If you have trouble viewing this newsletter, click here. Teachers! Special Announcement! Attending NSTA Convention in Dallas? Get a sneak peek at Starry Night Middle School and High School — complete space science curriculum solutions written for teachers by teachers. Visit Starry Night Booth #5307 The latest release of Starry Night Pro Plus, version 5.0, has an astounding new feature that really blew me away: a full-color image of the entire night sky. The AllSky CCD Image Mosaic has been painstakingly mapped to overlay precisely with the existing Starry Night databases. The integration is seamless. You simply launch Starry Night as you normally do, but the sky that fades up is superbly naturalistic. You can see below the difference between the old sky and the new... Sewn together from 20,000 individual images, the AllSky Image contains 6.44 billion pixels, spread over five levels of resolution, meaning you can now plan your night's viewing with both the precision of Starry Night's charts and the realism of, well, reality! Main Sequence Software spent 5 years creating the AllSky Image. Click here for the full story. If you find that AllSky isn't your cup of tea, like everything else in Starry Night you have complete control over its display. A new tab in the OPTIONS:STARS panel allows you to set the quality of display, or you can turn it off completely. Besides AllSky, the latest version of Starry Night Pro Plus contains a host of improvements and new functions. More about those in April's Starry Night Times. Sean O'Dwyer, Starry Night Times Editor
Mizar and Alcor make for a great introduction to the night sky, and to how things are often more interesting than they first appear. Everyone knows the Big Dipper (just one section, or "asterism", of the constellation Ursa Major) and most people can easily see that the middle star of its handle, Mizar, has a fainter companion, Alcor. However, aim even a small scope toward Mizar itself and you'll see it's actually two stars separated by 14". A nice easy double. This part of the sky floats above the celestial north pole (which sits very close to the end of the little dipper's handle) so there's much less interstellar dirt obscuring our lines of sight to some interesting, though quite faint, galaxies. M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, is a difficult spot. A row of stars leads down from Mizar and Alcor to relatively dark area of the sky where two parallel rows of faint stars will help you locate the galaxy's core. In my 8" reflecting scope, M101 is a challenge even on a good night. A little easier is M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. This is a rare example of quantity equaling quality: time spent with M51 reaps rewards, with brief flashes of clarity that slowly build in your mind's eye to a fascinating whole. Although faint, two cores are visible; the second, less bright core is NGC 5195, a smaller galaxy interacting gravitationally with its large neighbor. Get your eyes as dark-adapted as possible; averted vision will bring out hints of the spiral arms. M63 and M94 are two more spiral galaxies, less spectacular, but interesting to compare with each other and with M101 and M51. Cor Caroli , the brighter of two stars that make up Canes Venatici, is a nice double even in small scopes. Note the color difference. NGC 4631 is also known, quite properly, as the Whale Galaxy. It's faint, huge, extremely elongated and completely awesome in the eyepiece. NGC 4449 is an irregular galaxy in Canes Venatici. In comparison to the Whale, this galaxy is elongated, kinked, and a bit weird looking. Moving away from some of the fainter targets, M106 is a large and bright spiral galaxy visible in binoculars. Telescopically it has a large and mottled nuclear region surrounded by a much fainter elongated halo. A larger telescope and dark skies reveals two spiral arms extending from the central region into the halo. At the center of the galaxy is a 35 million solar mass black hole. Finally, M97, the Owl Nebula, is a nice challenge to wrap up an evening's work. A smudge in smaller scopes, larger scopes are said to reveal an owl's-face; whether it does or not is a discussion best taken up with a therapist. Sean O'Dwyer
This month's winning photo submission is from Scott Griswold. A Starry Night user, Scott does his imaging from Woodstock, Vermont. Scott's image, taken on October 30th, 2003 shows the Aurora (Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights) over Woodstock. Auroras appear as colorful shimmering curtains of reds, greens and whites. The different colors are a result of the interaction between the solar wind and the two main atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere oxygen and nitrogen. Photo Notes: Aurora, taken October 30th 2003, from Woodstock, Vermont. Meade 10” SCT telescope. Nikon CoolPix 5000 with 4 second exposure at ISO 800. PHOTO OF THE MONTH COMPETITION: We would like to invite all Starry Night users to send their quality astronomy photographs to be considered for use in our monthly newsletter. Featured submissions (best of month) will receive a prize of $25 USD. Please read the following guidelines and see the submission e-mail address below.
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Mar. 2005
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