Watershed of the Future simulator update - Day Three of install

Over the past week we have had dozens of reports of green fireballs over Manitoba. Here’s the typical description: A flaming object, greenish in colour, flashing into existence and flying in a straight line towards the horizon. Perhaps it explodes; perhaps it heads behind some trees or buildings and disappears. It’s usually visible for only a few seconds, leaving many viewers wondering if they even saw it or imagined it. It usually looks like it is very close overhead, or came to earth just behind the trees nearby.

These are well-known objects, although we seem to be getting a lot of them lately. Called bolides, they are basically large versions of meteors (which are commonly called “shooting stars” or “falling stars”). They are dying gasp of a small piece of rock that has been in space since before the Earth itself was formed.

Back in the day, about 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system itself was just forming from a slowly-spinning disk of gas and dust. Most of the materials went to form the Sun; most of the rest formed the planets. All that was left were tiny pieces of dust and rock, scattered throughout the solar system, orbiting the sun in oval-shaped orbits that carried them across the solar system. Eventually, they crash into a planet, like the Earth as an example.

When a piece of this cosmic dust crashes into earth, there is no danger to us – Earth is significantly larger than a piece of dust, and so we win this particular collision. The dust hits our atmosphere at orbital speeds, without the benefit of the heat shields we put on our returning spacecraft. The friction with the air heats the dust and surrounding air so quickly that the air itself glows in a long trail which marks the dust’s demise. Many kilometers below, we can see the streak of light as a meteor. This happens all the time – if you go outside on a dark, moonless night away from city lights, on average you will see a half-dozen meteors per hour. If the piece of material is bigger – say the size of a grapefruit – it makes a much bigger flash. It may survive long enough to get to the deeper layers of our atmosphere, where it explodes in a bright flash. These are much rarer – you are lucky to see one or two of these in your lifetime, since larger pieces of rock in space are (thankfully) much rarer than dust-sized specks.

Every so often, a comet can go by and leave a big trail of dust in the Earth’s path – a cosmic dustbunny in space. When the Earth goes through this cloud of cometary dust, we can get a lot of meteors in a short period of time – a meteor shower. Meteor showers usually produce a few meteors per hour, with the more active ones producing a few dozen per hour – much more than the average, but still the sort of thing you have to be looking for to see.

It so happens that right now, we are just coming off of the annual Leonid meteor shower – a relatively weak shower that can produce a dozen or so meteors an hour in most years. This is the source of many of the meteors seen over the last week – the bright green fireballs are larger pieces of the cometary dust that Earth encounters at this time of year.

Alas, none of these fireballs are likely to survive all the way down to the ground to become meteorites – cometary materials are made mostly of ice, and so the heat of their passage through the atmosphere completely vaporizes them.

Beginning March 7, Comet PANSTARRS will become visible in the evening sky for observers in Manitoba. This is a cool chance to see a comet, those mysterious visitors from the ragged edge of the solar system that occasionally grace our skies. But, you’ll need a pair of binoculars (and clear skies) for the best view.

What is Comet PANSTARRS?

It’s a small chunk of ice only a few kilometers in diameter that is in a long, oval-shaped orbit around the sun. Most of the time it is totally invisible, but right now it is swinging close past the sun. The sun’s heat vaporizes some of the ice, and the solar wind blows the dust and gas back into a tail which can stretch for a million kilometers or more.  There are millions of comets out there, but usually they are too far from both the Sun and the Earth to be visible except in large telescopes.

What’s with the name?

PANSTARRS is the name of the program that discovered it – the PANnoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System. Comets are named after their discovers, which in the past meant the person who first saw it. Nowadays, in the realm of automated telescopes making discoveries without human intervention, it often means an acronym instead of a name. You can learn more about the PAN-STARRS system here.

How do I see it?

There is a finder chart from Sky and Telescope magazine here. While the comet is bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye, it is also in very bright twilight skies right after sunset. Most observers will probably need binoculars to see it, and a clear western horizon with no buildings, trees or streetlights to distract. The comet is about second magnitude, which is about as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper, so it should be visible if the sky is clear and haze-free. It will likely look like a faint fuzzy blob, and the tail may or may not be visible. Comets are notoriously unpredictable, and can change their appearance in a matter of hours, especially if they’re as close to the Sun as this one is, so keep checking back for updates.

Can I take a picture of it?

You can try! If you have a digital camera, put it on a tripod or fencepost or something sturdy and point it towards the comet. Set the camera for Manual exposure, and select an exposure time of between 2 and 10 seconds. (Check your camera’s manual for how to do this.) Take a picture and see what it looks like, then take another one with a longer exposure time and see what it looks like. Trial and error will give you a decent chance of recording this celestial interloper. Try zooming in (which usually requires a longer exposure time) and even holding the camera up to your binocular or telescope eyepiece if you have one. Today’s cameras can do some amazing things, so try yours and see what happens.

So what?

Bright comets are beautiful and rare sights. Scientifically they offer a glimpse into the early days of our solar system. They’re basically left-over chunks of material that didn’t get swept up into one of the planets of our solar system, kept in a deep freeze for the last few billion years or so. Comets are responsible for most of the water on our planet, by impacting the Earth during the early days of its formation. And, they’re just cool!

Finally, another comet, Comet ISON, will appear in the sky later this year, and could be even bigger and brighter, so this is a good warm-up for observers.

We’d love to see your pictures of this comet. Send them to SkyInfo@ManitobaMuseum.ca and we’ll post the best ones on our website.

Jupiter and Venus have been engaged in a beautiful dance in the western sky after sunset. With the warm weather, I’ve been running outside in shirtsleeves every few minutes, waiting for the light levels to be at their best for viewing. A little point-and-shoot camera on a tripod is all you need to capture this dramatic dance of the planets.

If you aren’t happy with the picture your semi-intelligent camera computer comes up with, you can fall back on an old technique from the film days: bracketing. Set the camera for “manual” mode, and start with a 1 second exposure time. Then takes several shots with exposure times on either side of that, both higher and lower. Basically, shoot one image at each setting on the dial or each click of the button. You’ll get a whole range of pictures with different colour, depths, contrast, and definition. In the days of film, this was essential since you couldn’t see your results until after you had developed the film… sometimes a whole night’s work would come back out of focus or underexposed due to an error that went uncorrected under the sky. Nowadays, bracketing is just a way to explore the full depth of the scene before you, and reveal views very different from what your eyes see. Your images won’t replace the view of seeing it live, but they will remind you of your observation, and give you another perspective from which to contemplate the dance of the solar system.

On August 23 at about 9:35 pm, a bright fireball was seen across southern Manitoba and several U.S. States. We are collecting reports of the object to determine where it came from and also where any pieces might have landed. If you say this object, please email us at skyinfo@manitobamuseum.ca with the details.

Please include the following information:

• Where you were when you saw it;
• The direction you were facing when you first saw it;
• Whether the object was moving left-to-right, right-to-left, or up-and-down, and at what angle
• How high above the horizon it was – use the degree scale, where 0 is the horizon, 90 is straight overhead. So, halfway up the sky is 45 degrees, a third of the way up from the horizon is 30 degrees, etc.
• Any other details – colour, sound, how long you saw it for, etc.

Your reports can help us track down this object, which was probably a small asteroid burning up in the atmosphere.

April 12, 1961 – a date that will forever be a part of human history. The date that humanity became a spacefaring species. This achievement ranks amongst the greatest of human accomplishments – fire, the wheel, agriculture, the electric guitar – and its long-reaching effects are still rippling through our future.

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin boarded the Vostok spacecraft and flew once around the Earth. HIs 108-minute flight was significant only for its newness; the flight would be easily surpassed by both the Soviets and the Americans within a year, Gagarin became a world hero, not just for the Soviet Union but for all of us – he had gone where no one had gone before, and returned safely, blazing a trail that many of us still yearn to follow.

If you want to see what Yuri’s flight was like, watch the film First Orbit – a beautiful real-time recreation of the flight, using out-the-window imagery shot from the International Space Station, which closely mimics the Vostok’s flight path. Premiered on 12 April 2011, the film celebrates the 50 years that we have been leaving Earth for the vacuum of space. I can’t help but wonder what the next 50 years bring, both in spaceflight and in other events. Will we build on Yuri’s flight and push our frontiers ever farther, or remained mired in short-sighted and short-term plans to stay the course in space? We’ll see.

For myself, I echo Yuri’s first words after the Vostok’s carrier rocket lifted off the pad: “Poyekhali!” Translation: “Let’s go!”

50 years ago today, Soviet air force pilot Lt. Yuri A. Gagarin didn’t know he would become be the first human into space in just a week’s time. Gagarin and his colleagues, Gherman Titov and Grigori Nelyubov, were all in training for the first flights of the Vostok spacecraft, but the Soviet leadership had not yet formally authorized the flight nor assigned a cosmonaut. What’s more, the United States was racing to put a man in space as well, and although they lagged behind the Soviet Union, a surprise was still possible. Each man trained for the upcoming flight, now only a week away,  as if he would be the pilot.

On April 5, 1961, the cosmonauts flew to the launch centre with their medical team and a film crew. They are greeted by Sergei Korolev, the mastermind behind the Soviet space program. Korolev pushes for a decision on who will fly first, to no avail. General Kaminin, the man in charge of cosmonaut selection and training, will not make a final decision yet. That night, three young cosmonauts go to sleep, not knowing which of them will soon become the most famous person in the world.