2020: Most Full Moons In A Year?

Even though the COVID 19 pandemic has reduced amateur astronomy into a much lonelier endeavor, will this year’s surfeit of full moons be a consolation - and a special time - to amateur astronomers?

By: Ringo Bones

The global astronomical community announced back in January that 2020 will be a very interesting year for amateur astronomers and stargazers the world over because it will have 13 full moons instead of the regular 12. And October 2020 will be special because it is when two full moons will occur in the same month, not to mention another rare astronomical event is set to happen this month – a 100-percent full moon falling on Halloween night.

October 2020 will prove to be of interest to amateur astronomers and stargazers around the word because it will be a “full moon event” – i.e. two full moons occurring on the same month. For more than half a century, if two full moons fall on the same month, it is dubbed as a blue moon. Ideally, a blue moon event happens once every two and a half to three years. The October 1^st full moon of 2020 was dubbed as a “Harvest Moon” as such events have been called since antiquity, and the Halloween Full Moon of 2020 that will occur on October 31^st will be dubbed as a “Hunter’s Moon” – i.e. the full moon that occurs after a Harvest Moon.

Even though artistic depictions of Halloween night – more often than not – had always shown a full moon high in the sky with kids in various Halloween costumes trick or treating the night away, a full moon occurring on a Halloween night is actually a relatively rare event. The last time that Halloween night was illuminated by a 100-percent full moon was back in 1944.

Ideally, a 100-percent full moon on Halloween is supposed to happen once every 19 years, but given that the 31^st of October falls on a different day of the week year after year, a full moon on Halloween is a very rare event indeed. According to astronomers, the next time a 100-percent full moon will be shining on a Halloween evening after 2020 will occur in the year 2039, then in 2058, then in 2077 and the last one for the 21^st Century will occur in 2096.

The good news is that even if a scheduled 100-percent full moon event will fall a day or two before or after the October 31^st Halloween night, it can still serve as a spooky Halloween night backdrop because since most people, and most general-purpose hand-held cameras, can’t tell the difference between a 100-percent full moon and a “mere” 98-percent full moon. Because of this, October 31, 2031 Halloween night will seem to appear just as spooky to future Halloween revelers as this coming October 31, 2020 Halloween Night.

Phosphine: Proof Of Life On Planet Venus?

Found in the droppings of badgers and penguins and used as an ad hoc chemical weapon on the TV series Breaking Bad, is phosphine the definitive proof that extraterrestrial life exists on the Planet Venus?

By: Ringo Bones

The planet Venus, despite of earning the moniker as “planet Earth’s twin” has since been dismissed as hostile to familiar forms of life because its surface temperature averages 800 degrees Fahrenheit and on its surface, the atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of planet Earth – akin to going 3,000 feet underwater. Not to mention the clouds of sulfuric acid found on its upper atmosphere. But recently, hopes had been raised that there’s definitive proof that extraterrestrial life exists on Venus because astronomers had detected a chemical that can only be produced as a metabolic byproduct of anaerobic microorganisms here on planet Earth – and that very chemical is called phosphine.

Here on planet Earth, phosphine can be found in our intestines as a metabolic byproduct of anaerobic microorganisms living there, in the feces of badgers and penguins and in some deep-sea worms, as well as other biological environments associated with anaerobic organisms. It can be very poisonous in large enough concentrations. Militaries have employed it for chemical warfare and it is widely used as a fumigant in commercial farms because it is less corrosive than ammonia. On the TV show Breaking Bad, the main character Walter White used it as an ad hoc chemical weapon to kill two of his rivals. Sadly, scientists have yet to provide a definitive explanation on how Earth’s anaerobic microorganisms produce it.

Phosphine has been detected by the Cassini spacecraft on the atmospheres’ of the planets Jupiter and Saturn due to the immense pressures exerted by these gas giant planets’ atmospheres. But at atmospheric pressures closer to planet Earth’s it seems that phosphine can only be produced with the association of the metabolic processes of anaerobic microorganisms and associated environments.

Back in June 2017, Dr. Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University of Wales set out to test the hypothesis first proposed by astronomers Carl Sagan and Harold Morowitz back in 1966 that the cloud layer just 31 miles below the upper atmosphere of the planet Venus might harbor life because the average temperature there is only 83 degrees Fahrenheit and the atmospheric pressure is about the same as that found here on Earth at sea level. Using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to look for signs of various molecules on the Venusian atmosphere, Dr. Grieves chose to zero in phosphine because, according to her,  phosphorous  might be a sort of go-no-go for life.

According to Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using phosphine gas a s a sign of extraterrestrial life on planet Venus is an “out of the blue finding” after the interests raised over the publishing of the papers she co-authored in Nature Astronomy and the journal Astrobiology. Harvard University astrophysicist Clara Sousa-Silva whose research paper she co-authored with Seager focusing on phosphine has now raised further interest in exploring the planet Venus further for definitive proof for signs of extraterrestrial life. Sadly only one spacecraft – Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft – is currently performing a lonely vigil of orbiting planet Venus since 2016. Maybe NASA should send a balloon-borne probe to explore Venus’ upper atmosphere to find signs of extremophiles living on the sulfuric acid droplet clouds.

Johann Daniel Titius: Original Author Of Bode’s Law?

Even though he’s not a well known household name like Newton, did the astronomer and mathematician Johann Daniel Titius the original author of Bode’s Law?

By: Ringo Bones

It has since been rechristened as the Titius-Bode Law and in his honor, an asteroid – 1998 Titius - and a crater on the Moon was named after him, the 18^th Century German mathematician and astronomer Johann Daniel Titius never became a well-known household name like the Englishman Isaac Newton. But nonetheless, Titius did make some important contributions to mathematics, physics, astronomy and biology during his lifetime.

Johann Daniel Titius (1729 – 1796) was born on January 2, 1729 in Konitz Royal Prussia – a fiefdom of the Crown of Poland – to Jakob Tietz, a merchant and council member from Konitz, and Maria Dorothea, née Hanow. His original name was Johann Tietz, but as was customary in the 18^th Century, when he became a university professor, he Latinized his surname to Titius. Teitz attended school in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied at the University of Leipzig (1749-1752). He died in Wittenberg, Electorate of Saxony on December 16, 1796.

Titius proposed his law of planetary distances in an unsigned interpolation in his German translation of the Swiss philosopher Charles Bonnet’s Contemplation de la nature (“Contemplation of Nature”). Titius fixed the scale by assigning 100 to the distance of the planet Saturn from the Sun. On this scale, planet Mercury’s distance from the Sun is approximately 4. Titius therefore proposed that the sequence of planetary distances (starting from Mercury and moving outward) has the form:  4,4 + 3,4 + 6,4 + 12,4 + 24,4 + 48,4 + 96,…

There was an empty place at distance 28, or 4 + 24 (between the planets Mars and Jupiter), which Bode asserted, the Founder of the Universe surely has not left unoccupied. Titius’ sequence stopped with the planet Saturn, the most distant planet then known. His law was reprinted, without his credit, by Johann Elert Bode in the second edition of his Deutliche Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels (Clear Guide to Knowledge of the Starry Heaven) in 1772. In later editions, Bode did credit Titius, but this mostly escaped notice and during the 19^th Century the law was usually associated with Bode’s name.

Titius published a number of works on other areas in physics, such as a set of conditions and rules for performing experiments and he was particularly focused in thermometry. In 1765, he presented a survey of thermometry up to that date. He wrote about the metallic thermometer constructed by Hans Loeser. In his treatises on both theoretical and experimental physics, he incorporated the findings of other scientists, such as the descriptions of experiments written by Georg Wolfgang Kraft in 1738.

As a confirmed polymath, Titius was also active in biology, particularly in classification of organisms and minerals. His biological work was influenced by Carolus Linnaeus. Lehrbegriff der Naturgeschichte Zum ersten Unterrichte, his most extensive publication in biology, was on the systematic classification of plants, animals and minerals, as well as the elemental substances: ether, fire, air, water and earth. The standard author abbreviation Titius is used to indicate Johann Daniel Titius as the author when citing a botanical name.

The Mysterious Bode’s Law: The Most Puzzling Law Of Science?

Often cited as the most productive – and most puzzling – scientific law at the same time, are there any mysteries behind Bode’s Law?

By: Ringo Bones

This rather “curious” scientific law was named after an 18^th Century German astronomer and mathematician named Johann Elert Bode, but contrary to popular belief, it was actually discovered by Johann Daniel Titius – a German mathematician – back in 1766. However, the empirical relation that gives the approximate distances of the planets from the Sun did not attract attention to the 18^th Century astronomical community until it was publicized by Johann Elert Bode – whose name has since then associated with it – back in 1772.

To the uninitiated, Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826) was an Eighteenth Century era German astronomer who popularized an empirical law that was later named after him, which gives the approximate distances of the planets from the Sun. Bode was also famous for naming the planet Uranus that ended the confusion in the astronomical community at the start of the 19^th Century when the British astronomer William Herschel desired to name the then newly discovered planet as Georgium Sidius after King George III of England.

After examining the work of fellow German mathematician, Johann Daniel Titius, Bode noted that the distances of the various planets from the Sun fell into a curious mathematical sequence. Bode then published a paper which arbitrarily assigned numbers to the planets: 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, and 192. Thus the planet Mercury was numbered 0, planet Venus 3, planet Earth 6, planet Mars 12, and so on, each number being double the last one. When 4 was added to each of these numbers and the result is divided by 10, figures emerged which almost exactly equaled the planets’ distances from the Sun, measured in astronomical units. By the way, an astronomical unit is a unit of distance between the planet Earth and the Sun – which is around 93-million miles or 150-million kilometers.

The only trouble with the law was that back in the time when Bode published it in 1772, there were no planets found at positions 24 or 192. But astronomers searching in position 24 located the asteroids – around the start of the Nineteenth Century – i.e. the discovery of asteroid Ceres in 1801. The planet Uranus, which was discovered back in 1781, occurs at position 192 and conforms almost exactly to Bode’s calculations. Only the outermost planets – Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto – failed to obey Bode’s Law. Although many attempts have been made to derive a physical explanation for the law, none has completely succeeded.  Today, many astronomers dismiss Bode’s Law as a coincidence and that Bode’s Law is not a rule governing planetary systems. Yet it remains one of the most mysterious statements of natural law formulated by man.

Can We Build A Cosmic Telescope With Gravitational Lenses?

Using the principles behind Einstein’s General Relativity, is it possible to create a space based telescope with virtually no Raleigh Criterion limits?

By: Ringo Bones

I’ve first heard of the working principle of a cosmic telescope was in an episode of Cosmos: Possible Worlds where Prof. Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains how a space-based telescope using existing – i.e. late 20^th century to early 21^st Century technology - could take advantage of the Sun’s gravitational lensing effect in order to create a telescope capable of seeing the surfaces of extrasolar planets better than the ones we currently use like the Kepler Space Telescope. But first, here’s a brief primer on the principles of gravitational lensing.

The Gravitational lensing effect is a consequence of Einstein’s General Relativity. Often referred by astronomers as a “natural telescope”, gravitational lensing occurs when a huge amount of matter – such as clusters of galaxies – creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it, but in the same line of sight. The effect allows astronomers to study the details of early galaxies too far away to be seen with current technology and telescope. The gravitational lensing cause by our Sun’s gravitational field can also be used in a similar fashion. You can also spot distant extra-solar planets when a star itself is the interloper if it carries any planets in orbit around it, they will change - ever so slightly – the momentary brightness during the microlensing event.

There are already plans for a “viable” cosmic telescope that could – in theory – make the Raleigh Criterion limitations of the telescopes we currently use, space based or earthbound, completely irrelevant. The Fast Outgoing Cyclopean Astronomical Lens – or FOCAL – is a proposed space telescope that would use our Sun as a gravity lens. The concept of a space-based telescope that takes advantage of the Sun’s gravitational lensing effect was first suggested by Prof. Von Eshleman and analyzed further by Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and others. In order to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, it would be necessary to position our space telescope to a point in space of at least 550 astronomical units away from the Sun.

The proposed FOCAL telescope can actually use current technology that’s already in use on operational space-based telescopes for astronomical use, however, there are difficulties. The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes are currently at distances within 147 astronomical units and 122 astronomical units. It took them over 40 years to reach those distances using rocket technology we currently have – by the way, both Voyager spacecraft were launched back in 1977. It looks like we won’t be sending space telescopes with comparable technology to the James Webb Space Telescope to a point in space 550 astronomical units – or 51 billion miles or 82.5 billion kilometers– away from our Sun. By way of comparison, the dwarf planet Pluto is “only” 3.7 billion miles or 5.97 billion kilometers away from the Sun.

SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites: Light Pollution Problem For Astronomers?

Intended to improve internet connectivity in far-fringe areas, could the fleet of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites be a source of light pollution problem for astronomers?

By: Ringo Bones

Near the end of 2019, the world’s astronomical community – including a growing number of amateur astronomers – has voiced their concerns that SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s upcoming fleet of satellites intended to provide and improve internet coverage and reception in far-fringe areas - called Starlink - could eventually become a source of light pollution that could eventually interfere with astronomy. But are the concerns of the astronomers valid?

As of May 7, 2020, SpaceX had unveiled plans to make their Starlink satellites “invisible” in order to make them not a source of light pollution that could interfere with astronomical observations. A software upgrade and a new design for the satellites are intended to reduce the interference for astronomers.

Near the end of 2019, the company’s billionaire founder Elon musk had denied claims that the eventual 12,000-strong fleet of satellites could ruin the night sky for astronomers. Bowing to growing pressure from the global astronomical community, SpaceX eventually made plans to make its satellites “generally invisible to the naked eye within a week of launch” following complaints about light pollution and actual photos taken by scores of amateur astronomers of the first batch of the Starlink satellites as a visual proof that it became an unnecessary source of light pollution on various social media sites.