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The Moon's Phase From the USNO |
-- First Quarter, November 2003 -- | ||||||||||||
| Lexington High School, Astronomy 361 | Volume 1, Issue 1 | ||||||||||||
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Links The Starry Messenger is written by the students of Astronomy 361 and is edited by Mr. Colarusso. All students' work and likenesses have been released by their owners for use on this page. See a name here you recognize. The alumni list keeps you in touch. View |
November 8th, Lincoln Field: Ben, Theresa, Heather Horn, Ross Milton, Charlote Morse-Fortier, Greg, Stephanie Galaitsis, Alice Wang, Mr. Colarusso, Marlee Tichenor, Kelly, Jill Goldin, and Mary Bongiovi brave the winter weather to view this moth's lunar eclipse. What's up with the blurs? |
Now You Don't by Mary Bongiovi What were you doing on Saturday, November 8th? Unless you were living under a rock, you probably noticed that the moon underwent an eclipse. To get a better view of this event, some students in our Astronomy class braved the cold to view the eclipse at Lincoln field. Armed with cider and a really large telescope, we got to see a celestial phenomenon that will not occur again for another year. Eclipses are when a shadow cuts off the light from one celestial body by another. There are two kinds of eclipses, lunar and solar. On Saturday, the Moon passed through the shadow of the earth. While the Moon is at its fullest and the Earth lies between the Sun and the Moon, a lunar eclipse occurs. Since the Earth's shadow is in the way, the Moon, which would normally be brightened with the Sun's light, is now mostly dark. As the Moon passes into the Earth's umbra, the darkest part of the shadow, we could see it begin to darken much like it would during its normal phases, except now it was occurring in a much shorter time span. An eclipse differs from the Moon's phases because the shadow is caused by the Earth itself during an eclipse, while the phases of the Moon are not. There still is some sunlight visible in the Earth's atmosphere which can reach the Moon even during a solar eclipse, giving it the red hue you may have noticed on Saturday. For those of you who may have missed it, the next lunar eclipse that we can observe here in North America occurs October 28, 2004. Full Article by David Colarusso So the inaugural issue of the Messenger finally made it to press, and I'd like to take this opportunity to say a little something about its origins. Astronomy 361 was created this year in an attempt to provide more choice in the senior year for the fourth year science requirement--something other than physics. Many of the students are taking this class in order to fulfill that requirement while others are simultaneously enrolled in honors physics. As you might imagine such a class is populated with a diverse set of students. Full Text | |||||||||||
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to the Formation of the Universe by Alex Curlin Humankind has wondered about the origin of the universe throughout recorded history, and no doubt before. Preceding the time of the Telescope, our solar system was considered to have comprised the entire universe and the stars were believed to be small holes in the heavenly sphere behind which burned the fires of creation. But creation, in modern day, stems from a belief in the theory of the Big Bang, an occurrence that scientists have little knowledge of. Astronomers may be able to learn about the creation of the universe from the study of black holes; supermassive collapsed stars, from which nothing escapes. Full Article |
Einstein's Dreams by Dan Green The bulk of twentieth-century research in astronomy, and much of our present understanding of the field, is based on revolutionary concepts of space and time as developed by Albert Einstein. He discovered that, among other things, light can never change its speed relative to any object. That is, if you are moving toward a beam of light it will still be coming at you at the same speed - roughly 186,000 miles per second -- as it would if you were moving away from the light beam. This notion goes completely against common sense and after Einstein announced it, physicists went to great lengths to disprove it. Full Article | ||||||||||||
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by Alice Peiying Wang The celestial sphere was the topic of the first unit of Astronomy 361. Each member of the class constructed a 3 dimensional model of the celestial sphere. The models aided our understanding of phenomena such as the motion of the sun, the motion of the moon, the diurnal motion of the stars, the phases of the moon, eclipses and the seasons. Full Article by Jill Goldin Full Text |
by Stanislav Kostarnov Determining the chemical composition of stars is a very complex and difficult task for astronomers, as you cannot simply take a sample of the star's makeup due to them being such an enormous distance away. Just a hundred and fifty years ago such a task would have been considered totally impossible, as it is to stop time in our age. However with what we now know about the behavior of light and emission spectrums we live in an age were the composition of any object in the sky can be measured through a brand new science of spectra analysis which is armed with the laws of Kirchhoff and Bunsen. Full Article | ||||||||||||
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