Coromandel Life Magazine 2015 Winter V3

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BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL • 07 866 5343 •
Stargazing Tours Available Most Clear Nights
Identify Constellations, Planets & Stars From Rotating Dome
Handle Meteorites Older Than The Earth
Astronomy Gift Shop
Luxury B&B With A Difference
ASTRONOMY TOURS B&B
392 STATE HWY 25 • KUAOTUNU • WHITIANGA
Photo by Peter Drury
We highly recommend a visit to Stargazers B&B and
Astronomy Tours for a ‘tour of the skies’. Alastair has
an impressive observatory and various telescopes,
including the largest one on the Coromandel, for those
who want to learn more about the heavens.
The Dawn
spacecraft
powered by
a novel ion engine
is now in orbit
around Ceres, the
largest asteroid, and
sending back great
photos. Some show
mysterious white spots in one of the craters,
and NASA is inviting the public to outguess
their scientists as to what they might be. You
can have a close look and vote at:
nasa.gov/dawn/world_ceres/
No doubt the mystery will be revealed in
the next few months as Dawn spirals down
ever closer to the surface of Ceres, which
actually suffers from a bit of an identity
crisis…when first discovered in 1801 it was
called a ‘planet’. This was then changed to
an ‘asteroid’ when additional similar objects
were discovered nearby, and about 10
years ago it was renamed
again, this time as a
‘dwarf planet’ similar
to Pluto.
However, come July 14 every one of us, be they
10 years old or 90, will know more than the best
scientist or astronomer does today! Never again
will mankind wonder about these questions. We
are about to change a fundamental bit of human
knowledge forever – textbooks will have to be
re written. We live in interesting times!
Rosetta Probe Reveals
Secrets of Comet 67P
The Rosetta spacecraft orbiting Comet 67P
is sending back fascinating images of the
increasing activity on the comet’s surface as it
approaches the Sun.
We are now able to see part of the comet’s
internal structure
which appears to be
made up of soccer
ball sized spheres or
‘gooseberries’. These
strange structures
can be best viewed
inside 120m wide holes in the comet – sites
where water and dust are actively jetting from
the interior and starting to form its tail.
Large cracks are also seen in the neck area
between the two lobes of the comet and there
is some speculation whether 67P may actually
break in two as it nears the sun during August.
Clearly there is still much for us to learn about
these mysterious bodies that predate the
formation of the planets and Sun.
A Planetary Dance
Venus and Jupiter put on a lovely display in
our western sky this winter, moving ever closer
during June, and almost touching on July 1, with
Venus being the brightest of the two. As they
gradually move away, they will be joined by a
thin crescent Moon on July 18 and 19 very low in
the northwestern sky.
Saturn will be clearly visible as a bright slightly
yellowish object high in the northeastern sky.
Joined by our Moon on July 26, watch as it
glides past the ringed planet from night to night.
Spacecraft Dawn to
Explore Asteroid Ceres
Look to the skies with Alastair
Brickell, astronomy buff and
owner of Stargazers B&B and
Astronomy Tours in Kuaotunu.
STARGAZERS
WINTER TREATS
13
Spacecraft
Reaches Pluto….
A UNIQUE MOMENT IN THE
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE
The 10 year voyage for the New Horizons
spacecraft is about to enter its most exciting
phase. After all this time, on July 14 it will
zip past Pluto in 8 hours and achieve its long
awaited goal of exploring our most distant
and unknown dwarf planet.
Pluto was discovered in 1930 by American
Clyde Tombaugh and in homage to him the
American spacecraft is actually carrying
some of his ashes past his planet! When
discovered it was named after the recently
discovered element plutonium and since the
spacecraft is so far from the Sun that solar
panels are useless it is powered by a small
nuclear power supply on board which uses
radioactive plutonium as its fuel!
It has already sent back great if still somewhat
fuzzy images of Pluto and its 5 known moons
as they orbit around it in a cartwheel fashion
on Pluto’s 248 year long journey around the
Sun as shown in the diagram above.
Its biggest moon, Charon, itself half the size
of Pluto, does a wonderful dance around the
planet as they both orbit around an invisible
point in space between them (as can be seen
in this video clip at:
com/astronomy-news/pluto-the-last-picture-
show-050420155/).
Nobody on Earth, not even the best scientists
knows much about Pluto. We do know it has
an atmosphere with mainly nitrogen just like
Earth, but we don’t even know how many
moons it has. Does it have rings, does it have
geysers, clouds, lightening,
volcanoes, ice,
lakes, aurora?
No one
knows.