I'm not sure how I made it to this age with never having looked at the night's sky through a telescope. In San Pedro de Atacama I fixed that. We took an outdoor astronomy course with Atacama Desert Skygazing which is a one man operation by Jorge Fernandez. For me, it was a highlight of this journey we've been on for the past 11+ months. It will be impossible to forget seeing the stars sparkle up close, but it was even more memorable to see Saturn and its ring and the Moon and its craters. Oh wait, and then there was Jupiter, its bands and four moons. I saw these things! I had many serious "wow" moments. If you haven't looked through a proper telescope at the night sky please find a way to make this happen soon. It reminded me of my first time SCUBA diving as I felt like I was being introduced to an entirely new world. It's a wild sensation to discover something that had previously been unexplored (by me). How many other experiences are out there in this world that would make me feel this way? I wasn't searching for such a feeling but I'll tell you, it feels good, really good.
Jorge grew up in the area we are staying in in Chile, San Pedro de Atacama. He studied tourism and by day is a local guide to the many sites around the area. In the evening, he hosts various levels of astronomy/skygazing outings on his rented land. He is a self-taught Astronomer and only began exploring this passion through his own research and studies less than 15 years ago. I realize I'm a novice, but I was thoroughly impressed with his knowledge and if he didn't tell me, I never would have imagined that he didn't study astronomy at university. His passion was absolutely contagious. I'm going to guess that you probably haven't heard of San Pedro de Atacama. It's small town in the Atacama desert with approximately 2,500 residents. The Atacama desert is one of the driest places on earth and due to its low humidity, low presence of clouds, high altitude, and lack of pollution and radio interference (because there are no big cities anywhere close-by), it is known as one of the best places in the world for astronomy. In fact, there is an international astronomy facility located within the San Pedro de Atacama dessert due to its prime conditions. It is called ALMA which stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter/sumillimeter Array. It is a partnership of many science foundations including the ones from the U.S., Europe, Japan, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea. More about that in a future post. Since this is obviously one of the best places in the world to observe the nights sky, I signed us up to do just that.
Our class consisted of five students in total and lasted about four hours. For the first hour and forty minutes we sat in chairs underneath the moonlit sky while he taught us the basics of astronomy as well as its history, and he pointed out several constellations, stars and planets in the sky with some sort of incredible laser. It really seemed like his laser was reaching the star etc., you knew exactly where he was pointing. I have no idea how that worked (when Jake read this blog he laughed at me and said, "Yeah Jesslyn, it's called a laser pointer", but I've never seen one used like that!). One thing I learned is that stars aren't just white but may be a variety of different colors. Perhaps this is very common knowledge, but I had no idea that stars were different colors. After our instruction, it was time to get closer via the seven telescopes he had set up in his yard.
A extremely brief history on the telescope:
Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey is credited with inventing the first telescope probably because he was the first person to apply for the patent. That was in 1608, the device had three-times magnification and was not called a telescope but a "Dutch perspective lens". It consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. The story goes that two children were playing in Lippershey's shop with two lenses, he observed that it made a distant weather vane appear closer, and thus the idea for his design was sparked. In 1609 Galileo heard about this new invention, quickly replicated one without ever having seen it, and dedicated years to improving its design. Galileo's devices are the first ones to be called "telescopes". At a banquet Galileo was honored at in 1611, a Greek poet/theologian invented the word. It comes from the Greek tele = 'far' and skopein = 'to look or see'; teleskopos = 'far-seeing'.
Johannes Kepler then designed a telescope with two convex lenses. What's important about that is that working from Kepler's writings, Isaac Newton made a telescope out of mirrors rather than lenses and built his famous reflecting telescope in 1668. Centuries later it was Newton's design of the reflecting telescope that would go on to dominate astronomy and provide us with much of the information about the solar system that we have today.
Our observations:
As you'll see in the photos below, our class was outside and since its winter in the desert, it gets pretty chilly at night. Luckily Jorge provided us all with fleece blankets you see most of us wearing as skirts. He also had space heaters we stood around while we chatted and enjoyed hot drinks. The moon was in its first quarter phase and was illuminating the sky quite a bit. Despite that, we were able to observe a lot for the novice eye. Two of the seven telescopes Jorge had set up were based on Galileo's design, the other on Newton's. They had varying magnifications which allowed us to look at the same object through more than one telescope and be able to appreciate the differences in the technology and magnification ability.
The five of us looking through the telescopes. Jorge took this picture using a tripod and slow shutter speed. That combined with a little moonlight makes it look like daytime.
Jake took this picture of the Milky Way using our camera, a tripod and a slow shutter speed. No magnification!
One of the first things I got to see through the telescope was a sparkling blue star and I couldn't believe my eyes. Blue indicates that the star is "new" and very hot. The blue star that we looked just happened to be in the Virgo constellation which is my Astrology sign. Maybe that's why it's always been my favorite color? As I sit here writing this blog, I was curious to know more about this blue star. According to space.com, this star is called Spica, but is also known as Alpha Virginis and is actually a blue-white star. It is the 16th brightest star in all of the night sky and is located about 260 light-years from Earth. In other words, if you were to travel at the speed of light, which is impossible, it would take you 260 years to get from Earth to the star. Spica is also believed to be about twice the size of the sun and have 2,300 times the luminosity of the sun. Huh?! This is so hard for me to comprehend and I find it amazing. I have a hard time believing that we Earthlings could deduce something like this, but I trust it as the stars have been utilized and studied for thousands of years.
I had a hard time really seeing the color of the reddish and yellowish stars we looked at, they looked kind of white to me, but the blue star was completely apparent. Then we looked at various parts of the Milky Way, things like open clusters and closed clusters (globular clusters). Yeah, I had no idea what those things were either. We looked up at the sky with our naked eye and using his laser, Jorge showed us the area in the sky that we were going to look at through the telescope. The first was called an open cluster except what we were looking at with our naked eye just looked like a cloud over the milky way. With our naked eye there were no stars to see. Then we looked through the telescope and BAM! an explosion of stars. Unreal. For the closed/globular cluster, what we saw with our naked eyes was the same, cloudy nothingness, no stars. Then when we looked through the telescope, BAM! Except this time instead of an explosion of stars it was a cluster of stars very close together. It reminded all of us of looking through a microscope at specimens. It looks like that more than stars. Unbelievable stuff.
How was Jorge able to quickly set up each of these telescopes in the exact location to observe these phenomenons? He said it's easy, he knows the map of Southern Hemisphere sky and has memorized the coordinates of many, many objects. For us true amateurs he ensured that it would be easy to do if you have the coordinates of what you want to see and enter them into the telescope. Of course it's not actually that simple as the Earth is rotating and things may be a little off of the sky maps coordinates. However, it sounds like with patience, a good eye and coordinates, you can navigate to find what you are looking for. Of course the light of the moon is always a factor so the less moon the better when it comes to skygazing.
After looking at the above mentioned clusters in the Milky Way, we moved on to planets and looked at Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. I couldn't really make out any reddish color when looking at Mars it just appeared big and bright. I found Jupiter and Saturn much more exciting to look at. I could see the bands on Jupiter as well as its four moons and the ring around Saturn! I still can't believe that I saw these things, it was incredible. I feel a bit silly admitting it because I'm sure that many of you have seen these things through a telescope decades ago. Wait a minute - why didn't anyone ever tell me to go look for myself?! Jake and I always talked about going to the Boston University observatory, but we never made it there. The last thing we observed was the moon and it was spectacular to look at through the telescope. We looked at it through three different telescopes beginning with the one that had the lowest magnification. That was incredible in itself and as the magnification with the other scopes increased the wow-factor elevated along with it. I can't believe that you can look through an amateur telescope and see craters on the moon! I want to look at the sky through a telescope every night. I don't see how it could get old. Like SCUBA diving - there is so much to see! I might have just picked up another expensive hobby.
Picture of the moon taken with my iPhone through one of Jorge's telescopes (thanks for giving me the iPhone Amanda!)
There was one other woman in the class who was as enthusiastic as me at what we were observing. She jokingly said that we should timeshare a telescope together as we had previously learned that one of the really nice quality telescopes we were using goes for about $1000 USD. That's actually much more affordable than I would have imagined given the quality of the devices we were using.
This blog was really fun for me to write. Thanks for reading it! If you want to nerd-out and go skygazing together sometime, let me know. I'm very curious who of my friends and family is into this stuff and it just has never come up in conversation.
~ Jesslyn
Going to Chile? Be sure to go meet Jorge! http://www.atacamadesertstargazing.com
Sources:
http://www.space.com/17021-virgo-constellation.html
http://www.space.com/21950-who-invented-the-telescope.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope
http://www.explore-atacama.com/eng/atacama-guides/san-pedro-de-atacama.htm