 I'm not quite sure how long these are going to last, but I think we've decided on about an hour in length. So if anybody has to go early, you're welcome to do so. If you want to stay late, I can answer questions if you have any and we'll see how this proceeds. One thing I have to warn you about, my granddaughter gave me this cold, the third time in a row now. So if I suddenly start acting irrationally, it's because I'm trying to hold back a cough and you'll have to give me a few minutes to control myself. I also have a weird sense of humor so you can laugh anytime you want. I thought I'd add this ending right away in case nobody showed up and I was pretty close to it too. Okay, I want to give you a short background here and a little advertising. I've been here since 2001 and we collaborate a lot with the Spoying Astronomical Society. We have one of our former members here. We have a meeting tonight and you're not at the meeting? No? I thought this would be more interesting. Well, good for you. No, what I want to point out is our society assembled in your 1993. Our 1973, boy am I off. And if you do the math from 1973 to 2013, that makes 40 years. So we have a 40th anniversary this year. When we formed the society, we noticed that the Spoying Press had an announcement that the comet of the century was coming. That sound familiar? They're talking about comet of the century now. This particular comet was named Komet Kehutek. It was going to be fantastic. You could see it during the daytime and people were going to get so interested in astronomy. So I came to UW Spoying and I borrowed some of the telescopes. I think Al Keppel was the astronomy teacher then. And we made arrangements to set them up at the Spoying Memorial Mall. So that people could look at the comet with a telescope. The comet was not as spectacular as we had been promised. What happened was that comets can't be predicted. They're all different ages. They have different components. Some last longer. Some resist the pressure of the sun more. And you never know what's going to happen. So it was kind of disappointing. The comet itself was about second magnitude. If you can picture the stars as a big dipper, that's second magnitude. So it was easy enough to see with binoculars and a telescope, but it wasn't a very nice object to look at with the naked eye. So I'm hoping that we won't get disappointed. Again, this year, when you're talking about the comet of the century, this is actually what the comet looked like if you were out in the country, out from the mall area, you could only see the white areas to the left. You could see the head and a little bit of the coma and a short extended tail. So it was disappointing. This new comet that's approaching and that's been so highly talked about is named Comet Isund. And it should be here around about October. And then it'll spend a couple months within our area and it'll take off again. The nice thing about this comet is, it's coming out of the Northern Hemisphere, diving straight for the sun and then leaving the same way. So it should be an observer's dream for Northern Hemisphere observers. And we're very lucky to see this kind of thing. There are actually two bright comets coming. Besides Comet Isund, there's another one coming next month. And that's already starting to fizzle out. So I don't know if we can have a good view of that one, but we'll try to have some telescope set up for people to look at. Before I continue, I want to give you a little idea of what we do on campus. We have four astronomy classes during the year. During the summer, we have astronomy 100, which is a survey of astronomy. That was the only astronomy class we had when it came to campus. Astronomy 100 contains everything, solar system, the stars, galaxies. And we found that that was a very short time to cover so much material. So we decided to split the course into two parts, into two semesters. Now we have astronomy 105 in the fall, which deals with the solar system only. Much more convenient. 106, which is this current semester, is called stellar systems. We talk about black holes, galaxies, anything outside the solar system. And in the fall, we have astronomy 291, which is about spaceflight. And that's one of the more exciting courses of all four of them, because now on our schedule, we have possible balloon flights, high altitude balloon flights, going up to 100,000 feet. We're still trying to look for different kinds of payloads to add to such objects. So far, we've just launched cameras. And you can't launch them from Sheboygan because most of the prevailing winds go to the east. You can have payloads costing several thousand dollars go in the drink or end up in Michigan if you're launching from this area. So launches usually take place in the Madison area. With the last launch, the balloon came down directly over the campus. I thought, oh my gosh, it's Saturday, all the students are out. Somebody's gonna grab the payload and take it to their dorm. But we lucked out because the payload landed on top of a building. And we had the campus police come and get it for us. So that worked out okay. The balloons have GPS on board so you can track them with like these little tablets you have here. They show you a map of the ground and the exact position underneath the balloon. And then it's a race with the chase cars that try to get to be the first person to find the balloon. It's a lot of fun. Okay, so here's the comet that's coming next month. It's named Pan Stars. It should be visible about 45 minutes after sunset if you look directly west, which would be about this direction. This is one that was promised to be almost visible by eye comet. But as I said before, it's a race starting to fizzle out a little bit. So we'll have to see what happens. This is the comet Ison that so much hullabaloo is being put out with. It's this tiny dot inside these two crosshairs. And it's currently about five astronomical units away from the sun. The average distance between the earth and the sun is one astronomical unit. So it's just crossing the orbit of Jupiter. It's got a long ways to go till it gets here, but most comets don't get that bright at such a distance away from the sun. And that's what they're hoping for. Here we go. Okay, so maybe we can understand these two comets better if we look at comets in general. See what they're made of, where they come from, if they have differences in types, and what kind of damage we could get if one of them would hit the earth. That's a main concern to scientists. Back in the 1980s, a comet got too close to Jupiter and it came apart. It was called a string of pearls, an elongated object. And when it came back towards Jupiter, a whole year later, it struck the atmosphere and caused gigantic explosions. So scientists wanted to know what would happen during impacts and they got their answer. If there would have been dinosaurs on the cloud layers of Jupiter, they would have been dead. Another attempt at humor. Okay, so throughout history, comets have often been connected with bad and good omens. Here's an example of King Harold of England during his death scene. And in the upper part, you can see a comet. So many artists connected comets with bad things that were happening. In another case, here's the nativity. Jesus being born. And what do you know, up on top is a comet. So people think that the wise men that came to visit Jesus may have been astrologers and they must have known about new things in the sky. They wanna see a big comet. They wanna be interested in following it. On the right, we have a bunch of people standing around and there's a comet stretching from one end of the sky to the other. Images like this lead astronomers to believe that comets in general have kind of fizzled out. There must have been a lot more bigger comets, what they call sun grazers. And these have fizzled out maybe because comets evolve. They lose a lot of their volatiles each time they pass a sun. So only comets from far away can retain that much on their surfaces. Okay, so perhaps the best known comet of all is Comet Halley. It was the first comet to be predicted on its return. Halley takes about 76 years to complete a trip around the sun. Sometimes that's plus or minus two years. That's because the volatiles being emanated from it produce jets which act like a rocket engine. And that causes it to speed up or slow down. Interesting thing about Comet Halley is that it travels in a retrograde direction. All the planets in the solar system move from west to east in a direct orbit. Anything that moves in the opposite direction is in a retrograde path. So this means that Comet Halley must have come close to one of the planets that's sometimes in the past. And the gravity from the planet must have ejected it in the opposite direction. Comet Halley is also one of the items that are called short period comets. Any comet that orbits the sun in less than 110 years is a short period comet. Anything that takes longer is a long period comet. And both of these comets that we're expecting these year this year are long period comets. One of the differences between the two is that short period comets have passed the sun a number of times and each time that happens they lose some of the volatiles in them. The long period comets may take 40, 50,000 years before they pass the sun again. So that makes them live longer. Of course on occasion some of them can pass a planet and get captured so that the length of time is much shorter. Halley's comet was also found to have a magnetic field. The first such object that was kind. What this indicates to me is that it must have been part of a larger body maybe almost planetary size. Something that broke apart with the inner core being reserved for a magnetic field. And that relates us to the question of where do comets come from? Some astronomers think they're leftover material from the formation of the solar system not just our solar system but from other locations as well. Kind of like the after births of the solar system. This is the head of comet Halley. About 1910 when it made a close approach to the earth our planet passed right through the tail of the comet. People were really upset. They had done a spectroscopic analysis of the elements inside the comet. And they found that there's arsenic vapors inside the comet. And people thought nah we're gonna die we're all gonna be poisoned because it's gonna filter through the atmosphere. Lucky they didn't have the internet back then. Because there were all kinds of hucksters who made comet pills and they tried to sell them to people. Buy our pills now and you'll live. There were many people who committed suicide because they were worried about dying from this poisoning from the comet. You know some pieces of water that have been collected they appear to have come from comets. Another thing that comets might harbor is bacteria. Not the bacteria we have on earth but bacteria that might float between the planets. Remember the big commotion back in was it 2006 about the piece that came from Mars. When they looked inside with an electron microscope they found what looked like tiny fossil creatures that may have existed on Mars. Well we can use radio telescopes to study interstellar clouds. And we find that they contain stuff like amino acids which are necessary for life. Alcohol definitely necessary for life. And all kinds of important things. So if you have diseases and stuff that can incubate inside or on the surface of comets you know we might have some of our flu strains reaching us periodically. They could easily filter through the atmosphere and make us sick. The black death for instance could have been come from comets. There are three main parts of a comet that will help us understand these objects better. We at the center of a comet is what's called the nucleus looks just like an asteroid only when it's far away from the sun it presents a solid surface to us. Underneath the layer of the solid surface are all kinds of volatiles. As the comet was orbiting the sun it released a lot of dust that spread out and as it left the vicinity of the sun the dust settled down again. There might be a layer of a couple feet thickness covering these volatiles. On occasion an impact or a storm from the sun might release some of these volatiles and it will ignite this furnace on the comet itself. So you can have a solar flare, an impact all kinds of ways to release material from the surface of this particular nucleus. And when that happens here's what the comet looks like. It looks like it's developing an atmosphere, material that's bubbling off the surface but the gravity of the comet is still strong enough to keep to retain these particles. Most of them are about the size of a grain of sand but there are some larger particles too. So this is called the coma. There are some comets that approach the sun not too great of a distance away and leave without developing anything more than a coma. They don't remember anything after that. Okay, as a coma develops eventually the particles exert enough influence so they can escape from the gravitational field of the comet. And when that happens particles from the sun take over. Sunlight has pressure on gas particles and there are protons and neutrons, electrons that come from the sun and they push against this material and they force the coma backwards. So since most of the surface particles are like beach sand, very small particles, the same particles that produce a meteor shower like when you see the Percy's meteor shower in August or the Leonid meteor shower in the latter part of the year, those are all tiny particles that burn up as they speed through the atmosphere. Anything larger than a grain of sand is a sporadic meteor and sporadic meteors come from the asteroid belt. Occasionally you have collisions in the asteroid belt and the particles that break off can be some big chunks, little chunks, they spiral inward and eventually encounter the earth. And these are the objects that can land on the surface. Most asteroids are found between the area of the planet's Mars and Jupiter. This is in the area called the asteroid belt. Sometimes there are collisions in the asteroid belt and that will make the asteroid appear like it's a comet because a coma and a tail develop. So astronomers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Is there a comet or an asteroid? Tastes great, less filling, tastes great, less filling. Watch the Super Bowl. I miss those commercials. So here's a collision that was photographed with a Hubble Space Telescope of two asteroids that collided. You can see material coming off one of the asteroids, forming a tail and elongated object. So this could be called a transition asteroid, or a transition comet. All depends on if this is dust or some kind of volatiles that have been hidden inside the asteroid. This is the third part of a comet, it's a tail. Comets have two tails. One is a dust tail and one is a gas tail. The bluish colored object is the gas tail. It always points directly away from the sun. The dust tail is seen curved to the right and that's produced of these tiny particles that bubble off the surface of the sun. It always points along the direction of the orbit. And as I said before, each time a comet passes the sun, it loses some of the material on its body. Eventually the entire orbit is filled up with these tiny particles of dust. So all Earth has to do is go inside this orbital area and you have a meteor shower. So each of the meteor showers we know of on Earth were produced by polluted comets. Has nothing to do with drunk UWS students. Extra credit for laughing at me. So the two types of dust tail is dust, is dust and gas. One always points away from the sun and it's affected by the pressure of sunlight because sunlight has strong enough to push against gas but it can't push against the little bits of soil. So nucleus, coma and the two tails. There are some comets that actually develop more than two tails and when that happens it's a matter of geometry. You're actually looking at the tails forming a cone. So when you're looking edge on to the cone, it looks like there's two tails, plus one in the center. There was a beautiful comet named West back in 1976 which developed all these different tails that made it a beautiful site as it rose over Lake Michigan and it got a little too close to the sun and it split into four different parts. So when it comes back in about 40,000 years you'll have four individual comets approaching the sun. Okay, before the space age began in the 1950s astronomers used comets for natural space probes. They followed the path of a comet throughout the solar system and they monitored the way the tail behaved. If it waved, they waved back. No, if it waved then they knew that something was affecting it, some unique particle. And for like a gas tail, sunlight can be the culprit but for a dust tail, there had to be a larger particle more powerful and this gave them the idea that there was something called a solar wind. Particles being emanated by the sun. And the first observation of the solar wind was made by American satellites which went into orbit around the sun. Here's comet Morehouse. You can see the swiggles in this tail. You can kind of tell that there are two different effects. There's a short stubby tail and there's one being affected by larger particles. This one is called comet Merckers, 1957. You can see the gas tail and the dust tail. The gas tail is on the left and you can see it being discontinued halfway up. So there must have been a shock wave that carried all this material along. Obviously it's not caused by sunlight. This was comet Brooks. Again, you can see all the squiggling in the tail. And once the space age began, they could make a direct analysis of some of these comets. They could have flybys, bring sample returns back. And in some cases, even use some of the missions a multiple number of times so they could visit various different comets. The first attempt to visit a comet was made by the United States. And this was the ICE mission. S-E-E, ICE, get it? The way the ICE mission worked, it was hovering at a spot between the Earth and the Sun where the gravitational effects cancel themselves out. Now at this particular time, comet Halley was scheduled to come and return to the vicinity of us. And the United States didn't have any money. We were at the end of the Vietnam War and all kinds of stuff was being canceled. We had the two Viking landers on the surface of Mars. And those people want to save $40,000 so they cut them off instead of continuing to send back pictures. I think that's criminal, real waste. So there was an attempt to combine a U.S. mission with a European mission, but the United States canceled out. Again, the bean counters in Washington kept hemming and hawing, trying to cut funding. There was an attempt to donate money by amateur astronomers. They wanted to have an amateur mission go to the comet. But Congress turned that down. They said NASA cannot accept funding. So the United States was left out of it. Instead, some of the scientists decided to use an existing spacecraft. They wanted to see if they could use a gravitational assist of the moon and fling it in the direction of a comet. Not comet Halley, but another comet. And that would then be giving us a feather and a cap. We could say we launched the first spacecraft to a comet. So there are a number of liberation points in the Earth-Moon system where the gravity cancels each other out. This elliptical thing you see here is one of the points between the Earth and the Sun. Once you get into this halo orbit, it'll stay there forever without being disturbed. We have a number of important satellites at that location. And its opposite point at the L2 position is where the successor for the Hubble Space Telescope will be located on the back side of the Moon, basically. So it was decided with the thrusters themselves, they could eject the spacecraft from this halo orbit, fling past the Moon several times, and then make their way to comet Geo-Ko-Bene-Zinner. It could fly through the tail of the object and be close enough to manage a flyby through the tail of Hali, too. And this mission was pretty successful. The problem is there were no cameras on board. So we got no pictures, but we do have information as to the elements that were in the tail of the comet. There was a whole amount of space vehicles that encountered Hali. There were two missions from the USSR. There was one from Europe, and even Japan pitched in and launched two missions. I mentioned before that Hali's comet travels in a retrograde orbit around the solar system. So if you wanna fly next to it, we'll have a slow flyby. You have to have a way of reversing the direction of your spacecraft. Well, the USSR, which is now Russia, decided they were gonna launch their two spacecraft towards Venus. In the vicinity of Venus, they were gonna release some landers which would make down to the surface of the planet. And then they would release some balloons that France had brought along, and the balloons would float through the atmosphere about a third of the way around Venus so they could learn about the atmosphere. And then the mothership would take off towards comet Hali. The European Space Agency also had a mission which was gonna photograph the comet. And Japan actually launched two missions but didn't have any cameras on board. So the United States, in the short end of it, did not send a vehicle to comet Hali. And again, that's a shame. If you ever go to Disneyland in Florida, they've got this Tomorrowland, and they've got this fancy spaceship that's supposed to demonstrate how advanced we're gonna be. When comet Hali comes next time, we're gonna go visit it with a spaceship, and that never happened. So here's a little diagram of the lander which made it down to the surface. And here's the balloons released and the mothership up on top making a flyby of the comet. This is the lander itself. The pressure on the bottom of Venus' atmosphere is so intense that it can crush a vehicle within a half hour. Also, the temperature is hot enough to melt lead. And if that won't kill your spacecraft, there's a layer of sulfuric acid on the bottom of the cloud layers. So Venus is not a nice place to explore or visit. This was one of the first Japanese space vehicles sent into orbit around the sun. It was an engineering test vehicle to see if they could just build it and launch it. It was followed by a second one which was a little more advanced. But again, these two really got that close to comet Hali. It was just a propaganda stunt. The European mission was named Giotto and in order to avoid the dust that was being emanated by the coma of comet Hali, it had to fly backwards with a heat shield protecting it. Then there were cameras inside here with like a periscope mirror shining over the edge so it could get a decent picture of comet. This is the first image that was sent back. It showed that Hali's comet is one of the darkest objects in our solar system. It's kind of potato shaped. The direction towards the sun is on the left. So when the solar particles strike the surface, they produce fissures or something to release some of this interior stuff and that pushes outward to develop a coma and then gets pushed backwards to develop the tail. When the space vehicle flew in front of the comet was a time when they found out that it also has a magnetic field. So the first comet found was a magnetic field. We've now found asteroids that have magnetic fields too. But this was a surprise to scientists. They're still wondering if Pluto is gonna have a magnetic field when the probe flies past it. Another image showing the material being emitted from the nucleus going into our short coma and then forming a tail. Another mission to a comet was called Stardust and it went to a comet called Bild 2, not Wild 2, but Bild 2. This particular comet was thought to come from the Kuiper Belt, which is just beyond the orbit of Neptune. Somehow it got ejected out of the Kuiper Belt and made its way towards Jupiter where it got ejected into its present circular orbit. So scientists wanted to see what this comet was like. They took along a collector, which you see on the bottom here. It's like a solar panel or like a tennis panel. When the bottom container opens, the panel can slide upward and it's got some kind of gelatin inside which can get sticky particles from the comet. This is called aerogel. I've got some in here if you wanna pass it around. Aerogel is the next thing in the building construction industry. It's gonna be used for insulation and for all kinds of different things. The aerogel is, in these little containers, it's kinda like a jello, except when you look at the new product when it's first made, it's kinda like a smoky, hazy thing. But it's got a lot of substance that can hold stuff. It can act like a shuttle heating tile so it can keep the hot and cold separate. It's almost like a styrofoam type of thing. So you can put crayons on top and they won't even melt, even though you're using a Bunsen burner or heating from the bottom. Very good properties. When the mission was launched, scientists almost skipped a heartbeat. They took their first pictures of the moon and the image was completely blurry. They looked like some moisture's gotten on the lens. So they wondered if they'd be able to get any pictures at all. Now, this was pretty common to military satellites. When the early spy satellites were launched, they found that if there was moisture on the lens, they could dissipate it just by having a slight electrical charge over the front end of the lens because this is caused by atomic oxygen being released from the lens. But they kept turning the spacecraft back and forth to the sun to heat it and back to the darkness of space to get these temperature extremes. And finally they were able to burn off the moisture that was on the lens. So the optical problems disappeared. This was the nucleus of the comet as a vehicle approached. You can see it looks a little different. Well, it's a larger nucleus. So the comet has enough mass to pull itself into a circular shape. You see a lot of craters and what looks like putty on the outside. This is a nice picture. There's a sun. There's a nucleus. And there's a little bit of the coma being formed on the side facing the sun. Okay, so the spacecraft folded everything up and released the capsule, brought it back to Earth. And this was the highest speed object ever to enter the atmosphere of the Earth at the time. Even faster than astronauts coming back from the moon. The sample retrieval was over Utah. That seems to be the latest place. There's another comet which appears to be having sunward emission, but it's shaped more like a bowling ball, not a bowling ball, but a bowling pin. So here the capsule landed all intact and they were able to take out some of the aerogel. Here you can see some of the particles entering the gels and like substance. These are actual pieces of the comet. At this particular time, NASA had announced the ability for people to go on the internet. They could use a virtual microscope, the focus back and forth to try to locate and plot some of the hundreds or thousands of particles that were inside this material. They were kind of eager to get the job over with. From the information that they gathered from the comet particles, it appears that when astronomers had suspected all along, is in fact true. The outer comets from the Kuiper Belt just beyond the orbit of Neptune and the Earth cloud, which is on the extreme edge of the solar system, have must have formed in a warmer region. Which means that when the solar system developed, the sun ignited in what they call a Titori phase and that blew a lot of the material in the outer parts of the solar system. So the particles indicate that they formed in a warmer region. Another mission was called Deep Impact, which was launched to the comet temple one. This had a mother ship and a penetrator which you see on the left. For this particular mission, JPL gave us the opportunity of having all our students enter their names for the mission. The names were put on a little thumb drive, which was placed on board the impactor. So we can say we smashed a heck out of that comet. One of the objectives was to see if there was anything future astronauts and astronomers could do to divert the path of a comet if such were ever discovered. So there's all kinds of telescopes watching the probe leave and there's also cameras on board the impactor watching the comet get larger and larger until it hits. The impactor itself was made mostly out of copper. The reason for this was they wanted to make a spectral analysis of the material blown off the comet. And if anything referred to copper, then they knew it came from the impactor. They wouldn't have to worry about such material coming from a comet itself. Here's a mother ship making its flyby and still photographing the impact. This mother ship has been used several other times to study other comets. So they're getting debux words. He is a comet traveling from just outside the orbit of Mars down to Jupiter and back again. And the orbit of the impactor and the mother ship trying to catch up with it. The impactor was actually launched and positioned in front of the comet. So the comet would have to catch up with it. No sense in trying to steer towards the comet. You might miss and then you wouldn't have anything. So here's from the mother ship, the comet getting larger. You can see the coma and a short tail. Now you can see the nucleus. You can see all kinds of land formation, all kinds of ridges, mountains, craters. When this vehicle made a second flyby of the comet, they were able to pick out the crater it made and was about the size of a football stadium. We had set up telescopes outside the campus. We wanted to make some observations before the impact and again after impact to see if there was a difference in the activity. This was on a weekend so we invited the public to come down but nobody showed up, just our students. Here's the impact itself from the mother ship and this is what happened. It was the same weekend that the acuity building used for igniting their lightsaber into the sky. So we had light pollution just about where the comet was going to be appearing. Some of my students got so upset they went down to talk to management and they say, why do you use this to us? And they said, well, there's a law that if there's a flag flying above a place, it has to be illuminated at all times at night. So they fell volunteer to go down with flashlights and shine flashlights on the flag tongue and cheek but it didn't work either. Hubble Space Telescope showed that there was indeed a change in brightness before and after. Okay, Deep Space One, I believe was the last, one of the most recent missions to Comet Morelle. It used an ion drive, the same kind of drive that's currently in the asteroid belt. Investor getting series investor. You can burn these things for years at a time but you get very low thrust. So it's approaching the space vehicle, hunting it down and this one looks kind of like a bowling pin again. As we approach, you can see a little more detail and again, I wanna remind you that short period commas come from the Kuiper Belt, which is just beyond the orbit of Neptune. Pluto travels in and out of the Kuiper Belt during its progress around the sun and that's one of the reasons why it was demoted from planet Earth. Usually there's a collision in some of the Kuiper Belt objects and they'll send a comet sunward or Neptune can perturb some of the objects and send them towards the sun. Long period comets come from the Oort cloud which is halfway between our sun and nearby stars. Okay now, some of you may wonder how do astronomers know that sporadic meteors come from the asteroid belt? You know, the random flashes you see in the sky once in a while. Quick, make a wish, make a wish. Well, in the 1950s when the space age started, our government spent a lot of bucks, big bucks buying these Baker and Uncameras. They're extremely fast. They're like 1.0 or 1.2 for fastness, effectiveness. With that, within a few seconds you can photograph all the stars you can see with the naked eye. Later on they went on the market and you could buy them for a song. But inside these refractor type cameras was a rotating shutter with a blade constantly turning. So as a picture was being made of a certain part of the sky, if you saw a shooting star or something flipped by there would be a break in the path. And if you know how fast the shutter is moving, you can calculate how fast the object is moving too. So astronomers know how much of a speed an object would have to have if it's coming from say the asteroid belt towards the earth. That's a fairly easy procedure to calculate. But each of these dashes is caused by the shutter. That's also how they tried to determine some of the early satellites, their speed and stuff. Then we have a satellite called SOHO between the earth and the sun. It's been up there for quite a while and it's discovered over a thousand comets. You can go on the SOHO website and periodically some amateur will say, I found a new comet. Well, you can't have your name connected with that particular comet. But you might be lucky enough to have one that comes out of the range of the sun and you can see it in the evening sky. So this is what SOHO looked like when it was being launched. It has four different cameras in wide angle, regular angle, white light and infrared, I believe. And it constantly observes the sun. And it's again got this halo orbit between the earth and the sun. So if there's a strong solar wind coming from the sun, we've got instant warning because it can send messages back to us saying, hey, watch for northern lights. Watch for effects on your electronics. So here's one of the images, the sun is blocked out and here's a comet heading towards the sun. Look at the bent in the tail, that's a gas tail. So it's moving so fast that the actual tail is being bent by sunlight. When the comet came around the other side, it didn't reappear. So scientists think it collided with the sun's surface. Here's another image, the wide angle one. Up on top you can see a comet heading down towards the sun. That one disappeared too. So there have been a number of comets that have struck the sun, apparently, with no ill effect on the sun. Then you have the current mission that's on its way to a comet. This was launched by Europe. Again, it uses solar electric power and it's going to bring back a sample return from an actual comet. On the way it made two flybys of asteroids, this was Lutisha, which is the largest asteroid flown past so far, and Steins, which is just a smaller object. It's going to release a lander which will settle down on the surface and bring back a sample to Earth. Notice the spindly arms and legs because there's very little gravity on the surface of such a body. Little crane coming down and picking objects up. Okay, so let's get back to comet Ison, which we started with. In general, comets can have up to three names connected to them in terms of the discoverer. If there was a team that discovered, three names can be connected to it, like Schumacher-Levy-Nein and so forth. There might be independent discoveries within minutes of each other because when you discover such an object, you have to send it into the International Astronomical Union and they will determine which name gets attached to any of these objects. Well, comet Ison was discovered by two Russian astronomers and their name isn't connected to the comet. Instead, they connected the network that they used the telescopes from to name it. And that's the International Scientific Optical Network, I-S-O-N, that's where Ison comes from. Comet Ison, once it was discovered, the orbit was calculated and it was found that it's one of the sun grazers. There seems to be a whole bunch of comets that are sun grazers, which belong to the Kreuz group, as it's called. Apparently, the Kreuz group was part of a larger object which broke apart sometimes in the distant past. And periodically, some of these objects are still coming by. And the first indication was that it was gonna smack dead on with the sun. What would happen when Ikea Zecki appeared in 1966? 1966, it was also scheduled to hit the sun. That was a sun grazer, too. But once they were able to finalize the orbit, they found that it was gonna be close, but no cigar. So this one is gonna come less than the diameter of the sun to our native body in the sky. And that might be close enough to break it up. So when it leaves the sun, it can be in the number of pieces. That's something that they're watching for now. There was also a satellite called Solwind, or P78-1, which was an excellent sun observatory. It photographed many comets that approached the sun and some of them hitting it and stuff. But this was shot down during the Reagan administration when they were testing their Star Wars concept. They launched a rocket and just blew it out of the sky. There was some ill-feeling among astronomers when that happened because it was in perfect working condition. After it was destroyed, all we had left was Solomax, which you may remember. It was one of the first satellites rescued by the space shuttle and put it into a higher orbit and then left to decay when it came back. So the question now is, where is this range comet from? All the comets we have cataloged travel in either elliptical or parabolic orbits, which means that they're bound for the gravity of the sun. This particular comet is only the second one I know of that is approaching in a hyperbolic orbit. A hyperbolic orbit is one of escape. If you have an outward hyperbolic orbit like the Voyager, Pioneer, and the Pluto probes, they're never going to come back. But if you have an inbound hyperbolic orbit, it means that it's coming from another solar system. So it's entering our solar system from interstellar space. Where was it formed? What star was it formed with? What kind of views has it seen? Were there planets around the star? It must have made several trips around the parent star. What kind of stories could it tell? These are all interesting things that astronomers hope to find out. And one thing that's really interesting is that the first indication is that the comet has kind of a greenish color. There was one other comet with a hyperbolic orbit that approached us about two years ago. It also had kind of a greenish color. So is there some material between the stars that produces this kind of coloring? That's something that they're looking at too. So comet Lovejoy was a photograph from the space station. This is actually the edge of the earth with the comet poking up. This one survived its close trip to the sun. The same year, again in 2011, we had a comet called Elenin, and that broke up and it got too close to the sun. This was the object that they were talking about, the Mayans causing a destruction because it's gonna hit the earth and all that stuff. Well, we showed them, didn't we? Okay, five minutes, that's good timing. Anybody else wanna have a picture of Saturn? If anybody is interested, I can send you an email message whenever we're gonna observe some of these comets. We'll have some telescopes set up straight out here. And hopefully, this next one won't fizzle out. You know, right, except you're in my class in spring. And well, this first comet, I'll be able to tell you in class, but in the fall, you might not be in a class, so I can still get word to you. They're talking about maybe by Thanksgiving, real long time, with a telescope. Probably October is what I saw lately. And if it does become visible, it might be as bright as the full moon, which has a magnitude of what? Minus 16, really bright. So you should easily be able to see it during the daytime skies. Oh, I love to hail bomb. What's that? I love to hail bomb, it's too easy. Yeah. So what was the magnitude of it? How will this one- Well, I was never able to see it during the daytime. But at Lakeland, we could easily see the two tails. And I would say it was a minus negative, maybe minus one. But if this works out the way it's scheduled, it should be much overshadowing that. I would suspect it was part of a larger body at one time, just like some of the asteroids that I found with magnetic fields. There's part of the center maybe, and something exploded, could be. Just like the moon Ghana made, which orbits around Jupiter, it's the only moon with a magnetic field so far. And they detected apparently salt water under the surface. And that's being used to generate electricity and the magnetic field. It's a long period. NASA figures I have is 20 to 40,000 years. And... Is it deterring the time frame for ice then? If it's better before or after the October, November observation will it come again? That's a good question. Because it's in an escape orbit now. It's going fast enough so it could leave the solar system again. But I think personally, this would be a good time to prepare like a cluster of instruments to crash land on it. So if they survive, this could be an interstellar spaceship for us. It could send back information because our spaceships would never go that fast. No, that's just my idea. Collections? No, that was that Aline that I mentioned before. The one that disintegrated. Right, it was supposed to swing around the Earth by disintegrated before that time span could happen. In other words, if it didn't disintegrate, it would still be approaching this area. Awfully close to the sun. The sun could divert it in any direction and you never know what might happen. Good question. Right, like the comet that struck Jupiter, they were wondering if it was going to be loose enough like a dirty snowball so it would just melt as it entered the atmosphere or if it was going to leave blemishes on the face. Again, for that impact, we had telescopes set up where the observatory used to be, Bruce Grover's Observatory. And we had the public asking, do we look through it? We didn't know if we'd be able to see anything as it was. We didn't see anything but there were large blemishes on the planet. So apparently they were all solid bodies. And one of them, when it impacted the cloud layers of Jupiter, it interacted with the magnetic field and it followed the field lines so that there were northern and southern lights on the planet. So maybe this had a core with a magnetic field too. Maybe ice time was projected off of a, like other solar system that I may have left. Would it be some way of projecting? It was traveled in as to where it came from. And then the word that star may have been back to one or two million years ago as it came off of that star. Possibly. There's some talk that the Sun might have been part of a cluster that was formed from a large galactic cluster. And that would have caused all the stars inside to spread outward. But the Sun would have orbited the center of the Milky Way galaxy at sea of, once every 250 million years, and it's about seven billion years. So it would have gone around about 21 times already. And during that time, you couldn't tell one from the other. And who knows how long the comet was in the solar space. That's a good question. From another angle. That's a good question. The Kuiper Belt is like a donut that goes around the Sun. And the Oort Cloud, which is composed of material that was ejected to that location, was initially also kind of a flat plane. But because the plane of our solar system and the plane of the Milky Way are almost 60 degrees to each other, these objects have been torn into a spherical shape. So it's a spherical cloud now. And they argued for that because the comets are coming from all different directions. So it's gotta be a spherical shape. And in regards to your answer, it's hard to tell if this was a star above the plane of the galaxy or below or on the same level. But I'm sure they're trying to figure something out. But on the same plane. When all the planets formed, that it was formed out of a disk which kind of flattened out. Like when you're on a chair and you're spinning, you can do this without getting sick or like an ice skater when they hold out their arms. Eventually the cloud starts like this, but the centrifugal force pulls the center out. So you have a flattened plane and that's where all the planets move in. Except for Pluto. That's one of the reasons why it was demoted. Because it was 17 degrees off the plane of the other planets. It could have collided with something in the Kuiper Belt or it could have been an escaped moon from some place. But there are all these possibilities. Now we just realized that Pluto is a dog, not a planet. It's just my idea, I don't know. You could build like a solar sail and just sail it into the path of the comet. That might be the fastest way of doing it. And then just let it collide with it. I'm sure there are other propulsive techniques you could come up with. Like a solar plasma, which kind of acts like a cushion. One thing you don't want to do is destroy the instruments. And not that thing, you know. Right. That's one of the things. That's one of the things they're watching for now too. There was some talk of building a, like an automated observatory on the lunar surface so it can scan in all directions from the moon. This thing is the moon is one fourth of the diameter of the earth so there's a less chance of that happening. But it still could. Yep. It didn't hit any satellites, did it? Have you heard anything? All these interesting things we're talking about. I can back out into space and all of our planets. It could break up as it gets too near the sun. And then what do we see? I don't know, are there many pieces that break? Like this one, let me go back to this one slide. It showed the, one of the previous comets breaking up into about half a dozen pieces. See? A whole swarm, like shooting a shotgun off, it's possible if it comes too close. Well, if this is a plane of the planets, the comet is coming from the top and it's swinging real close to the sun and then going back out. So it's not really coming close to any of the planets here. When they say it's about as far away as Jupiter, like Jupiter would be about over here. And it's not really going by Jupiter, it's still pretty far away. Normally, like with Schumacher Levy 9, which struck Jupiter, it formed a string of pearls as they call it. Instead of scattering in all different locations, they followed each other, each in its own orbit around Jupiter, but they ended up in basically the same place while Jupiter just orbited or rotated underneath it. Maybe. Yeah. Judges, what's the location where it's gonna go wrong? Little sun, when is that gonna get more exact? When will a person go exactly to that? Good question, good question. Maybe they'll find additional observations that were made before the two Russians found it and they'll be able to add that in so they can refine the measurements a little bit. But I'm sure they're, now it's been found, a lot of astronomers are monitoring it and tracking it. And it shouldn't take too long to find out some more details. I don't think so. They might be mad that they're not named for it. There's other of the two comments that I mentioned before that also was named after the place that discovered it, not after the people, the one that's coming next month. Okay, I guess 10 after eight. I could stay here all night and talk. We have been working on this for a very long time. It's been a long time, but we've been working on this. It's been a short time. But it's been a long time. And it's been a great time for us. And it's been a great day. I'm sure it's been a great day. But, yeah, we're not sure if we're gonna be able to find the data that we're gonna get out of here. But, yeah, it's been a great day. I'm sure that maybe, maybe the right side of the map is gonna be able to find out