But first, we admit a mistake in the last article, alas. The star beta Cassiopeii is called Caph, while alpha Cass is called Shedir. We got them backwards in our last article (thanks to our dedicated subscriber F.P. for pointing this out).

Onwards…

If you have reasonably dark skies, and even a 3-4 inch scope, try to spot the emission nebula NGC 281 (shown just near alpha Cass in this map. An OIII or UHC filter is a big help, especially if you’re up against some light pollution.

NGC 281 was discovered by the self-made astronomer E. E. Barnard, though he missed the embedded and inconspicuous star cluster IC 1590. The brightest star in this cluster, called Barnard 1, is a multiple star with three blue-white components visible in most telescopes. This star and its stellar brethren light up the gas and dust you see in your telescope.

Visually, NGC 281 looks ghostly white. It’s just not bright enough to trigger the color receptors in your retina. But long-exposure photographs bring out the pinkish-red color nicely. Here’s an image of NGC 281 taken with specialized optical filters. While taking an image this detailed is quite difficult, a little practice and the right know-how will help you grab your own images of NGC 281, and similar sights in the sky.

In the next article, we’ll tell you about a critically important star in the next-door constellation Cepheus, and how it helped astronomers to measure the universe…

But that’s it for today…

In Greek mythology, Cassiopeia was the wife of King Cepheus of Ethiopia.  She was beautiful but vain, and boasted she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than all the Nereids, the nymph-daughters of the sea god Nereus.  Poseidon, the main sea god, did not take kindly to this boast and threatened to flood the kingdom of Ethiopia.

An oracle advised Cepheus and Cassiopeia to appease Poseidon by sacrificing their daughter Andromeda.  The beautiful princess was chained to a rock at the edge of the sea, and left to be mangled and eaten by the dreaded sea monster Cetus. But the hero Perseus, flying back on the winged horse Pegasus, and after slaying the Gorgon Medusa, arrived in time to save Andromeda and turn Cetus to stone with Medusa’s severed head.  Soon after, Perseus and Andromeda married.  But Poseidon still punished Cassiopeia by casting her and Cepheus into the heavens, where they circle the celestial pole, never rising or setting (at least not from the latitude of Mt. Olympus).

Messier 103

Let’s have a look at three of the finest open clusters in Cassiopeia, all of which are worthy of a little examination through the chilly fall air.

M52. Messier 52 is easy to find… just continue a line from beta Cass (Shedir) to alpha Cass (Caph) a little more than the same distance.  It’s visible in binoculars as a hazy patch of magnitude 7.  A 3-4 inch telescope will reveal a few dozen mostly blue-white stars, and a couple of yellow giants which evolved off the main sequence.  The cluster is fairly tightly packed and hard to resolve.  It looks small because it’s far away… about 5,000 light years.  In the 1800’s John Herschel saw the cluster as round, while the redoubtable amateur Admiral Smyth saw it as triangular or fan-shaped.  What do you see?

M103. This is the last object in Messier’s original catalog (it was later padded to include 6 more objects).  It’s also easy to find, about 1 degree northeast of Ruchbah (or delta Cass).  At 8,500 light years away, it’s one of the most distant open clusters in Messier’s catalog.  In a small scope, the cluster is unmistakably triangular and displays perhaps two dozen stars.  The star triple star Struve 131 is the bright star at the north vertex of the cluster; you can easily resolve all three stars in Struve 131 in a scope, even at low power.

NGC 7789. A personal favorite.  This open cluster is old (> 1 billion years), far (>8,000 light years), and faint (most stars are magnitude 11 or 12).  Because it’s so old, many blue-white stars have turned into red giants, so the cluster is quite colorful in photographs.  It was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783.  You can’t resolve this cluster in binoculars, but a 3-inch scope resolves a spray of tiny pinpoints of light on a hazy background.  This open cluster, unlike many, looks better with higher magnification.  Find NGC 7789 at one vertex of the right-angled triangle it forms with Shedir and Caph.

Star clusters M52, M103, NGC 7789, and NGC 457 in Cassiopeia (click to enlarge)

A bonus object: Another favorite cluster in Cassiopeia is the lovely NGC 457, named after a famous character in a Steven Spielberg classic, and described on p. 171 of our own guide Secrets of the Deep Sky.  You can read more about this guide here.

That’s it for today.  But we’ll look at a few more sights in Cassiopeia in an upcoming issue.

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Tired of just reading about the stars? Stargazing for Beginners takes you on an easy-to-follow tour of the stars and main constellations.  No telescope required!  Click here to learn more…

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In the northern hemisphere around 9 p.m., the star Fomalhaut sits alone above the southern horizon.  Amazingly, it’s the brightest star in the vast expanse of sky between Deneb and Aldebaran.  This year, Fomalhaut has brilliant company: the bright planet  Jupiter in nearby Capricorn.  Last November, astronomers imaged what appears to be a planet embedded in a disk of debris around Fomalhaut.  This was one of the first exo-planets imaged directly with a telescope.

Fomalhaut, Jupiter, and the constellation Aquila in the south and south-west sky as seen from latitude 45°N (click to enlarge)

In the southern hemisphere, Fomalhaut is high overhead, almost at the zenith, with the bright Achernar just to the southeast.  Tucana and its splendid globular cluster 47 Tucanae is close by.  The remnants of the spring and summer Milky Way, including the constellations Crux and Carina, lie low on the southern horizon.  Scorpius has set claws-first into the southwestern horizon. And the bright star Canopus lies in the southeast sky in Carina, along with other notable stars of the southern-hemisphere summer.

You’ll see fewer bright stars this time of year because the Earth’s night sky looks out of the starry plane of the Milky Way galaxy into intergalactic space where, with a telescope, you can see dozens of galaxies in Pegasus and Andromeda, and many more in the southern constellations Grus, Sculptor, and Fornax.

Moon

Full Moon: November 2 at 19:14 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
Last Quarter: November 9 at 15:56 GMT
New Moon: November 16 at 19:14 GMT
First Quarter: November 24 at 9:39 GMT

Planets

Mercury is lost in the sun’s glare this month.  On November 5, it passes behind the sun’s disk, a rare event but entirely unobservable, even in a telescope.

Venus rises about an hour before the sun in early November, and gets closer to the sun as the month wears on.

Mars hasn’t been much of a presence for many months.  But it’s getting a little higher and brighter now, rising by about 9:30 p.m. local time at month’s end in the constellation Cancer.  Mars is about as bright as Betelgeuse and has a disk about 10 arc-seconds across.  In a telescope at high magnification, you may see a few surface features on the red planet.  Try to observe it when it’s higher in the sky… well after midnight.  If that’s past your bedtime, don’t worry.  The view will be better, and earlier, in December.

Jupiter is still the bright object in the southern sky.  You can’t miss it just after sunset.  It’s always worth at least casual inspection, if at least to see its moons dance around from night to night.   Neptune is just a few degrees away from Jupiter.

Saturn is visible high in the sky in Virgo at dawn.  The rings are just 3-4 degrees from edge-on.

Uranus is east of Jupiter, in the constellation Aquarius.  It shines at magnitude 5.8, and is easily visible in a telescope or binoculars just south of the Circlet of Pisces.

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Secrets of the Deep Sky helps you build an extraordinary level of observational skill, and lets you enjoy astonishing sights in the heavens most can only dream of seeing.  Click here to learn more…

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Celestial Events

There’s another meteor shower this month: the Leonids.  The peak should occur after midnight on November 16.  Last year’s display had an unexpected peak of 100 meteors/hour, and some meteor forecasters think this year could be even better.  While the radiant is in Leo, you can see the Leonids anywhere in the sky.  The meteors are tiny particles left over from the periodic Comet Temple/Tuttle.

But these sights are nothing compared to what you’ll find in the deep wilds, far away from city lights.

I was reminded recently of a classic astronomy story, written by Jerry Lodriguss, the creator of the excellent Beginner’s Guide to DSLR Astrophotography. It seems Jerry had an unexpected– and quite unwelcome– visitor while photographing the night sky, completely alone in the Arizona desert and miles from anywhere.

But I’ll let him tell you the story right here.

Thanks to subscriber L. R. for calling this classic encounter to my attention.

“Oh, I’ve seen them many times before”, you say. “They’re getting a little boring to look at.”

Boring? Come now. When you begin to tire of the beautiful sights in the night sky, it’s time to fire up your imagination. As you look at Jupiter’s four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, you might consider all the areas of art and science these four moons have influenced over the centuries.

For example…

1. Esthetics
The tiny pinpricks of light lined up with the bands of their giant home planet are in themselves a beautiful sight, even in the most modest pair of binoculars. Were it not for the overwhelming brilliance of Jupiter itself, you could easily see all four of these moons lined up like little stars.

Here’s a strikingly beautiful photo of our own moon and Jupiter. In this case, clouds passing in front of our moon allowed the exposure of the camera to be set to capture this scene. You can learn how to take photographs like this yourself here.

2. Drama
The moons of Jupiter move constantly, revealing almost nightly displays of shadows, occultations, and disappearances. When all 4 large moons disappeared from view one by one in early September, even though I was dead tired and desperately wanted to sleep… I couldn’t take my eye off of this show. It was absolutely gripping. And I’ve been doing this for more than thirty years.

3. Physics
The graceful rhythmic motion of the moons is governed by the laws of Newtonian gravitation. But observations of the moons also helped astronomers in the 17th century to understand that light moved at a finite speed, and helped them determine that speed fairly accurately. This was a totally accidental discovery.

4. History
The four bright moons of Jupiter were discovered by Galileo almost exactly 400 years ago. To celebrate this discovery and others by Galileo, this year was named the International Year of Astronomy.

But Galileo’s discoveries got him into hot water with the church. Despite the plain evidence in Galileo’s telescope, which they were invited to look through, church leaders compelled Galileo upon threat of excommunication and painful death to renounce his views that the Earth moved around the sun, as Jupiter’s moons revolved around the giant planet.

It’s a small mark of human advancement that, in some parts of the world, a scientist can oppose deeply held beliefs without having his life destroyed. Mostly.

5. Literature
We’ve already covered Arthur Clarke’s proposal of life under the thick ice of Europa in his science-fiction novel 2010.

And Canadian author Alice Munro named one of her lovely short stories “The Moons of Jupiter”, in which the main character had a small personal revelation while learning about the moons during a show at a planetarium.

Truth is, it’s hard not experience some personal insight while stargazing. If you just keep your mind open, and use a little imagination.

You just have to get outside and look up.

If you’re keen to image Jupiter, I have good news and bad news.

The good news: with digital cameras, it’s easier than ever to capture and process a good planetary image.

The bad news: it’s still a bit trickier than taking snapshots at your cousin’s wedding.

Believe it or not, cheap computer webcams give you one option for planetary and lunar imaging.   In the past decade, do-it-yourselfers figured out how to use simple webcams like the Philips ToUcam Pro to take quite stunning images.

You can modify such a webcam to replace the eyepiece in your telescope.  Then, with your computer, you turn on the webcam to capture a stream of hundreds or thousands of images in the span of a few seconds or minutes.  Then you use a special software package like Registax to automatically select only the best images, the ones least affected by atmospheric turbulence.  You can combine the best frames into a single image, and away you go.

At least, that’s the basic idea.

If you’re not into tinkering, there’s a commercial version of these webcams, all ready to go out of the box, and with all the software you need.  The Orion StarShoot Solar System Imager works well, and there are other options from Meade and Celestron.  If you’re in a hurry to image the moon and planets, this is a no-fuss way to get started.

And there’s another option for taking a good image of Jupiter (and other planets and the moon).  If you’ve got a fairly new digital SLR camera or plan to get one soon, you can use the camera’s “Live View” feature (which lets you use the LCD screen as a viewfinder) to capture a stream of images which you then process with readily available software.

The guide by famed astrophotographer Jerry Lodriguss has more details on this technique, and many other ways to take great astrophotos with a DSLR camera.  Click here to learn more…

And the best part about using DSLR’s for astrophotography?   You can actually use them to take pics of your cousin’s wedding, too.

Like all meteor showers, the Orionids occur as the Earth passes through the debris-strewn path of a comet, in this case, Halley’s Comet.  The meteors are simply tiny bits of ice and dust that fell away from the comet and ran into our atmosphere.  As in all such showers, the meteors appear to originate from a point in the sky called the radiant.  For this shower, the radiant lies in the constellation Orion.  Hence the name.

Here’s an image of the Orionids in 2006.

The Orionids run from October 17-25, with the peak predicted for early on October 21.  The meteors will be visible to observers in both hemispheres.  Just look up anywhere into the sky with your unaided eye and wait.  You’ll see some eventually.  If you can trace back the direction of a meteor to the radiant in Orion, that means you likely saw an Orionid.  If not, you saw a random meteor.  You’ll likely see more meteors after midnight, when the Earth turns into the debris field of Halley’s famed comet.

At its peak, the Orionids can display as many as 30 meteors per hour.  That’s just half of what you’d see during August’s Perseids, but it’s still an impressive sight.  Some meteor scientists believe number of Orionids fluctuates on a 12-year cycle.  If they’re right, this year should exhibit a peak… so it may be a vintage year for this shower.  We’ll see.

Watching a meteor shower is a pleasant way to spend a night.  But it’s also fairly easy to photograph a meteor shower.  All you need is a tripod and a camera that allows you to open the shutter for several minutes.  A digital SLR camera is ideal.  Point the camera anywhere in the sky, open the shutter, and wait.  This is one of the easiest types of astrophoto you can take.  To learn more about taking your own photos of meteor showers and other sights in the night sky, simply click here…

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The answer is, of course, quite a lot.

With a 5.5 degree field-of-view, R.B.’s 10×50 binoculars show a patch of sky as wide as four fingers held at arms length.  That’s a good wide field, ideal for viewing many things at once.

This week, for example, on the morning of October 16, there will be a splendid view in the pre-dawn sky of Venus, Saturn, Mercury, and a thin crescent moon.  The moon and Venus will be 5.5 degrees apart, Saturn will be 3 degrees above Venus, and elusive Mercury will be 8 degrees to the lower left of Venus.  This alignment is perfect for viewing with a good pair of binoculars and a clear view of the eastern horizon.

Venus, Saturn, Mercury, and the Moon in the pre-dawn sky on October 16.

And there’s more to see this month with a pair of 10×50 binoculars (or 7×50 or 7×35 or 8×42, for that matter).  Sweep the star fields of Cassiopiea and Perseus to see a dozen or so small misty patches of open star clusters.  In the southern hemisphere, check out the Magellanic Clouds and the Jewel Box star cluster in the Southern Cross.

And in spring, north or south, away from city lights, the patch of sky between Leo and Virgo contains a half-dozen galaxies visible with binoculars.  The brightest of these galaxies, M87, appears as a round unresolved  fuzzy patch.  But don’t be fooled… this galaxy itself contains more than a TRILLION stars.  And you can see it in the most modest pair of binoculars.

So you see, while most people think telescopes when they think astronomy, binoculars are an indispensable tool for the backyard stargazer.   They’re inexpensive, easy to grab for a quick peek, have a nice wide field, and they give dazzling views in dark skies.

Our own Stargazing for Beginners: A Binocular Tour of the Night Sky, shows you dozens more things to see in the north and near-southern skies.  No telescope required.

To be honest, E.D. is on the right track.  He’s using a large aperture scope to increase resolution of fine detail.  He’s using high magnification to increase the image size, yet he’s not using a too-high magnification to dim the image.  And he’s using a filter of the opposite color from the object he’s trying to find… in this case, the Great Red Spot.

What else can one do to get a better view of Jupiter, its colorful cloud bands, and Great Red Spot?

Here are a few more tips, some of which come right out of Basic Astronomy With a Telescope, an online astronomy course recommended by none other than Sir Patrick Moore, the grand patriarch of amateur astronomy.

* For us northern observers, Jupiter has been at a low altitude these last few years, which means we have to look through a lot of atmospheric murk.  Next year will be better, but for now do most of your observing when Jupiter is highest in the sky so you look through the least amount of atmosphere.

* Try not to observe Jupiter when its over a rooftop or a driveway, or anything else that’s slowly radiating daytime heat.  The turbulence and shimmering caused by the rising warm air will make the image into an ugly boiling blob.

* Use a simple eyepiece design to enhance contrast and color fidelity.  Plossls and Orthoscopics work well, as does the slightly more expensive Radian design by Televue.

* Refractors tend to have better contrast than reflectors.  But bigger telescope have better resolutions.  While it’s easy to find an 8-10″ or larger reflector, good luck getting your hands on an 8-10 refractor!   But when using a reflector like E. D., make sure the instrument is well collimated (see your user’s manual for how to do this).  Sometimes, just a slight turn of an alignment screw makes all the difference (of course, you have to know which screw to turn and which way to turn it).

* Look carefully… even at 240x, the Great Red Spot appears tiny.  It takes a little practice seeing such fine detail.

* Above all, be patient.  Sometimes you just have to wait for a patch of steady air to let you glimpse the maximum detail.  Some nights, you get just 10 seconds of good seeing at a time.  But it’s often worth the wait.

And here’s an advanced tip…

* If you have an 8-inch or larger scope, try an apodizing mask.  This is a type of filter or screen than fits over the top of the telescope.  It gradually decreases the amount of light reaching the edge of the objective lens or mirror.  This has the effect of improving contrast by reducing the amount of light from one feature that diffracts into another.

(Trust me, you do NOT want to see the mathematics required to prove this).

On planets and double stars, apodizing masks can work remarkably well.  I’ve not seen such masks for sale.  But here’s a link to help you make your own.

http://www.bpccs.com/lcas/Articles/apodizing_masks.htm

Do you have a question about observing the heavens, whether with your eye, binoculars, or telescope?  Send us an email at info@oneminuteastronomer.com.  And remember, there are no dumb questions, only dumb mistakes.

As a writer, Clarke was no Hemingway.  But the strength of his writing came not from his elegant style or complex character development, but from his thought-provoking ideas, most of which were based on scientific fact.

Perhaps his most unexpected plot twist came in his sequel to 2001, called 2010.  Towards the end of the novel, the mysterious black monoliths of an advanced and meddlesome race began infesting and multiplying in the atmosphere of Jupiter, adding mass to the big planet in a matter of days.  As its mass grew, the planet shrunk, then finally collapsed and ignited as a new star (I won’t tell you why this happened.  You can read the book or see the movie if you’re interested; as usual, the book is better).

Here’s a view from the movie of 2010 that shows the collapse of Jupiter into a star.  The key moment happens at 3:15 into this clip.

Clarke’s idea is almost entirely accurate.  As it happens, Jupiter is not just the largest planet by size in the solar system.  Given its composition, structure, and mass, it’s as large as it can possibly be.

If Jupiter was less massive, it would be smaller like Saturn or Uranus.  But if you could add 2x, 5x, 10x or more mass to Jupiter, perhaps with the help of Clarke’s magic monoliths, the planet would not grow larger.  It would shrink.  (Don’t you wish your waistline worked like that).

As it is now, the dense core of Jupiter generates heat which radiates into space.  If the planet’s mass increased by 50x to 60x, the core would get hotter and denser until the planet turned into a “brown dwarf”, a type of failed star.  At that mass, the planet would start to grow again back to its present size.  In fact, all brown dwarfs, whether 10x or 60x Jupiter’s mass, all have roughly the same diameter as Jupiter.

If Jupiter grew to 75x its current mass, its core would get hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core.  It would become small main sequence red dwarf star, and burn steadily for billions of years.  Though even then, its diameter as a red dwarf star would only be 30% larger than the planet’s current diameter.

By comparison, our sun, which is bigger than most stars, has a diameter 10x that of Jupiter, but a mass 1000x as great.

You’ll find Jupiter this month in the constellation Capricorn, hovering fat and bright in the southern sky at an impressive magnitude -2.6.  It’s the brightest object in the southern night sky, save the moon.  Aside from Jupiter, Capricorn has quite a few sights for binoculars and small telescopes, including a lovely double star just west of the biggest planet (see page 59-60 of Stargazing for Beginners for more about what to see in this part of the sky this time of year).

Next time, we’ll give you a few tips on how to observe  Jupiter.  No monoliths required.