MoreTelescopePower TV pdf More Telescope Power All New Activities and Projects for Young Astronomers GREGORY L MATLOFF with drawings by C Bangs John Wiley & Sons, Inc More Telescope Power Copyright ©[.]
Trang 2More Telescope
Power All New Activities and Projects
for Young Astronomers
GREGORY L MATLOFF
with drawings by C Bangs
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Trang 3Telescope
Power
Trang 4Copyright © 2002 by Gregory L Matloff All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York
Illustrations by C Bangs
Figures 1.2, 3.3, and 6.1 courtesy of NASA
Figures 4.2, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4A, 6.5B, 6.5, and 6.6 courtesy of NASA/JPL/CalTech
Figures 5.3 and 5.4 courtesy of Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or oth-erwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744 Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, (212) 850-6011, fax (212) 850-6008, e-mail: PERMREQ@WILEY.COM.
The publisher and the author have made every reasonable effort to ensure that the experi-ments and activities in the book are safe when conducted as instructed but assume no responsi-bility for any damage caused or sustained while performing the experiments or activities in this book Parents, guardians, and/or teachers should supervise young readers who undertake the experiments and activities in this book.
This title is also available in print as ISBN 0-471-40985-5 Some content that appears in the print version of this book may not be available in this electronic edition.
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Trang 5Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again
another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and
golden shall shine out again
The great stars and the little ones shall shine
out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring
pensive moons shall again shine
—Walt Whitman, “On the Beach at Night,”
Year of Meteors(1859–1860)
Trang 6Introduction: Tools of the Astronomer 1
Limitations of Early Astronomers 2
An Astronomical Revolution 2
Telescope Evolution and Accessories 4
A Short History of the Early Space Age 8
ACTIVITY 1-1 Observing Satellites in Low Earth Orbit 8
Orbits and Conic Sections 9
Acceleration, Mass, and Force 10
Gravity and Orbits 11
ACTIVITY 1-2 Estimating the Velocity of a Satellite in LEO 12 ACTIVITY 1-3 Can You See Any Detail on a Large
Satellite in LEO? 13
Geosynchronous Orbits 14
Other Satellite Observations 14
Types of Meteors 19
The Origin of Meteors 19
Observing Meteors 20
ACTIVITY 2-1 Preparing Finder Charts for a Meteor Shower 20 ACTIVITY 2-2 Meteor-Observing Party 22
ACTIVITY 2-3 Estimating Meteor Track Length 23
Meteors, Meteorites, and Life 24
Physical Characteristics and Motions of the Moon 27
ACTIVITY 3-1 Observing the Eccentricity of the Moon’s Orbit 27
Contents
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The Moon’s Phases 28
ACTIVITY 3-2 Keeping Track of Lunar and Solar Motions 29
Moon Features 29
ACTIVITY 3-3 Simulating Crater Formation 32
ACTIVITY 3-4 The Rays of Copernicus 32
ACTIVITY 3-5 The Central Peak of Tycho 34
ACTIVITY 3-6 The Mountains near Schickard 34
ACTIVITY 3-7 Masking Your Telescope’s Aperture 34
Eclipses of the Moon and the Sun 35
Lunar Occultations 36
ACTIVITY 3-8 Observing Lunar Occultations 37
The Moon and Earth’s Tides 37
ACTIVITY 3-9 Observing the Moon’s Effect on the Tides 38
The Astronaut’s Moon 38
Comets in Myth and History 42
Visual Aspects of Comets 43
ACTIVITY 4-1 Sketching a Comet As Viewed through Your Telescope 43 ACTIVITY 4-2 Estimating the Size of a Comet’s Coma 45
ACTIVITY 4-3 Keeping Track of a Comet’s Progress 46
ACTIVITY 4-4 Observing Changes in a Comet’s Tail 47
Where Do Comets Come From? 47
ACTIVITY 4-5 Observing Stellar Occultations by Comets 48
Comets and the Solar System’s Evolution 49
Comet Exploration 49
ACTIVITY 4-6 Comet Viewing with Color Filters 50
The Visible Sun 52
Observing the Sun 54
ACTIVITY 5-1 The Sun’s Spectrum 55
The Solar Interior 55
The Active Sun and the Earth 57
ACTIVITY 5-2 Using Sunspot Observations to Determine
Solar Rotation 57
ACTIVITY 5-3 Monitoring Solar Activity 58
Solar Energy 59
The Sun’s Future 60
Trang 8Contents ix
The Planets in History 62
ACTIVITY 6-1 A Scale Model of Solar-System Distances
and Planet Sizes 64
Types of Planets 65
Viewing the Planets 65
Mercury 67
ACTIVITY 6-2 Observing Mercury 67
Venus 67
ACTIVITY 6-3 Observing the Atmosphere of Venus 69
ACTIVITY 6-4 Observing Venus’s Phases and
Changes in Size 69
Mars 70
ACTIVITY 6-5 Coordinated Mars Observations 71
ACTIVITY 6-6 Atmospheric Variation and Mars’s Canals 72
Jupiter 73
ACTIVITY 6-7 Observing the Jovian Moons with a Reticle Eyepiece 74 ACTIVITY 6-8 Identifying the Large Moons of Jupiter by Brightness 75 ACTIVITY 6-9 Filter and Reticle Observations of Jupiter’s Cloud
Bands and the Great Red Spot 76
Saturn 76
ACTIVITY 6-10 Observing and Estimating the Size of Saturn’s Rings 77 ACTIVITY 6-11 Observing Saturn through Color Filters 78
Uranus 78
Neptune 79
Pluto 79
The Variety of Stars 82
The Significance of Star Colors 83
Binary and Multiple Stars 85
ACTIVITY 7-1 Observing Some Colorful Binary Stars 86
Mizar and Alcor 86
Rigel 87
Albireo 88
Castor 88
ACTIVITY 7-2 Reticle Observations of Binary Stars 89
ACTIVITY 7-3 Color-Filter Observations of Binary Stars 89
Variable Stars 90
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Deep-Sky Objects 90
ACTIVITY 7-4 Observing M42 through Color Filters 90
ACTIVITY 7-5 Counting the Pleiades 91
ACTIVITY 7-6 The Milky Way Galaxy and M31, the Great Spiral Galaxy
in Andromeda 92
Appendix A A Note about Measurement 95 Appendix B How to Use a Reticle Eyepiece 97 Appendix C Lunar and Solar Eclipse Table 99
Appendix D Planet Data Table 101 Appendix E Seasonal Finder Charts 103 Reading List: To Dig Deeper 107
Glossary 109 Index 115