APOD 3.6

In this picture you can see Comet Lovejoy. Its ion tail stretches across the field of view of the telescope.This picture if from February 20th. The star filled back round is filled with with the bluish star Phi Persei and the planetary nebula of M76. This is also know as the Dumbbell nebula. Comet love joy has a greenish color. Love joy is outbound from the inner part of out solar system. its about 10 light minutes from earth. The Dumbbell nebula is over 3000 light years away. This picture captures the vastness and the beauty of our solar system.

APOD 3.5

IN this picture what you see is spiral galaxy m106. This galaxy is made up of a swirling disk of star an gas. Its appearance has blue spiral arms and red dust lanes closer to the center.  M106 glows very bright in radio waves they also emit x-rays.  An example of the closest thing to m106 is the sefert class of galaxies. This is where gas was thought to be falling through a massive black hole. M106 is only 23.5 million light years away from us. The width of is is 60 thousand light years. You can see it within the hunting dogs constellation. 

willem de sitter bio

Noah McClannahan

Mr. Percival

Astronomy

2/19/2015

Willem De Sitters Astronomer

Willem de sitters parents where named Lamoraal Ulbo de sitter and Catharine Theodore Wilhelmine Bertling. He was born on may 6 1872. The sitters had a family tradition of family members becoming lawyers. Willem decided to take a different route with his love for science and mathematics. Willem attended Secondary school in Arnhem. After he graduated he went to the University of Groningen with hopes of a degree in mathematics. While pursuing his degree he became very interested with physics and physics related experiments. He started working with Jacobus Kapteyn in the laboratory. In 1896 is when Sitters life changed. When David gill discussed the southern sky survey to Kapteyn. Sitters decided to finish his degree before leaving for Cape Town. He got his degree in 1897. He started working in Cape Town South Africa for a couple of years while participating in heliometer and photometric programs. Sitter returned to Groningen in 1899 and became an assistant in the Astronomical Laboratory and also continued to work towards his doctorate in the study heliometer observations of Jupiter's moons. In 1898 sitter married Eleonora Suermondt. Their first child was Lamoraal Ulbo was born in 1899 and died in 1901. The other children they had were Theodora, Lamoraal Ulbo, Aernout, and Agnes. Lamoraal became a geologist. Aernout was part of the Bosscha Observatory. Willem de sitter submitted his thesis on the Discussion of Heliometer Observations of Jupiter's Satellites moons in 1901. In 1913 sitter proved that the velocity of light was independent of the velocity of the source based on his observations of double start systems. In 1916 he suggested a four-dimensional space-time would fit in with cosmological models based on general relativity. Sitter found solutions to Einstein’s field of equations in the absence of matter. Sitters work led to an expedition in 1919 to measure gravitational deflection of light rays passing near the sun. Sitter was elected as President of the International Astronomical Union and served in this capacity from 1925 to 1928. In 1932 Sitter and Einstein joined together for a joint paper where they proposed a model of the universe. In the paper they mentioned dark matter which does not emit light and hasn't been detected. Even today dark matter is still a very mysterious and is a big part of what some people research today. Sitter is best known for his work on relativity. In 1929 he was working on the motions of satellites when he died. His research showed that there was varying tidal friction which affects the moon and earth. De Sitter suffered from chest complaints for several years but seemed to overcome them. However he died from pneumonia at the young age of sixty-two years in in 1934. Willem De sitter dedicated his life to the world of science and his life played a major role in the contributions to modern day physical cosmology.

Sources for bio

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Willem_de_Sitter.aspx

http://www.phil-inst.hu/~szekely/PIRT_Budapest/ft/Realdi_ft.pdf

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/546850/Willem-de-Sitter

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Sitter.html

Stellar Nurseries

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/stellar_nurseries.html



















http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2409.html#.VNyeVubF-So

Observations

On 1/7/15 i saw the iridium flare around 7 35 pm
on 1/28/15 i saw another iridium flare.
on 2/3/15  the HST is visible. Also was keeping and eye out for the space station which is brighter than the HST. But i did not see the space station.
I look up every night and i watch the different phases of the moon and i try to point out constellations. Their is a cool app someone told me about where if you point your phone in the sky it tells you what constellation those starts are in and where they are located. I am going to keep trying to familiarize myself with the night sky more by always looking up.

3.3 APOD

Titan seas reflect sunlight. The sunlight from the liquid seas of titan. Saturns moon has many smooth lakes made of methane,when the angle is right it reflects the sunlight as if they where mirrors.This picture is falsely colored and the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn image captured titian last summer in different bans of cloud piercing infrared light.The reflection is so bright it saturated Cassini infrared cameras. The reflection regions confirms that northern titans houses a wide complex array of seas with geometry that indicates periods of evaporation.This is on of our most mysterious moons. Cassini has revealed titan to be a world with active weather. The times it raids on Titan it rains a liquefied version of natural gas

3.2 APOD

IN this picture you can see the beautiful exposure on the northern winter sky.
The starts and skylight includes orions belt the orion nebula and the Pleiades stat cluster.
Betelgeuse and Rigel are part of the constellation orion.  The belt of starts of orion are nearly vertical in the central line between the horizon image center. The lowest star of the belt is kinda skewed due to the red glow of the flame nebula. Bernards loop is to the left right by the bright orange start Betelgeuse.Belts right is the Orion nebula and Rigel. The blue cluster of starts in Pleiades and the red nebula to the left is the California nebula. The Bright orange dot about the image is Aldebaran which is a star in the constellation Taurus the bull. This picture was taking near Palau village in Spain.