News from your Planetarium

By Pam Eastlick

Greetings Everyone,

Well, it’s going to be an astounding month for skygazers. We’ve got eclipses and transits and public Planetarium shows and a special deal coming up in November. Keep reading to learn all about everything! (And I warn you, this one is pretty long but well worth the effort to read it all the way to the end!)

1. Lunar eclipse Monday 4 June 2012

2. Transit of Venus Wednesday 6 June 2012 3. Public Planetarium shows 14, 15 & 16 June 2012 4. The total solar eclipse in Cairns Australia in November

Pam

1. Partial lunar eclipse Monday 4 June 2012

Most of you probably missed the partial solar eclipse that I called the Commuter Eclipse on Monday 21 May because it happened between 7 and 9 a.m.

and it was pretty cloudy. Well, interestingly enough, there’s an unusual event happening next Monday. There’s going to be a partial lunar eclipse.

Now lunar eclipses aren’t unusual. Most years there are at least two and they always occur in pairs with solar eclipses. When there’s a solar eclipse, there’s always a lunar eclipse visible somewhere either two weeks before or two weeks after.

What makes this unusual is that you have the opportunity to see both events. In the 20 years I’ve been the Star Lady we’ve never been able to see both the solar and the lunar eclipse of a pair.

You may have missed the solar eclipse, but you stand a pretty fair chance of seeing the partial lunar eclipse on Monday. The Earth’s shadow will cover about a third of the Moon just as the Moon’s shadow covered about a third of the Sun in the solar eclipse.

To see it, just go outside next Monday night, the 4th of June and find the full Moon in the eastern sky. The eclipse starts at 8:00 p.m. (although there won’t be much to see), reaches maximum coverage just after 9:00 p.m.

and will be over by 10:00 p.m.

I’ve commented many times that watching a lunar eclipse is sort of like watching paint dry, so I recommend that you go outside a few minutes before 9:00 p.m. and find the Moon. If it’s cloudy, keep checking until the clouds part in the Moon’s vicinity. And, of course, since Pacific Islanders and most Asians have the belief that a lunar eclipse can harm an unborn baby, if you’re pregnant you might want to stay indoors on Monday night.

2. The Transit of Venus Wednesday 6 June 2012

If you’ve been reading your newsletters, my columns or the news in general, you’ve heard about the transit of Venus and you’ll hear a lot more about it in the upcoming week. The news is not about the appearance of the event, but its rarity. The next Venusian transit will happen in 2117, 105 years from now.

You, my loyal readers, already know what the transit is; you just need to know how to see it. I’ve been making plans for a couple of weeks and I’ll have a telescope with a Sun filter set up in the covered walkway between the Science Building and the classroom addition to the north. (That’s to the left if you’re facing the Science Building). I’ll also have some other viewing methods and if any of you have a pair of #15 welder’s goggles you’d be willing to loan me for that day only, I’d be most grateful.

The transit starts shortly after 8:00 a.m. and it will last until around

2:30 p.m. Since watching the entire transit really would be like watching paint dry, I suggest that you plan to stop by the UOG Science Building at any point during the transit and have a look at the small black dot as it wends its slow way across the Sun. Perhaps not the most exciting sky event ever (for more about a really exciting sky event and how to see it, keep reading!) but here’s the important thing. You will NEVER see another transit of Venus.

So stop by the Science Building next Wednesday 6 June to witness celestial mechanics in action and see something you will never see again.

3. June public Planetarium shows.

Summer Skies

6:30 p.m.

Quality Time with the Star Lady

7:00 p.m.

14, 15 & 16 June 2012

Most of our news this month involves the solar system, but there’s a whole sky full of stars up there, so join me for June’s public shows when we’ll take a leisurely romp through Guam’s Summer Skies. We’ll spot the Southern Cross, find the star that’s closest to the Sun and then have a look at my favorite unofficial constellation, the Ice Cream Cone. Are the flies bad at your house? You’ll find out there’s one in the sky too!

At 7:00 p.m. we’ll have the wonderful Quality Time with the Star Lady where I attempt to answer your questions about the sky and space stuff in general. Then, weather permitting, we’ll go outside and try to find all the wonderful sights in the real sky!

4. The total solar eclipse in Cairns, Australia in November

So . . . what’s on YOUR bucket list? I decided that since I’ve been the Star Lady for 20 years now and I’ve never seen a total solar eclipse, it is WAY past time. So I’ve signed up for the KPRG (that’s Public Radio for Guam if any of you are unfamiliar with the call letters) trip to the Cairns Wildlife dome next November to see a total solar eclipse. I’ve been a member of KPRG since they started and many of you listen to my weekly KPRG radio broadcast Tropical Skies.

I sent this newsletter out a little early because, quite frankly, I’d like you all to join me in Cairns. There are still complete tour packages left and if you sign up with KPRG before the 31st of May (only two days away,

guys!) you’ll get a substantial discount. I will eventually have links on the Planetarium website (www.guam.net/planet) but for now, either visit www.kprgfm.com or www.latitude13adventures.com for all the details.

Many of you know that my first love is biology and I’m almost as excited about visiting the Cairns Wildlife Dome as I am about seeing the eclipse.

As you can probably tell, I’m really looking forward to this trip and I’d like to have many of my loyal supporters join me for a great adventure.

See you in Cairns in November (if I don’t see you in the Planetarium or for the transit before then)!

THE GRAND DESIGN

By Pam Eastlick

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

I’m sure that most of you are aware that I’m ‘the Star Lady’ and that I run the Planetarium at the University of Guam but in this column, I try to feature all sorts of scientific news. However, next week we have a couple of very interesting and unusual sky events that you’ll want to know about for a couple of reasons.

Although you probably missed it, there was a partial solar eclipse over Guam on Monday morning, the 21^st of May. I called it the Commuter Eclipse because it happened between 7 and 9 a.m. The Moon only covered about a third of the Sun and not too many people saw it here because of the clouds.

Next Monday evening, 4 June, we’re going to have a partial lunar eclipse. Now lunar eclipses aren’t particularly unusual: there are usually two lunar eclipses each year and they also occur in pairs with solar eclipses. Whenever there’s a solar eclipse at new Moon, there’s always a lunar eclipse visible somewhere on the Earth either at the full Moon two weeks before the solar eclipse or two weeks after.

But here’s the unusual thing. Solar and lunar eclipses do occur in pairs, but it is not common at all to be able to see both pairs. In the twenty years that I’ve been the Star Lady, we’ve never been able to see both the lunar and solar eclipse of an eclipse pair.

You may have missed the partial solar eclipse, but you stand a pretty fair chance of seeing the partial lunar eclipse on Monday. The Earth’s shadow will cover about a third of the Moon just as the Moon’s shadow covered about a third of the Sun in the solar eclipse.

To see it, just go outside next Monday night, the 4^th of June and find the full Moon in the eastern sky. The eclipse starts at 8:00 p.m. (although there won’t be much to see), reaches maximum coverage just after 9:00 p.m. and will be over by 10:00 p.m.

I’ve commented many times that watching a lunar eclipse is sort of like watching paint dry so I recommend that you go outside a few minutes before 9:00 p.m. and find the Moon. If it’s cloudy, keep checking until the clouds part in the Moon’s vicinity. And, of course, since Pacific Islanders and most Asians have the belief that a lunar eclipse can harm an unborn baby, if you’re pregnant you might want to stay indoors on Monday night.

There’s a much rarer event happening on Wednesday of next week. In fact, it’s literally a once-in-a-lifetime event. We’re having a transit of Venus. A transit occurs when Venus passes directly between the Earth and the Sun and appears as a small moving black dot on the Sun’s face. Venusian transits occur in pairs eight years apart and we saw a portion of the first transit of this pair in 2004 on Guam. The next transit of Venus is in 2115 and trust me, you’ll miss it!

Seeing a transit of Venus involves looking at the Sun and that’s a dangerous proposition. You can use a mirror to reflect the Sun’s image into a darkened area or you can use a pair of #15 welder’s goggles to look directly at the Sun. Venus is large enough that you don’t need magnification to see it. But remember YOU DO NEED EYE PROTECTION!

I’ll have some viewing stations set up in the covered walkway between the Science Building and the classroom annex to the north of the building on Transit Day. The transit will start shortly after 8:00 a.m. and after that, Venus will make its slow progress across the face of the Sun. It will leave the Sun’s face around 2:30 p.m. and I plan to be there for the entire transit. (Barring necessity breaks).

Like the lunar eclipse, watching the entire Venusian transit would be very much like watching paint dry, but there is this to think about. You’ll never see another Venusian transit. So why don’t you stop by UOG sometime between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the 6^th of June and witness a once-in-a-lifetime event with the Star Lady.

I’m going to Cairns Australia in November for the total solar eclipse with the nice folks at KPRG and I’ll have information about that trip. I hope you can join me to witness celestial mechanics in action!

BREATHE DEEP!

By Pam Eastlick

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

Greetings all! Well, I think it’s time to dip into one of my favorite files, the one labeled “Animals”. As I have mentioned many times, we humans have a hyper-inflated sense of our own importance in the overall scheme of things. We may think we’re the dominant animals on this planet, but the insects far outweigh us in importance, numbers and sheer mass.

But insects are all small and as individuals are pretty much at the mercy of the larger animals that surround them. Even the ones that don’t eat insects. Just imagine that you’re a tiny aphid, minding your own chomping business on that lovely alfalfa leaf when suddenly the goat that saw it too has made a meal of the alfalfa and gained a little extra protein by eating you!

Well, interestingly enough, some Israeli researchers have discovered that the aphid avoids being part of lunch most of the time by a very simple strategy. It smells that goat coming and drops off the leaf.

"Tiny insects like aphids are not helpless when facing large animals that rapidly consume the plants they live on,” said Moshe Inbar of the University of Haifa in Israel. “They reliably detect the danger and escape in time.”

Inbar had always wondered about the accidental predation of small plant-dwellers based on his observations of insects that don’t really move around. “As soon as we started to work on this problem, we suspected that the aphids responded to our own breath,” he said. (The researchers later used snorkels to keep their own breath from mucking up their experiments).

The researchers allowed a goat to feed on potted alfalfa plants infested with aphids and discovered that 65 percent of the aphids dropped to the ground right before they would have been eaten along with the plant. The escape maneuver could have been triggered by many cues like plant shaking, sudden shadows, or the plant-eater’s breath. While a quarter of the aphids dropped when the plants were shaken, more than half fell to the ground in response to the goat’s breath, the researchers report. Shadows had no effect at all on the dropping behavior and ladybugs, an aphid predator, didn’t inspire that synchronous response either.

So what were they responding too? In other experiments, the researchers learned that they responded to the warm and humid stream of air produced by mammalian breath. The researchers suspect that aphids aren’t the only ones that do the same thing. Want to swat a fly? Try holding your breath!

When plant-eating mammals such as goats chomp on a sprig of alfalfa, they could easily gobble up some extra protein in the form of insects that happen to get in their way. But a new report shows that plant-dwelling pea aphids have a strategy designed to help them avoid that dismal fate: The insects sense mammalian breath and simply drop to the ground. (Credit: iStockphoto)

FOSSILS OLD AND NEW

By Pam Eastlick

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

There’s no question that fossils can teach us about the past but a recent discovery in Australia has proved remarkable. A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales has found a 15-million-year-old fossil limestone cave packed with even older animal bones. The bones have revealed the entire life cycle of a large prehistoric marsupial, from babies still in their mother’s pouch to elderly adults.

The scientists uncovered hundreds of beautifully preserved fossils of an extinct browsing wombat-like marsupial they named Nimbadon lavarackorum, along with the remains of galloping kangaroos, primitive bandicoots, a fox-sized thylacine (also called Tasmanian tigers) and forest bats.

By comparing the bones of 26 different Nimbadon individuals that died in the cave at varying stages of life, the team has been able to show that the babies developed in much the same way as marsupials today, probably being born after only a month’s gestation and crawling to the mother’s pouch to complete their development.

The animals appear to have plunged to their deaths through a vertical cave entrance that was probably hidden by plants and acted as a natural pit-fall trap. The animals either unwittingly fell to their deaths or survived the fall only to become trapped.

The site is also scientifically important because it documents a critical time in the evolution of Australia’s flora and fauna when lush greenhouse conditions were giving way to a long, slow drying out that fundamentally reshaped the continent’s cargo of life as rainforests retreated.

A skull of the sheep-sized Nimbadon lavarackorum from the middle Miocene cave deposit, AL90. (Credit: Karen Black, UNSW)

That climate change caused by the global warming that we all know isn’t happening (tongue firmly planted in cheek) will probably have a great effect on many animals because as the next story shows us, it isn’t only Australia that was affected by warming trends.

We’ll fast-forward several million years to a more recent global warming. We’re headed for Africa where genetic investigators are examining the beginnings of the partnership between humans and the ancestors of today’s donkeys. Apparently nomads recruited the animals to help them survive the increasingly harsh Saharan landscape more than 5,000 years ago.

The domestication of wild animals is quite an intellectual breakthrough for humans (although we’re not quite sure what it says about the donkeys) and the researchers provided solid evidence that donkey domestication happened first in northern Africa and happened there more than once.

The researchers used the most comprehensive sampling of mitochondrial DNA ever assembled from ancient, historic and living specimens and determined that the critically endangered African wild ass, which exists today only in small numbers in eastern Africa, zoos and wildlife preserves, is the living ancestor of the modern donkey.

Knowing when and where donkeys were first tamed is important, because there are always cultural ramifications from being first. Having animals at your disposal that you can use as food or transport or as work aids can make you more successful than your neighbors. After all, the horse and donkey were also used in war.

A small herd of wild donkeys. (Credit: iStockphoto)

Wombats and donkeys. We share our planet with some astounding creatures. Here’s hoping we don’t destroy ourselves and all of them in the process.

News from your Planetarium

By Pam Eastlick

Greetings Everyone!

We have an astounding two months coming up for sky gazing. Not only can you see The Magic Half Hour during the first three weeks of May, we have a partial solar eclipse on Monday, 21 May AND the once-in-a-lifetime experience of the transit of Venus on 6 June. This e-mail is a little longer than normal because of all the cool stuff happening in the sky. I hope to see all of you either at public shows or possibly viewing the transit. More on that later.

It’s an amazing couple of months! (Please note that you’ll probably get a few more e-mails from the Planetarium over the next few weeks than you usually get!)

Pam

1. May public shows

2. The Magic Half Hour

3. The Commuter Eclipse (21 May)

4. The transit of Venus (06 June)

5. A call for help.

1. May public shows

10, 11 and 12 May 2012

You’ll notice that there’s no show named above and there’s a reason. I hope to produce a new show for May that features both the solar eclipse and the transit of Venus and how to view them both safely. However, May is traditionally my busiest time of year and I may not get it done. If I don’t, we’ll see “The Magic Half Hour” at 6:30 p.m.

Regardless of which show we see, we’ll have the traditional Q&A session at

7:00 p.m. and then we’ll go outside to see The Magic Half Hour when it gets dark enough to see it. And even if I don’t get the eclipse/transit show done, I’ll provide all the information you need to see them both in the Planetarium newsletter. So you’ll definitely want to mark this month’s Planetarium shows on your calendar.

2. The Magic Half Hour

That astounding time when you can see eight of the ten brightest stars, 15 of the 20 brightest stars, the largest and smallest constellations and the three most famous constellations ALL AT THE SAME TIME is in prime viewing time in May. It occurs from 8:00 to 8:30 p.m. from 1-7 May; 7:30 to 8:00 p.m. from 8-14 May; and 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. from 15-22 May. We also have three planets up there too. Saturn is in the eastern sky near Spica, the fifteenth brightest star, Mars is almost straight overhead all month and Venus is impossible to miss in the western sky. Enjoy!

3. The Commuter Eclipse

We’re having a partial solar eclipse over Guam on Monday 21 May. I’m calling it the Commuter Eclipse because it occurs between 7:00 a.m. and

9:14 a.m. with maximum eclipse at 8:07 a.m. Only about one quarter of the Sun will be covered by the Moon so you’ll need some kind of viewing device to see it. A safe, simple way is to walk outside and look under a tree.

The round circles you see are actually images of the Sun shining through the leaves and during the Commuter Eclipse, they’ll have a ‘bite’ out of them! I hope to get some stuff up on the website that will show you other safe ways to view this eclipse. (www.guam.net/planet)

4. The transit of Venus

Venus will pass directly between the Earth and the Sun on Wednesday 6 June 2012. Guam is almost directly under the path of the transit and we’ll see the whole thing. It will last about six and a half hours.

Venus will appear as a small slowly moving dot on the face of the Sun and you’ll definitely want to see it because there won’t be another one for

105 years in 2117 and you will probably miss it!

The transit starts at 8:13 a.m. here on Guam. That’s when the leading edge of Venus makes visual contact with the edge of the Sun. This will occur on the lower left side of the Sun at about the 8:00 position. At

8:31 a.m. Venus’ trailing edge contacts the Sun. After that, Venus will slowly make its way across the Sun’s face. The edge of Venus will contact the Sun’s edge again at 2:28 p.m. and will leave the Sun’s disc entirely at 2:45 p.m.

There are several ways to view a transit and that brings us to our last topic.

5. A call for help

The people who subscribe to this list are the Planetarium’s best friends and I need some help for this transit. I’m thinking of setting up some viewing stations here at the University, probably in the vicinity of the Science Building. Do any of you have any suggestions about other more appropriate places? Perhaps you might like to set up your own viewing stations somewhere else. If you’re interested in volunteering to help on that date or have your own viewing site, please let me know.

And that brings up the second call for help. A friend and I are going to try to construct some reflection viewers using either dead refractor telescopes or fuzzy binoculars that have grown mold on the lenses. They need to be ‘dead’ because the Sun’s heat is very hard on the glue used to mount the optics. If you have old binoculars or telescopes you’d like to donate to the cause, please let me know.

I’m also looking to borrow #14 welder’s goggles for viewing the transit.

These are about the only safe method to actually view the transit by looking directly at the Sun and not a projected image and I’d like to have some on hand. They will be returned to you unscathed!

All comments, suggestions and offers of help are greatly appreciated. And thank you for reading this incredibly LONG missive all the way through!!