Welcome to the 41st edition of our newsletter, sent to members to keep you informed about Planetarium and Friends news, as well as happenings in the world of astronomy and events in our area related to science education. Visit the website for more news updates and a list of our articles. |
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FOAP's May 18-19 public weekend featured the
1st Annual Dome Fest
Film Festival, featuring short films produced by Arlington Public School secondary students. |
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19 films, representing 48 students from HB Woodlawn, Wakefield HS, and Washington-Liberty HS were screened on the planetarium dome. Using cell phone or hand-held video cameras as storytelling tools, students learned to explore the world around them through filmmaking. Congratulations to these budding visual artists! |
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FOAP Supports Northern Virginia Regional Science Fair
FOAP judges reviewed astronomy-related projects at the March 2, 2024 Fair, recognizing two bright students for their impressive displays. Learn more here. |
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Aurora Borealis Lights Up Our Skies!
submitted by Jennifer Bartlett Did you see the aurora borealis, or northern lights? The Sun is continuously losing energetic, charged particles, mostly electrons and protons, that travel outward through the Solar System. Some of this "solar wind" will encounter the Earth but our magnetic field channels these particles towards the poles. When a particle from the solar wind collides with an atom or molecule in our atmosphere, the energy imparted to the atom or molecule puts it in an excited state. Eventually, the atom or molecule will return to an unexcited state by radiating that excess energy as light (the aurora borealis).
The level of activity in the Sun’s atmosphere follows an 11-year cycle. Over the next year, the Sun will be close to its maximum activity for this cycle, producing solar storms and coronal mass ejections that will spew large amounts of charged particles into the Solar System. Such events can produce more wide-spread aurora, including possibly more events visible from Arlington. |
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Voyager 1 Back In Business!
submitted by Kathi Overton The space probe Voyager 1 was originally launched in 1977 on a mission to visit the outer planets of our solar system. It is still traveling away from Earth, and is now more than 15 billion miles away, requiring more than 22 hours for a signal to reach the craft! Below is an artist’s rendition of Voyager 1 in deep space |
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Over the decades, the spacecraft continued to send back valuable data, until last November when one of the probe’s memory chips stopped working. It took almost six months for a group of engineers at NASA and JPL to figure out the problem, and then painstakingly devise a complex workaround to bypass the damaged chip and restore the data transmission. The team is now finishing a software rewrite to enable the spacecraft to once again send usable data to Earth.
Links for more info: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ https://www.space.com/voyager-1-communications-update-april-2024 |
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1919 Solar Eclipse Tests General Relativity
submitted by Jennifer Bartlett
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published his general theory of relativity in 1915, which predicts that spacetime is warped by the presence of matter. Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) understood that this meant that stars near the Sun would appear to be in slightly different positions than would otherwise be calculated for them. However, we cannot easily measure the positions of stars near the Sun, because the Sun itself is so bright. During a solar eclipse, the Moon blocks the Sun allowing the stars to be seen.
On May 29, 1919, Eddington photographed stars during a solar eclipse visible from Island of Príncipe off the coast of Africa. Another expedition observed from Sobral in Brazil. Photographs taken during the eclipse were compared with nighttime photographs taken 6 months later. Eddington concluded that the change in stellar positions as their light passed the Sun was consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. While we usually associate general relativity with black holes and gravitational lens, the Global Positioning System (GPS) on which we rely must account for general relativistic effects; clocks on Earth run slower than clocks on the GPS satellites due to the difference in the Earth’s gravitational attraction at different altitudes.
Learn more about the 1919 eclipse from the Smithsonian Magazine.
Below is the highest resolution image of Eclipse of 1919 from Sobral, including modern image reprocessing. Image credit Crommelin, HDAP, ESO (CC-BY 4.0) |
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“In the Good Old Summertime”
submitted by Jennifer Bartlett
We all look forward to summertime when the days are long and warm. When does it begin? On Memorial Day weekend, when the community pools open for the season and rules about white shoes are relaxed? On June 14, when the Arlington Public Schools release our youngest students for the long break? On the Summer Solstice, the longest daylight period of year which is also known as Midsummer? Meteorologists and climatologists will begin their summer data collection on June 1 because June, July, and August are typically the hottest months of the year in the northern hemisphere and having seasons neatly align with calendar months is more convenient.
Just as we experience the annual change of the seasons, we see annual changes in the visible constellations. Orion the Hunter stalked the winter skies but sets too early for viewing. Instead, try identifying the Big Dipper, which is part of Ursa Major the Big Bear. The Big Dipper is high in the northern sky at 9:00 PM EDT. The two stars at the marking the lower side of its cup, Merak and Dubhe, point to Polaris, the brightest star in the Little Dipper also known as Ursa Minor the Little Bear. The Little Dipper is fainter and more challenging to find. You can imagine water pouring out of the Big Dipper and into the Little Dipper. Happy stargazing!
Learn more about seasons:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/meteorological-versus-astronomical-seasons |
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SAVE THE DATE!
June 15-16 Spaceflight - From Dream to Reality
is the theme for our final public weekend of the 2023-2024 School Year. Tickets go on sale in early June.
Watch for advance member email notice. |
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This message has been sent to you from the Friends of Arlington's Planetarium. Friends of Arlington's David M. Brown Planetarium
P.O. Box 7029
Arlington, VA 22207 USA
Copyright (C) 2024 Friends of Arlington's David M. Brown Planetarium (FOAP). All rights reserved.
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