December 7th, 2019 is National SKYWARN® Recognition Day!!
So, just what is SKYWARN® ?
It is a National Weather Service (NWS) volunteer program with between 350,000 and 400,000 trained severe weather spotters. The main responsibility of a SKYWARN® spotter is to identify and describe severe local weather and storms. Unlike storm chasers, they generally stay in one place until it is necessary for them to move. The spotter is the “eyes and ears in the field” for the NWS.
In 1999, the NWS and the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) created SKYWARN® Recognition Day to recognize and honor “. . . the contributions that SKYWARN® volunteers make to the NWS mission, the protection of life and property. . .” It is held each year on the first Saturday in December.
Think you would be interested in becoming a SKYWARN® volunteer? Training includes learning about basic severe weather structure and development, how to report, and basic severe weather safety. Training is free and typically lasts about 2 hours. Volunteers include police, EMTs, dispatchers, fire fighters, individuals affiliated with hospitals, schools, nursing homes – and concerned private citizens! You can attend training at any NWS office facility, no matter where you live! Check SKYWARN training for information and find the SKYWARN® program in your area! Attend a training course near you, register as a spotter, and help keep your community safe!
Thank you to all the spotters out there who volunteer their time to help the NWS with the updated, real-time weather information!
Resources:
Skywarn Recognition Day : First Saturday in December.National Day Calendar. Date accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
Skywarn Recognition Day : December 2, 2017 from 0000z to 2400z.National Weather Service. Date accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
Mogil, H. Michael. 2007. Extreme weather :understanding the science of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, heat waves, snow storms, global warming and other atmospheric disturbances. New York, N.Y. : black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. Engineering Library QC981 .M65 2007
Can you imagine a life without tools? We can’t! And you don’t have to! We have approximately 233 tools in our Tool Library – and are always adding more!
We have all sorts of things! We have laptotps and iPads, chargers and cables, hammers and screwdrivers, 3D scanners and hot glue guns, GoPro cameras and Raspberry Pi – all available to check out! We also have an Occulus Rift for use in the library!
Need a video game screwdriver set? We’ve got that! Wire cutter/stripper? Yup, we’ve got that. Sound level meter? We have that, too! Multimeter? Projector? Heat Gun Kit? Oscilloscope? Yes, yes, yes, and yes! We have those!!
We have 3D scanners, cables and chargers (63!), 5 laptops, 12 iPads, calipers, a 25-foot tape measure, speed gun, wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, socket set . . .
And, we have just added 2 Video Conference Meeting Cameras (Owls) and a vibration meter!
Check our Tool Library to see everything that is available!
When we think of women in aviation, we often think of Amelia Earhart. But have you heard of Harriet Quimby, Lores Bonney, Fay Gillis Wells?
Amelia Earheart took her first plane ride in 1920 and began flying lessons in 1921 – buying her first plane that same year. Harriet Quimby was a newspaper reporter/writer and was assigned to cover an airshow in 1910, and she was hooked. On May 11, 1911 – one day before her 36th birthday, she entered flight school. In 1931 Lores Bonney set a new Australian record for a one-day flight by a woman. In 1933 she was the first woman to fly from Australia to England. In 1928 Fay Gillis jumped from a disabled plane in flight, making her the first woman to join the Caterpillar Club – a group composed of pilots who have made life-saving jumps with silk parachutes. Betty Skelton-Frankman won the International Feminine Aerobatic championship in 1948, 1949, and 1950. She was best known for the trick “inverted ribbon cut,” (she flew upside down, 10 feet off the ground, through a ribbon tied between two poles)!
In 1994 Patrice Clarke-Washington was the only African American woman flying with the rank of captain for a major airline. Jean Ross Howard-Phelan is the 13th woman in the world to receive a helicopter’s pilot license. She learned to fly in 1954. Florence Parlett actively flew until she was 83 years old and has operated the Annapolis Flying Service at Lee Airport in Edgewater, Maryland.
In 1993 at age 11, Victoria Van Meter flew across the ocean and then did it again the following year. A flight instructor was required to be with her on both flights because she didn’t meet the age limit to fly alone.
These women, and so many others, laid the groundwork for women to pursue their love of flying in a variety of aviation careers.
Lori Love: crop duster in California.
Madge Minton: joined the WASPs (World War II Women Airforce Service Pilots) and flew fighter planes across the country to various military bases.
Susan Still: 3rd woman trained in combat aircraft for attack missions.
Suzanne Asbury-Oliver: skywriter for Pepsi in 1980.
Evie Washington: flight instructor for the Civil Air Patrol.
Mary Edna Fraser: uses aerial photography to inspire her silk batik artwork. She doesn’t have a pilot’s license, but will take off, land, and maneuver the aircraft into position.
Ellen Paneok: Native American Eskimo pilot – delivering supplies and mail to remote Alaskan villages.
Mayte Greco: Cuban American pilot and founding member of Brothers to the Rescue (Hermanos al Rescate), an organization of pilots who fly search and rescue operations over the ocean between Florid and Cuba searching for Cuban exiles in rafts.
They also paved the way for the participation of women in NASA and space exploration. In the beginning they were “human computers,” then aeronautical engineers, and then astronauts.
Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith and Barbara Holley: African American women mathematicians, worked at NASA during the Civil Rights era. “Human computers.”
Shannon Lucid: one of the original core of women astronauts; in 1997 she held the record for the longest time in space for an American (188 days on board the Russian space station Mir).
Mary Ellen Weber: mission specialist on board space shuttle Discovery in June of 1995.
Vickie Gutierrez: Aerospace Engineering. Began working for NASA in 2002.
Rosalind Cylar: Attorney and advisor in the Office of chief counsel at NASA’s Marshall space Flight Center.
Courtney Ritz: Is blind and works at the Goddard Space Flight Center since 2002. She is the Web Accessibility Coordinator.
In September 2017, astronaut Peggy Whiton broke NASA’s record for the longest time spent in space – 665 days! She also holds other records – the record for the oldest woman to go to space (57 years old); women’s record for the longest amount of time doing spacewalks – 53 hours & 22 minutes; and the first woman commander of the space station. On her latest mission she traveled 122.2 million miles and went orbited Earth 4,623 times. She was born in Mt. Ayr, Iowa.
All of these women – from the pioneering aviators to the pioneering women in aeronautics – have helped clear the way for this generation, and future generations, to fulfill their dreams of flying!
Girls in Aviation Day is sponsored by Women in Aviation International. Women in Aviation International (WAI) hold events are being held world-wide and include one in Dubuque, IA, which is sponsored by the WAI University of Dubuque Chapter. Contact Polly Kadolph for more information.
Resources:
Michele Wehrwein Albion, editor. 2015. The quotable Amelia Earhart. Albuquerque : University of New Mexico. Engineering Library TL540.E3 A3 2015
Russo, Carolyn. 1997. Women and flight : portraits of contemporary women pilots. Washington, D.C. : National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Boston : Bulfinch Press. Engineering Library FOLIO TL539 .R87 1997
Winters, Kathleen C. 2010. Amelia Earhart : the turbulent life of an American icon. New York : Palgrave Macmillan. Engineering Library TL540.E3 W57 2010
Holt, Nathalia. 2016. Rise of the rocket girls : the women who propelled us, from missiles to the moon to Mars. New York : Little, Brown, and Company. Engineering Library TL862.J48 H65 2016
Eschner, Kat. June 16, 2017. Meet the Rogue Women Astronauts of the 1960s Who Never Flew : But they passed the same tests the male astronauts did – and, yes, in high heels. SMARTNEWS : Keeping you current. Smithsonian Institution.
Riley, Ricky. June 29, 2016. This Black NASA Mathematician Was the Reason Many Astronauts Came Home – Their Life Depended on Her Calculations.Atlanta Black Star.
NASA Langley to dedicate building in honor of Katherine Johnson.
NASA Women of Stem. August 3, 2017. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA.
Gallentine, Jay. 2016. Infinity beckoned : adventuring through the inner solar system, 1969-1989. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press. Engineering Library TL795.3 .G355 2016
Beginning geometry students might remember finding the area of a circle – pi x radius squared…. But, what is Pi (π) and why does it rate its very own day?
Pi is one of the most famous and mysterious of numbers. Defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter, Pi seems simple. However, it is an irrational number. An irrational number cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction and the decimal representation therefore never ends, nor does it ever settle into a permanent repeating pattern. Scientists have calculated billions of digits of Pi, starting with 3.14159265358979323…. with no end in sight. It could be calculated to infinity and there would be absolutely no way to know which number would come next.
Pi is not only irrational, it is also transcendental! A transcendental number is a number that is not a root of any algebraic equation having integral coefficients, as π or e. All transcendental numbers are irrational, but not all irrational numbers are transcendental. . .
Pi is used all around us every day – Christian Constanda, the University of Tulsa’s C.S. Oliphant professor of mathematical sciences, says, “Look at a football: when you compute the volume, then Pi gets involved in the formula.” Constanda also said, “If you drive through a puddle, creating a wave with the car, that involves Pi. If you see a tornado, that definitely involves Pi.”
Designers Cristian Ilies Vasile and Martin Krzywinski transformed the number pi into stunning works of art. Check out Martin’s website for an explanation of how he creates his amazing works.
Dots are used to represent the adjacency between digits showing the progression and transition for the first 10,000 digits of pi. DailyMailAccuracy of 10,000 rational approximations of π for each m/n and m=1…10000. Martin Krzywinski.
Want to see what 100,00 digits of Pi look like? Go here.
The number 360 occupies the 360th position in the digits of Pi.
Divide the length of a river – with all the bends and curves – by the length of the river would be “as the crow flies,” the average ration will be approximately Pi. Watch this youtube video for an explanation!
In 2008 a crop circle with Pi embedded in it appeared near Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, England.
Want to impress your friends with how many digits of Pi you can recite? Here is a song that should help you remember….
Code Embed: Cannot use CODECJ3 as a global code as it is being used to store 3 unique pieces of code in 14 posts
The Pi Song. Originally sung by Hard ‘N Phirm. Sept. 17, 2006
Take a look around today – how many instances of Pi can you find? Or sit and contemplate a piece of your favorite pie…
Just remember – you’d be irrational to not celebrate Pi Day!
Resources:
Adrian, Y. E. O.. The pleasures of pi,e and other interesting numbers. 2006. Singapore : World Scientific. Engineering Library QA95 .A2 2006
Posamentier, Alfred S. 2004. [Pi] : a biography of the world’s most mysterious number. Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books. Engineering Library QA484 .P67 2004
Maths has never looked so appealing! Oct. 3, 2013. dailymail.com
The Pi Song. Originally sung by Hard ‘N Phirm. Sept. 17, 2006. youtube.com
Mead, Wendy.March 13, 2015. Fascinating Facts About Pi Day & Birthday Boy Albert Einstein. A&E Television Network, LLC. Bio.
How much time did you spend playing tick-tac-toe when you were a kid? Did you realize the person who had the first go was at a disadvantage? The first player actually has to draw one connecting line longer than the opponent. So, if you are the first to go and still win, that’s impressive! If you add more squares – say 18 – there are 153 connecting lines. Which means there are 3153 game situations – roughly equivalent to the number of particles in the universe. Searching for a winning strategy is quite impossible and sometimes referred to as “computational chaos.” I had trouble winning with just 9 squares….
Another popular grid puzzle is Sudoku. The most common version of the puzzle consists of 9 squares by 9 squares – a grid of 81 squares. The grid is divided into 9 blocks, each containing 9 squares. The rules: each of the 9 blocks must contain all the numbers 1 – 9 within the squares. Each number can only appear once in a row, column or box. The tricky part is that each vertical 9-square column or horizontal 9-square line – within the larger square – must also contain each of the numbers 1 – 9, with no repeats… Each puzzle has only one solution…
If that isn’t challenging enough, there are also circular Sudoku puzzles!
Each of the 4 rings and 8 quarter circles have the numbers 1 through 8 (unlike the square version which has 9). Of course, you can always have 3-ring puzzles, or 5 and 6 ring puzzles. Variants and puzzles can be found in Nets, Puzzles, and Postmen.
Ready for the grown-up version of the baby donut stacker?
The Tower of Hanoi is a much more complicated form of the donut stacker. It was invented by the French mathematician, Edouard Lucas, and was first sold as a toy in 1883. The goal is to transfer the tower of 8 disks to one of the 2 vacant pegs in the fewest moves possible…without putting a larger disk on a smaller one…. For 8 disks that will take 255 moves… If you haven’t figured it out for yourself, the complete mathematical formulas are on pages 196-200 in Famous Puzzles of Great Mathematicians.
Logic puzzles more your style? Try to solve these – good luck!!
Wine & Water:
A dishonest servant takes 3 pints of wine from a barrel and replaces those pints with the same amount of water. He repeats his theft twice, removing a total of 9 pints, replacing those pints with water. As a result, the diluted wine remaining in the barrel lost half of its former strength. How much wine did the barrel originally hold?
Animals in a field:
A cow, a goat, and a goose graze on grass in a field. The cow eats the same quantity of grass as the goat and the goose together. the cow and the goat eat all of the grass in the field in 45 days, the cow and the goose in 60 days, and the goat and the goose in 90 days. How many days will it take the cow, the goat, and the goose together to eat all of the grass, assuming that the grass grows at the same daily rate?
Compose plane figures/Fibonacci’s numbers:
Make a rectangle without any gaps by using small squares whoe sides are the Fibonacci numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and 21.
Want more logic puzzles? Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube, by Martin Gardner presents (among others) a puzzle called The Monkey and the Coconuts…
Ever heard of the “pea and the sun paradox?” A solid of any size (a small pea for example), can be partitioned into a finite number of pieces and then reassembled to form another solid of any specified shape and volume, (the sun, for example). Is that even possible? Author Leonard Wapner explores this (and many more) puzzles in The Pea & the Sun : A Mathematical Paradox.
Or perhaps you would rather eat the puzzle? Try the chocolate puzzle with real chocolate bars and enjoy them once you have solved the puzzle!
Smullyan, Raymond M. 2009. Satan, Cantor and infinity : mind-boggling puzzles. Mineola, NY : Dover Publications. Engineering Library QA 95 .S5 2009
Szpior, George. 2010. A mathematical medley : fifty easy pieces on mathematics. Providence, R.I. : American Mathematical Society. Engineering Library QA93 .S973 2010
Gardner, Martin. Hexaflexagons, probability paradoxes, and the tower of Hanoi. 2008. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press. Engineering Library QA95 .G247 2008
Sarcone, Gianni A. 2013. Impossible folding puzzles and other mathematical paradoxes. Mineola, New York : Dover Publications. Engineering Library QA95 .S315 2013
Gardner, Martin. 2008. Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma cube: Martin Garnder’s mathematical diversions. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press. Engineering Library AQ95 .G2975 2008
How much time did you spend playing tick-tac-toe when you were a kid? Did you realize the person who had the first go was at a disadvantage? The first player actually has to draw one connecting line longer than the opponent. So, if you are the first to go and still win, that’s impressive! If you add more squares – say 18 – there are 153 connecting lines. Which means there are 3153 game situations – roughly equivalent to the number of particles in the universe. Searching for a winning strategy is quite impossible and sometimes referred to as “computational chaos.” I had trouble winning with just 9 squares….
Another popular grid puzzle is Sudoku. The most common version of the puzzle consists of 9 squares by 9 squares – a grid of 81 squares. The grid is divided into 9 blocks, each containing 9 squares. The rules: each of the 9 blocks must contain all the numbers 1 – 9 within the squares. Each number can only appear once in a row, column or box. The tricky part is that each vertical 9-square column or horizontal 9-square line – within the larger square – must also contain each of the numbers 1 – 9, with no repeats… Each puzzle has only one solution…
If that isn’t challenging enough, there are also circular Sudoku puzzles!
Each of the 4 rings and 8 quarter circles have the numbers 1 through 8 (unlike the square version which has 9). Of course, you can always have 3-ring puzzles, or 5 and 6 ring puzzles. Variants and puzzles can be found in Nets, Puzzles, and Postmen.
Ready for the grown-up version of the baby donut stacker?
The Tower of Hanoi is a much more complicated form of the donut stacker. It was invented by the French mathematician, Edouard Lucas, and was first sold as a toy in 1883. The goal is to transfer the tower of 8 disks to one of the 2 vacant pegs in the fewest moves possible…without putting a larger disk on a smaller one…. For 8 disks that will take 255 moves… If you haven’t figured it out for yourself, the complete mathematical formulas are on pages 196-200 in Famous Puzzles of Great Mathematicians.
Logic puzzles more your style? Try to solve these – good luck!!
Wine & Water:
A dishonest servant takes 3 pints of wine from a barrel and replaces those pints with the same amount of water. He repeats his theft twice, removing a total of 9 pints, replacing those pints with water. As a result, the diluted wine remaining in the barrel lost half of its former strength. How much wine did the barrel originally hold?
Animals in a field:
A cow, a goat, and a goose graze on grass in a field. The cow eats the same quantity of grass as the goat and the goose together. the cow and the goat eat all of the grass in the field in 45 days, the cow and the goose in 60 days, and the goat and the goose in 90 days. How many days will it take the cow, the goat, and the goose together to eat all of the grass, assuming that the grass grows at the same daily rate?
Compose plane figures/Fibonacci’s numbers:
Make a rectangle without any gaps by using small squares whoe sides are the Fibonacci numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and 21.
Want more logic puzzles? Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube, by Martin Gardner presents (among others) a puzzle called The Monkey and the Coconuts…
Ever heard of the “pea and the sun paradox?” A solid of any size (a small pea for example), can be partitioned into a finite number of pieces and then reassembled to form another solid of any specified shape and volume, (the sun, for example). Is that even possible? Author Leonard Wapner explores this (and many more) puzzles in The Pea & the Sun : A Mathematical Paradox.
Or perhaps you would rather eat the puzzle? Try the chocolate puzzle with real chocolate bars and enjoy them once you have solved the puzzle!
Smullyan, Raymond M. 2009. Satan, Cantor and infinity : mind-boggling puzzles. Mineola, NY : Dover Publications. Engineering Library QA 95 .S5 2009
Szpior, George. 2010. A mathematical medley : fifty easy pieces on mathematics. Providence, R.I. : American Mathematical Society. Engineering Library QA93 .S973 2010
Gardner, Martin. Hexaflexagons, probability paradoxes, and the tower of Hanoi. 2008. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press. Engineering Library QA95 .G247 2008
Sarcone, Gianni A. 2013. Impossible folding puzzles and other mathematical paradoxes. Mineola, New York : Dover Publications. Engineering Library QA95 .S315 2013
Gardner, Martin. 2008. Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma cube: Martin Garnder’s mathematical diversions. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press. Engineering Library AQ95 .G2975 2008
There is a complete list of supplies needed to create any of the crafts in the book. Most of them are easily accessible or found around the house. Supplies include (but are not limited to) a needle-nose plier, sandpaper, tape measure, ruler, tape and binder clips. Each of the crafts has step-by-step instructions and are illustrated in full-color.
For the holidays you can have a Wookiee pumpkin for Halloween, a Mistle-TIE Fighter, or a Hanukkah Droidel. Nature & Science includes a Dagobah carnivorous plant habitat, a Wookiee bird house and an AT-AT herb garden.
Whether you choose to celebrate by making your own Daisy Ridley’s blaster (or a lightsaber!), or looking at the intersection of games and film, enjoy and May the 4th be with you!!
Resources:
Papazian, Gretchen, Sommers, Joseph Michael, editors of compilation. 2013. Game on, Hollywood : essays on the intersection of video games and cinema. Jefferson, North Carolina. Engineering Library, PN1995.9 .V46 G37 2013
April 4, 2016 is Square Root Day – so let’s get to the root of it!!
The next square root day won’t be until May 5, 2025, so let’s celebrate! There are only nine square root days in a century – so don’t miss this one!
The square root is an important mathematical concept used in many different occupations – including carpentry, engineering, architects, landscapers, and artists and designers. So, what is a square root? The square root of any number (x) is equal to the number (y) that when multiplied by itself or squared returns the first number (x). In other words, the square root of x is y, because x X x or x²2 is y.
Did you know that the symbol for square root (√) is called the radix or the radical sign? And Christoff Rudolff first used it in 1525?
Maurice Machover wrote a proof poem of the irrationality of √2:
Double a square is never a square, and here is the reason why:
If m-squared were equal to two n-squared, then to their prime factors we’d fly.
But the decomposition that lies on the left has all its exponents even.
But the power of two on the right must be odd: so one of the twos is bereaven.*
What fun ways can you find to celebrate this auspicious day?
How about:
Square Dancing
Learn to tie a square knot
Eat square shaped food – made from root vegetables (what else!?). How about square sweet potato fries, make a square carrot cake!
Try root vegetables you might not have eaten before: rutabagas, parsnips, yucca roots, and kohlrabi.
Onions, garlic and ginger are also root veggies – find new recipes
Be SURE to come into the library and work on our Color by Numbers (Engineering Style!)
Flannery, David. The square root of 2: a dialogue concerning a number and a sequence. 2006. New York : Copernicus : [Chichester, England] : Praxis. Engineering Library QA247.5 .F53 2006
Other Resources:
Square Root Day. 4/4/16 Opening Day and Square Root Day!!Square Root Day. Date accessed March 25, 2016
Sorry cute (?), burrowing creature, it isn’t your day.
National Mole Day is celebrated by chemists and chemistry students on October 23rd. The mole is honored between 6:02 a.m. and 6:02 p.m. This makes the date 6:02 10/23, And where did that number come from and why does it deserve it’s own day?
6.02×10^23 is called the Avogadro Constant and it defines the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in one mole of substance.
Periodic Table
The mass of a mole of substance is called the molar mass. The molar mass is used to convert grams of a substance to moles. The molar mass of an element is found on the periodic table, and it is the element’s atomic mass in grams/mole (g/mol). An interactive periodic table can be found here: http://chemistry.about.com/library/blperiodictable.htm. To explore calculating the mass of a single atom, you will also need to know the atomic mass. Want to try calculating an atomic mass? You can find an interactive example here: http://chemistry.about.com/od/workedchemistryproblems/a/avogadroexampl1.htm
In simple terms, a mole of anything is always 6.02×10²³. This invented unit is a consistent and convenient measuring unit much like saying a dozen or a byte.
Hubble Space Telescope, taken on 2nd servicing mission. Photo credit: NASA
On April 24, 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery. Previously, telescopes had been positioned on remote mountaintops and away from city lights in order to prevent distortion from Earth’s atmosphere. Now Hubble was being propelled into Earth’s orbit to prevent atmospheric distortion literally by rising above it.
That atmosphere is what causes start to look as if they are twinkling (sorry romantics, they don’t really twinkle….)1 But, once outside Earth’s atmosphere, “… [Hubble] can see astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arc seconds, which is like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Maryland.” 2
As telescopes go, Hubble is not large, the mirror measures 7’10” across (2.4 meters), the length of a large school bus3 (the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere is 30 feet).4 Hubble weighs 24,500 pounds – as much as 2 full-grown elephants5 – and was named after Edwin Hubble, the man who is credited with discovering the cosmos.
Jeff Hoffman (with red stripes on the legs of his suit) and Story Musgrave work on the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: NASA
Within a couple of weeks after it was launched, it became obvious that Hubble’s mirror had a flaw. The curvature was off by off by 1/50 of a human hair – 2.2 microns – enough to cause fuzzy images to be sent back to earth. Hubble was circling Earth at 17, 500 miles per hour and 343 miles above it, and scientists needed to figure out a way to correct Hubble’s flawed mirror. In 1993 the first servicing mission was launched and Hubble’s flaw was successfully corrected. The mission was the first chance to fix the flaw, install new instruments and conduct routine maintenance.6
Hubble was designed to work with the Space Shuttles, the plan being that once it was no longer serviceable, it would be brought back to Earth and displayed in a museum. The retirement of the space shuttles means, however, that Hubble will not be able to be brought back to Earth. Now, a robotic mission is expected to help guide Hubble out of orbit, through Earth’s atmosphere and into the ocean.7
Hubble “Deep Field.” Photo released in 1996. Photo Credit
The Hubble Telescope doesn’t travel to distance stars, planets or galaxies, it photographs them and in January of 1996 the “Hubble Deep Field” was released. At that time it was humanity’s most distant view of the Universe. For ten days scientists aimed Hubble at a single spot in Ursa Major (the Big Dipper), taking several hundred photos with exposure times of 15 to 40 minutes. “The result was a stunning still life of more than two thousand galaxies, a flurry of budding, tumultuous light whipped up in the shadowy primordial vacuum.” (Kanipe. pg 6)8
The brightest galaxies visible in the Deep Field are between 7 and 8 billion light-years away, some from 12 billion years ago. Some of the Milky Way’s oldest stars which congregate in globular clusters, are about 13 billion years old. 9 In fact, “Hubble has peered back into the very distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth.”10
Mystic Mountain. Photo released for Hubble’s 20th Anniversary.
The photo of “Mystic Mountain Nebula” was released for Hubble’s 20th Anniversary. Mystic Mountain is a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall. The brilliant light from nearby stars is eating away at it, while infant stars within the Mystic Mountain fire jets of gas.11
The Sombrero Galaxy.
The Sombrero Galaxy is just beyond the visibility of the naked eye, but can be seen with small telescopes. There are nearly 2,000 globular clusters which range in age from 10-13 billion years old. This is 10 times as many globular clusters as the Milky Way.12
Pandora’s Cluster. Photo published 2013.
Pandora’s Cluster appears to have a complex and violent history. It seems to be the “… result of a simultaneous pile-up of at least four separate, smaller galaxy clusters. The crash took place over a span of 350 million years.”13
The Rose of Galaxies
To celebrate Hubble’s 21st anniversary, scientists pointed it a group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy. The blue jewels across the top are combined light from intensely bright and hot young blue stars. They glow intensely in the ultraviolet light. The series of unusual spiral patterns are signs of interaction.14
In the 25 years since Hubble was launched it has made more than 1 million observations. Astronomers using that data have published more than 12,700 articles, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. It has circled Earth and traveled more than 3 billion miles and produces about 10 terabytes of new data each year.15 The policies governing Hubble have helped make it so rich in data and productivity. Any astronomer in the world can submit a proposal and request time on the telescope. When a proposal is chosen by a team of experts, that astronomer has a year to pursue their work. Once the year is up the data is released to the scientific community, which has given rise to numerous findings – many not predicted in the original proposal.16
Happy 25th Anniversary!!
RESOURCES:
Zimmerman, Robert. 2008. The universe in a mirror: the saga of the Hubble Telescope and the visionaries who built it. Princeton,
The Universe in a Mirror Engineering Library QB500.268 .Z56 2008
The Hubble Space Telescope. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center. This website is kept for archival purposes only and is no longer updated. Accessed: April 2015.
O’Dell, C. Robert. 2003. The Orion Nebula : where stars are born. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap press of Harvard University Press. Engineering Library QB855.9.O75 O34 2003
Zimmerman, Robert. 2008. The universe in a mirror : the saga of the Hubble Telescope and the visionaries who built it. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press. Engineering Library QB500.268 .Z56 2008.
