 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for July 2022. I'm Steph Astronomer John Anzworth of the Cherrywood Observatory Volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory for Longmont Public Media this month coming from the Red Feather Lakes Library Astronomy news James Webb Space Telescope is still at the top of the first page of the paper as it has been for months and next month We finally will get Images to show but the first images are coming in now to scientists NASA is not going to show these until July 12th But the NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said the first light images are just fantastic Thomas Zaburchin at NASA Said that he was moved nearly to tears by these images everything's working fine the main instrument is cooled down to its Operational temperature and we are just having to wait for a few more weeks Citizen scientists detect dusty discs So this is an image actually taken by the European Southern observatories At a kind of large millimeter and seven millimeter array These gaps and these dusty infrared image are probably where planets are forming Now a long-running program called Zooniverse that helped find unusually shaped galaxies and things like that using citizen scientists Have come out with disc detective to you can go create your own account and it'll feed you images and you get to Tell the system whether you see stars that have dusty images like this Again, the human eye and brain can outperform Algorithms at this point and they need your help so in the past 30,000 members of the public have Found over 50,000 disc candidates, so pretty pretty big project and they sure could use your eyes Wildfire threatened the KIP peak National Observatory in June fired climbed the slopes of the KIP peak mountain June 16 By June 11th 27,000 acres Had burned as of the 22nd This is located 55 miles southwest of Tucson south of Phoenix about 110 miles And from that mountain you can see both light domes of those cities There are 20 optical telescopes to radio dishes up there The one of the optical telescopes is a solar telescope and it's been in operation for a very long time Some of the outbuildings were destroyed a dormitory was destroyed I got some observing time at this observatory back in the late 80s and I would I stayed in that dorm so that's kind of sad Big star parties this month of the 29th annual Nebraska Scott star party July 24th to the 30th the Oregon star party is July 26. Delafane was a big famous one It's been going for a very long time in Vermont Starting July 28th and the Badlands Festival in Rapid City, South Dakota Also in that last few days of July August has some good shows coming up, too Your Astro 101 lesson for this month is SETI. What is SETI? It's the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the roots of the skull. They're back to Nikola Tesla in 1896 he suggested delisting the signals in the solar system for radio Radio was a new thing back then and he thought he could detect signals in 1899 in a station He set up outside of Colorado Springs. I think the remnants of that station is still visible Frank Drake in 1960 from Cornell University Launched the first modern SETI experiment something called Project Osma One of the notable highlights over the years was When Ohio State University using the big-ear radio telescope picked up the wow signal of this output from the antenna was printed on paper and so you can see here the Blanks or ones a very minimal signal and then it goes up through nine and then goes into the alphabet So eq uj is a very strong signal We have repeatedly looked back at this location in the sky and have not seen anything there Later the Aerocebo and then the Allen Array Joined in the Aerocebo of course is now no more Breakthrough listen is in operation fast the very large array in New Mexico The UCLA run Green Bank telescope also contributing at times to data Used to be that you could use your computer to again do citizen science Lying your computer CPU times to look through data at SETI at home That has been retired right now. They don't have enough data to feed the system, but the Boink Distributed Computing network is doing all sorts of things like protein folding Experiments and working with general relativity modeling. So you can still you use your computer for science You go to SETI net To see what is still in operation The sky above your backyard this month in Colorado Got the moon beginning of the month so on 4th of July you will have a Little sliver in the western sky if it's clear it ought to add nicely to fireworks But July 6th, it's the first quarter mid-month 13th is our full moon Third quarter is July 20th and July 28th. The very end of the month is new Remember two years ago at the end of the month Halloween. That was the full moon. So we've now gone halfway through the phases of the moon in progression For the planets this month really nothing visible in the evening sky Right after sunset. There's some Kuiper Belt objects labeled on the software there, but Nothing really there About 10 p.m. Around midnight You'll have the planet Saturn two hours up into the eastern sky and Neptune is rising just about midnight So there is Saturn over here the moon everything very low at this time and here is Neptune just coming up In the morning sky, that's where everybody is located. Saturn rises about eight hours before sunrise Neptune about six and a half Mars about five hours before Jupiter two and a half hours before sunrise Uranus and Venus two hours before sunrise So they make a nice close pair We have Mercury too close to the Sun for much of this month So that's a traffic jam in the morning sky, but when we get Four five six months from now a lot of these plans will be in the evening sky So it will be really great in the fall The Sun for this Month we have sunrise And the first going from 535 a.m. backing up to 558 a.m. And the sunset going from 831 to 813 So we lose about 45 minutes of daylight through this month for sunspot activity the 25th solar cycle is Underway and we are getting a lot more solar activity than we are expecting or predictive value was about 40 We're getting about 96 97 sunspots Running up through May there's always a month behind And here's a image of the Sun at the beginning of the month We have a sunspot coming around the eastern them here sunspot about to Vanish on the other side. We have evidence of some large sunspots Going crazy on the backside because we can see coronal mass ejections using the Soho space telescope Your feature object for this month actually two globular clusters in the constellation of Hercules in previous months We looked at Archean Tarcturus off the handle of the Big Dipper There's our tourists right there Constellation of Boates right there and then down below to the lower left is the keystone of Hercules zoom in here keystone looks like that There's the broad shoulders of Hercules one arm up here one arm here narrow waist here and M13 is over here on this side of his body It's a pair of magnitude is 5.8 so on a really dark night if you've got good eyes You should be able to see a tiny fuzzy patch there That is actually a cluster of stars about 145 light years in diameter over 22,000 light years away Going up here where the head of Hercules would be is another very nice globular cluster This is I'm searching here. Here's M92 down here. It's a little dimmer At magnitude 6.4. It's a little more distant and a slightly smaller 109 light years in diameter Your Colorado observing challenge for this month are the southern Delta Aquarids meteor shower So at the very end of the month July 29th to 30th all night long you can go out and Look to the southeast at first and then to the south and the southern sky Right here to the left of Capricorn near Aquarius these meteors come from a comet the real crop about 9,500 years ago and This one comet 96p and that holds Is the one that has the orbital path that we are going through that is littered with all these little rocks and bits of dust that are burning up in the atmosphere this year the Meteor shower is very close to the new moon. So you should be able to see even the fainter meteors Astronomy events near a long month this month The Longmont Astronomical Society does not yet have their July speaker Posted so you'll have to go check their website on that but they do have their star party night at the rabbit Mountain observing location July 8th running from 8 p.m. To 10 I have to get later and later as the Days get longer little Thompson Observatory and birth it is closed for its normal July maintenance They will be picking up again with group meetings. No word yet on Bringing back the open house nights on the third Friday SS Park Memorial Observatory has a Open no open public nights either, but they are still accepting 12 people or less reservations for Friday Saturday Sundays and Mondays see their websites for that information Northern Colorado Astronomical Society July 7th via webcast will have dr. Paul Bennett talking about star clusters The Fisk planetarium at University Colorado Boulder has reopened mid-June Check their site for show times There's a lot of shows they have running now and the observatory on campus will have observing nights on July 1st 8 15th 22nd and 29th and August 5th And finally the historical missteps in astronomy for this month is a concept called modified Newtonian gravity Vera Rubin Working at the Carnegie Institute in the 60s and 70s was taking a look at the Speed the galaxies rotate and other astronomers were taking a look at the speed the galaxies move through clusters of galaxies And they found that they are moving too quickly Galaxies should fly apart and galaxy clusters should fall apart very quickly, but they don't and so It looked like some other material some unseen matter now called dark matter because we don't know what it is Is present to keep everything held together like that dark matter Also does not interact with electromagnetic Light or energy and so it is doesn't block anything from behind. It's completely transparent But also we don't know what that is We're looking at subatomic particles and a lot of different theories to try to explain that and don't have a good Hold on that yet because of this ambiguity some astronomers are Trying to throw away the idea of dark matter being a solution to these This mass problem for instance our galaxy has about ten times the amount of dark matter by mass Then it does visible stars dust planets and things like that So they have come up with the idea of Modifying Newton's laws saying on a large scale you need a different equation to explain Gravity there's a lot of problems that arise with that For one one of the best Monde modified Newtonian gravity models Actually has to put some dark matter back in to still explain the motions of things on the largest scales So tests are being proposed to try to see if we can do without the concept of dark matter While other astronomers and physicists are looking for what duck matter might actually be If you have any additions or corrections suggestions, please email me at Johninsworth at gmail.com This has been the skies over Colorado July 2022 Keep looking up