Granite Falls, Minn. —
SMSU Planetarium
presents "Bad Astronomy" show
The SMSU Planetarium in Marshall is presenting an exciting show entitled "Bad Astronomy: Myths and Misconceptions". Based on the popular book and website of the same name, Bad Astronomy offers a unique and fun approach to learning about the cosmos. This show explores questions such as: Were the Apollo visits to the moon actually a hoax? Can you tell your future by the stars? Are movies and T.V. shows like Star Wars and Star Trek realistic? I had the chance to preview the show last weekend and it is very well done and is a very fun look at this topic.
Show times are February 3, 5, and 10 all at 7:00 p.m. A short laser show will follow. Shows run just over an hour, and tickets are sold at the door only. Admission is $5 for adults and $4 for kids under 12.
Bright meteor
flash visible January 12
You might have noticed the bright flash of a meteor over town at about 6:25 p.m. on January 12 in the northern sky. I was lucky enough to see it out of the corner of my eye while I was driving on 9th Avenue. It resembled the way lightning looks from a distant thunderstorm after dark.
I've done a bit of research and can't seem to find any information on it, but that night, WCCO news mentioned that it had been visible all over the state and was a remnant meteor of December's Geminid meteor shower. Other such flashes were reported throughout the U.S. in the first couple weeks of January. The meteor almost certainly disintegrated high up in the atmosphere and never reached the ground.
Planet Venus still
bright in morning eastern sky
The bright light you may have noticed in the eastern/southeastern sky before sunrise is Venus. Venus is shrouded in a thick atmosphere that reflects a lot of sunlight, that's why it looks so bright. Venus goes through phases just like the moon, and if you look at Venus with binoculars over the next couple of months you should be able to see it change into a crescent shape just like the moon.
Hubble photographs furthest galaxy
NASA released images last week of the furthest galaxy ever photographed. The distance to the galaxy has been calculated to be 13.2 billion light years away. You can see the picture of the faint smudge of red light at www.nasa.gov by typing "hubble furthest galaxy" in the search bar. The previous record holder was a galaxy about 13 billion light years away photographed in 2004.
The immense distances in the universe are mind boggling. The interesting part is that this galaxy isn't even there anymore! The light has taken so long to get here that the galaxy vanished a long, long time ago even though we can still see its light.
To envision how this works, imagine the cardboard tube found in the middle of a roll of wrapping paper. If you're like me, you've certainly talked and made funny voices through one. Now imagine talking through a longer and longer cardboard tube. Sound can travel about a mile in four or five seconds, so imagine a tube a mile long. If you said "Hey!" into one end of this tube, it would take five seconds for someone to hear it at the other end. Now imagine a longer and longer tube, until its thousands of miles long. If you were standing on the moon at one end of the tube and someone was standing on the earth on the other, you could yell "Hey!" into the tube and it would be days before the listener heard it. In that time, you would have jumped back into your spaceship and would be back home before the listener heard your voice. (It may be worth mentioning that radio waves used by real-life spacecraft travel at the speed of light so it only takes a little over one second for radio communications to travel the Earth-Moon distance.)
Of course this example isn't realistic (because as you'll learn in "Bad Astronomy", sound can't travel in the vacuum of space) but you can think of light in the same way. Just like the tube would, in a way, allow you to "hear" back in time, seeing distant galaxies with a telescope is, in a way, "looking" back in time.
Joe Hauger of Granite falls is a volunteer with the SMSU Planetarium and MN Master Naturalist Program. He leads several stargazing shows in the region in the summer months.
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