovely spiral galaxy NGC7331, a good target in the autumn, riding high in the constellation Pegasus.
The first time I tried, in September 2009, I imaged it from our backyard. Salt Lake City’s heavy light pollution intruded and the galaxy’s portrait was hideous, a greenish-toned mess with multiple “dust doughnut” flaws that showed up all too clearly in the glare. Later in 2009 I tried from Kanab but the exposures were too short.
On the morning of Aug. 14, 2010, I took another chance at the ORV recreation area called Knolls, Tooele County. My notes from that attempt:
“I found my target for the night, NGC7331, right off the bat by syncing on a nearby star, Matar, a corner point in Pegasus. I got it centered and then had the Meade guide camera lock onto a target and begin guiding. Next I was going to focus the main camera. … Then a hurricane of wind hit. I wasn’t able to focus adequately and certainly was precluded from any serious imaging. I took several focus views at 320 seconds each, just to see if the guider worked, and they seemed identical, though of course horribly blurry.”
The wind, which I estimated at 30 mph, kept up all night, ruining any chance at astrophotography.
Not one to give up easily, I tried at Lakeside, Tooele County, on the morning of Sept. 25 this year. In a total of 48 minutes exposure for luminosity (16 images of 3 minutes each), I collected enough photons for an acceptable view. However, it was a little anemic and the color exposures were too short to do it justice.
Returning to the site to work through the night of Sept. 26-27, I took images of NGC7217 (discussed in the previous blog). In the early morning I aimed my scope at NGC7331 and aligned it to closely match the pictures I had taken two mornings before. It soaked up light for about 4 1/2 hours.

Not all the frames were usable, but most were. When I digitally combined them with the Sept. 25 exposures, the galaxy looked good.

[View of NGC7331 taken on the mornings of Sept. 25 and 27 at Lakeside, Tooele County; total exposure about 5 hours. For a larger view, click HERE. Photo by Joe Bauman]
According to the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day site for Oct. 22, 2008, this beautiful spiral galaxy is about 50 million light-years distant. The caption notes that it is about the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy.
It’s called a member of the Deer Lick Group of galaxies, but its membership is only accidental, a result of happening to align between our galaxy and the rest of the Deer Lick bunch. They are really about 10 times farther away, according to APOD.
In my view, two of those more distant galaxies show up just “above” NGC7331, the fancy spiral galaxy NGC7337 on the upper left and NGC7335 on the upper right.
A scientific paper published in 1996 said the central disk of the big galaxy in our view, NGC7331, rotates in an opposite direction to the rest of the galaxy. But the next year another paper disagreed.

When I glanced through the rear-view mirror, the Jeep’s back window looked like it was in a car-wash, except that instead of water it was flooded with tawny dust, dust that shot upward in standing waves from the window’s bottom and fanned out, tumbled down, replaced instantly with more dust boiling up in a continuous opaque flow.
Mat Hutchings, who had met me at I-80′s Tooele exit, waited until my dust had largely filtered to the ground or drifted off before he followed me in. He drove cautiously, parking far enough from my site that his dust wasn’t a bother, and began putting together his tall, 16-inch-diameter Dobsonian telescope.

[Mat Hutchings at his Dobsonian telescope, morning of Sept. 27, 2011, at Lakeside, Tooele County, UT. Photo by Joe Bauman]
The place was Lakeside, about an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City on I-80, a five-mile jaunt to the right on a small paved road, then only a few tenths of a mile on the dust road. This material covered the vehicle’s back like strange dry snow. A few minutes after I started setting up my scope, my sneakers and lower pant legs were covered.
I visited Lakeside three nights during the new-moon period: Sept. 24-25 alone; Sept. 26-27 with Hutchings, whose wonderful scope he had built himself, including grinding the mirror; and Sept. 28-29, when I found Jo and Allen Grahn already present with their Dobsonian out of its trailer and set up. Later that night Rev. Michael A. van Opstall of the University of Utah Math Department came too, only to leave shortly afterward when his allergies flared.
The dust got the better of me too, the third night. Bending to work on some equipment on the ground, I inhaled so much of the silt that I went into an extravagance of violent coughing and gagging. The Grahns said that they thought they’d have to run over and resuscitate me. Luckily, it ended quickly.
That same night I was walking through the brush in the dark and I heard a crunch and felt a sharp stab in my left sole. After I hobbled back to my observing table I found that I’d stepped on a sharp stick that penetrated the sneaker but not the skin. It was shaped like a sharpened stake and I needed a pair of pliers to extract it.
Although I hugely enjoyed all these friends, the most delightful night was when Hutchings was there because my scope was on its best behavior, allowing me time to chat, stare at the fathomless Milky Way, look through the binoculars on his homemade mount and peer through the Dob. I saw several stunning objects I had never glimpsed before, including the wispy Veil Nebula.
The three nights were still and clear, though the first two were cold. Blazing Jupiter dominated the arch of the heavens, while the Pleiades floated almost as high. A little after 1 a.m. we saw the constellation Orion rise on the eastern horizon, the three stars of the belt pointing straight up. By the time I looked again at 2:30 or 3, the great Orion Nebula was easily visible. The starlight was bright enough for walks without using a flashlight.
Tracing the boxy shape of Pegasus, I wondered again how anyone could see a flying horse in that constellation. It looks more like a squarish octopus. Same with nearby Cassiopeia — that’s no princess, just a sprawling crooked W.
A main focus the morning of Sept. 27 was a galaxy in Pegasus designated NGC7217. It’s an exceptionally tight spiral, without protruding arms, without a central bar structure, whose outer region forms a bright ring. The galaxy is an isolated one, not part of any group, distance calculated at just over 60 million light-years away. When I finished imaging it at 6 a.m. it was less than 13 degrees above the horizon, so low that it was blurred in some exposures.
It was awe-inspiring to find the galaxy and watch its images come onto the laptop screen, a slightly oval, faint, fuzzy disk with its brighter ring. Showing it to Mat, I traced the ring with my fingertip.

[NGC7217 in an image taken the morning of Sept. 27, 2011, at Lakeside, Tooele County, UT. For a larger version, click HERE. Photo by Joe Bauman]

*****
Recent studies by Russian astronomers show that NGC7217 is a strange galaxy. Nearly face-on, it boasts a complex structure with a bulge and star-forming rings.
The most recent paper is “Large Scale Nested Stellar Disks in NGC7217,” accepted on March 7, 2011, by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, London. Its authors are Olga K. Sil’chenko, Igor V. Chilingarian, Natalia Ya. Sotnikova and Victor L. Afanasiev. Analyzing spectroscopic observations by a 6-meter (nearly 20-feet) diameter telescope operated by the Russian Academy of Sciences, they obtained detailed readings of the movements of the galaxy’s stars and gases. The Hubble Space Telescope also provided data.
Besides the star-forming rings, NGC7217 has a gas disk around the nucleus that is sharply inclined to the plane of the galaxy. Startlingly, the stars of the inner area rotate in the opposite direction to the rest of the galaxy.
Dominating the galaxy’s middle is a bulge about 1,300 light-years to 4,000 light-years from the center; next comes an inner disk from about 5,000 light-years to 13,000 light-years from the center; and finally an outer disk extending from about 15,500 light-years to almost 29,000 light-years from the center.
The bulge is old, with stars aged from 10 billion to 13 billion years. The thin inner star disk — only 650 light-years to 2,300 light-years deep — is the home of intermediate age stars dating back about 5 billion years, according to the paper. However, the outer disk may be up to almost 10,000 light-years thick and is dominated by young stars around 2 billion years old.
The explanation apparently is that the galaxy underwent two mergers with satellites galaxies; alternatively, only one satellite merger took place and material flung out by that collision eventually was drawn back into NGC7217, making in effect two absorption events.
Different orbits by the colliding objects resulted in star disks moving in opposite directions. According to the report, “The encounter on a retrograde orbit resulted in the formation of the inner polar disk, while the outer star-forming ring and the outer disk thickening were consistent with a minor merger on a prograde orbit.”
I contacted Sl’chenko to see whether I understood the paper, and emailed the photo. On the staffs of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute of Moscow State University and the Isaac Newton Institute of Chile, Moscow Branch, she quickly responded.
“Indeed, the galaxy NGC7217 have the rings of collisional nature (and your image of NGC7217 reveals the outer one very well), and the inner and outer disks have the stars of different ages,” she replied.
These disks “experienced their main star formation in different epochs related probably with different merger events.”
*****
Following three nights at Lakeside, even after a couple of hundred miles of freeway travel, dust remained piled on the rear bumper.

[The dust of Lakeside on our Jeep's rear bumper, after three round trips from Salt Lake City. Photo by Joe Bauman]