Fireball Planetarium

A night of observing Mars and the constellations!

The St.John's Centre RASC will be at the Admiralty House In Mt Pearl, Nl with there scopes tonight September21,2018 maybe your last chance to see Mars through a big scope. Hope to see you there.

Saturn The planet Saturn is always a wow factor when people see it for the first time. What catches their eye are the beautiful rings that surround it. As one looks closer with a higher powered scope one can see three rings and the gap between the rings, the most famous being the Cassini Division. Also take a look to see if you can see the rings’ shadow on the clouds of Saturn. Saturn rings consist of tiny particles of dust and ice. It’s surprizing that we can see them as t...hey are very thin, anywhere between 10m and 975km. Professional Astronomers have wondered what the age of these rings are? They use two ways of inquiry: 1. They thought the rings were formed around the birth of the solar system as there was sufficient debris from comets and planetesimals to create the rings thus greater mass means older age. 2. Ring brightness as time moves on the micrometeorites would darken the ring of Saturn, so bright rings are younger. Over 12 years, Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer measured the amount of dust falling on the rings and found that it was 10 times their estimates, so the rings should be darker then they are thus older. As Nasa sent Cassini through the rings of Saturn so it would burn up in the atmosphere, scientists got to estimate the mass of the rings by measuring their gravitational pull which is 0.4 times the mass of Mimas, a moon of Saturn and are less then estimate obtained by both Voyager in 1980’s. The results have left scientist with the conclusion that the rings are not 4.6 billion years old but when formed when dinosaurs rule the Earth (100-300 million years ago). Now Astronomer are wondering how they were formed. Saturn is up all the summer long so take some time to explore it’s rings through your telescope. The photo of Saturn was taken Tim Caruk ,a St. John's Centre RASC member

Monday, I was out doing some visual observing and drawings ( Illustration 1) of some galaxies as spring is time for galaxies hunting. The next day I was on my friend's twitter account @nlskies and saw that he had also photographed it (Illustration 2) too (What are the odd? Astronomical ! pun intend). NGC 4725 is over 100 thousand light-years across and lies 41 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. While most spiral galaxies have two or more spiral a...rms, NGC 4725 has only one. NGC 4725 got this way because it collided with NGC 4747. In a wide field of view eyepiece one will see NGC 4747 in the upper left corner. When galaxies invade each other's gravitational zones, the larger ones, in this case NGC 4725 did not leave the battle unscathed as it lost one of its spiral arms. This collision has left NGC 4725 with it's galactic center as an active nucleus turning into a Seyfert galaxy and has started more star formation in the outer regions, while NGC 4747 is also a highly warp structure. These galaxies can be see in scopes as small as 114 mm at about 10pm this month. You can learn more about colliding galaxies by booking our planetarium show Cosmic Castaways See more

I see, this is the 50th anniversary of the film 2001 A Space Odyssey. I really didn't understand that movie but love the special effects and what made them more interesting to me was they were made by a Canadian Wally Gentleman. Who also did the special effects for the Oscar nominated film by NFB Universe which lead me to to a life time love of astronomy. At that time, Universe was the education movie used to supplement the space chapter in your school's Canadian Scienc...e book. I was in grade 9 at the time, when I first saw this 16mm movie projected onto a screen and it brought the world of astronomy to life. Even today seeing the rings of Saturn turning in Black and white made the world of space come alive to me. The tail of comet as it move back and forward across the screen made seeing it happen in real time with comet hyakutake in 1996, a dream come true. That year was also when I got introduced to the Royal Astronomical society of Canada (RASC) and saw my first planetarium show at the now Marine Institute. I guess that why I run the Fireball Planetarium today, so I can turn others onto astronomy. This is Internationally Astronomy Week and the St. John's Centre of the RASC will be having a display and star party at the Johnson's Geo Centre on Saturday, April 21. Come meet them and me there! Oh, BTW, you can still see the movie Universe at https://www.nfb.ca/film/universe The data is out of date but the special effects may turn you into a star gazer. Clear skies Garry

Here's a video of photos I took of the eclipse.