 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for April 2022. I am Steph, astronomer John Insworth for Cherrywood Observatory, volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory in Berthad for Longmont Public Media. In the news our standard James Webb Telescope update. So it is doing great, still getting ready to start taking scientific images. They are cooling the instruments that need to operate at nearly absolute zero so we can see deep into the infrared part of the spectrum. The instruments are not cold then the telescope is basically making its own light source locally that would make it blind to the signal that we're trying to see back to the earlier times of the universe. So it's heading for negative 223 degrees Celsius that's negative 369.4 Fahrenheit so yeah it's pretty amazing it's only 12 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero. So the instrument question is called the mid infrared instrument and it is getting cooler and cooler and cooler. They are taking a look at the alignment of the mirrors. This is a test for an evaluation image and all the little lens shaped things around the picture here are distant galaxies. Speaking of distant galaxies using ground-based observatories, the Subaru Telescope, Vista Telescope, the UK infrared telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, so one up in space. We have now a new record holder for the most distant we suspect galaxy. So this is a thousand two hundred hours of observing time. My goodness and is this red little guy right here? The reason it's red is because at that great distance the universe is expanding throughout all the universe and the light from that galaxy is being expanded as well as it travels more spaces appearing in the light path and so to our instruments our eyes when you make a wavelength longer you make a redder we call that red shift. This is expected or suspected to be 13.5 billion light years away and that it came into existence only 330 million years after the big bang. So it's pretty amazing and be the earliest supermassive black hole as well. So this is turned out to be a little fuzzy but taking a look from the present going back in time you have the big bang itself you have the time when the universe is so dense and hot that light could not travel and then you have the edge of the cosmic microwave background radiation where the universe did become transparent to light just like light getting out of the center of the Sun it takes a long time hundreds of thousands of years to make it out from the center to the surface and then it leaps free from what we say is the surface and gets to the earth in just eight and a half minutes. The truth is you can fly an airplane about 10% down the radius of the earth if you could stand the heat because that's about where one earth atmospheric pressure is found. So here it is there's the most distant galaxy confirmed to date and this one goes way back into this time period so we'll see if it is true. All right change of pace here we are looking at using astronomy to see the interior secret voids inside the pyramid so what they're gonna do is bring move on detectors and place them around the base of the pyramid and let cosmic rays slime into the Earth's atmosphere because they're doing that anyways and part of the scatter of particles that comes out of that, muons can penetrate through stone like this vastly better than x-rays can't go that far so they are going to slowly build up a high resolution picture of the interior structures kind of crazy. Big star parties a lot of stuff is coming back now so we have Pensacola, Florida a couple of them we got Tucson, Astronomy, Thessalonica, Texas star parties the big one in the end of April, bootleg, spring star party in the end of April as well. May Pensacola repeats with a couple more public observing times. Here's a extra 101 note this time is talking about the nature of light we use light a lot to see what the universe is doing because light can travel throughout the entire universe and get to our sensors and our eyes. Well there's a technical definition but let me break that down so light is a transverse which means it's got things that are right angles for each other electromagnetic wave that can be seen by the typical human eyes so it's actually a tiny slice of the sensors we'll see in just a moment but it's actually much longer much shorter wavelengths are all part of the electromagnetic spectrum like the light that we see so they can travel through a vacuum composed of waves well I am also particles because everything is subatomic is both particle and wave in nature these particles represent quantum of light or other electric magnetic radiation they have zero rest mass so there's two ways of making light come and come out of matter if something is greater than 800 Kelvin which is extremely cold it will give off electromagnetic radiation and also if an atom is has this electrons boosted to a higher orbital not going to get into that detail and then the electrons fall back down again you get luminescence and you see that in glow in the dark paint toys and compounds and also fireflies and things like that so it travels at the speed C which meters per second is 299792458 meters per second or 186,000 miles per second that is in a vacuum if you start putting air through other media like sorry light through the media like air or water glass it does slow down the skies above your back yard while we start and end this month also with a new moon just like last time so a blue new moon it's not really a thing April 9th is our first quarter April 16th for a full and third quarter is April 23rd and the evening there's not much to see Mercury is coming rapidly up out of the Sun as the month goes on so at first it's not really there mid month it's about an hour after sunset you can still see it and by the end of the month will be a little bit better than that at the middle of the month Uranus is also lonely southwest sorry and setting about an hour after sunset so here they are really low neither of them are very bright or easy to see so much of a show and at midnight we don't have anything up you're gonna see in a backyard telescope or with eyes or binoculars but everything is in the morning sky so we have Saturn rising about three hours before sunrise Mars about two and a half Venus about two hours and I've seen about one and a half and Jupiter about one hour should be one hour before sunrise who edits these things so here they are all because of the tilt of the ecliptic that the planets in the morning sky are all very low in the south southeastern sky so but they're down there and it's quite a show if you have a clear southeast horizon we start the month with the Sun rising at 645 a.m. going all the way back to 6 a.m. at the end of the month sunset backs from 724 to 753 we go from 12 hours roughly 40 minutes to an hour 10 minutes more light by the end of the month the Sun's altitude about the southern horizon at local noon gains 10 degrees things really change quickly in March and April our feature object this month going to take a look at a constellation that's just coming up towards the highest point in the sky so the zenith and the meridian at sunset this is called m44 the beehive cluster also known as known as Presipi which is Latin for manger it's an open cluster in the constellation of cancer one of the nearest star clusters to earth under dark skies you can actually see a small nebulous object is one of the naked eye so great with binoculars and fantastic with a telescope in low power so here is the right after sunset here's the southern point in the sky you go up and a little bit to the left is this dim y-shaped constellation it's ahead of the sickle of Leo the lion which is very obvious right in here near the junction of the y upside down y is the star cluster your Colorado observing challenge is going to be the Lyria meteor shower go sit out in a lawn chair in the night of the round April 21st and look towards the constellation of Lyra the liar this is rising the northeast sky after ten o'clock so you don't have to stay up till three in the morning like some meteor showers this is debris left over from the comet C 1861 G1 thatcher and the radiant point that all the little meteors seem to be coming away from is up here to the upper right of the constellation of Lyra and the bright star Vega it started me then some year along about this month everything is starting to come back on long-run astronaut local society in April 21st at 630 the visible broadband imager of the Daniel K. Inoki solar telescope this is by Friedrich Lordger they do have a observing night plan with Boulder County open space you need to register and I'll give you the location but it starts now at 715 little township observatory is reopening there doing public nights yet but you can make reservations and to go to the telescope and get a private talk about astronomy and topics like that asks and that can vaccinations are committed but not required as to spark tomorrow observatory is open Friday 30 Sunday Monday limited to 12 people see their site for guidelines northern Colorado Astronomical Society is sticking with video webcast doctor Angela Stickel double asteroid redirection test is the topic April 7th at 615 this planetarium is reopening April and it seems to be that they are just back to normal I don't see any restrictions on their site so maybe look closer than I did and see if you can see anything but I think you can go to enjoy it and their observatory evenings are open again April 1st 815 and 22nd from 8 to 10 check out Colorado edu slash SB and finally our historical missteps in astronomy in about 30 seconds we're gonna look at Percival Lowell and the canals on Mars so kind of began with Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was director of the Milano Observatory and he drew pictures of canals on Mars now he called them canal a which properly means channels so he was not implying himself that these were artificial canals but Percival Lowell took it and ran with it 1893 to about 1908 he studied Mars a bunch made lots of drawings this is just a few sketches over here on the lower right he published three books of these Mars in 1895 Mars and its canals 1906 Mars as in a boat of life 1908 he came up with a whole story of a water star civilization that was desperately clinging to getting water from the polar caps down to where the cities were and like that so I think he also got excited about stuff happening on Venus as well but he really popularized this belief that Mars sustained intelligent life forms from this we get the war of the worlds both the original radio broadcast by Mercury theater and Orson Welles and movies and everything else from that Mariner for flew by Mars in 1965 and saw craters but no canals kind of putting the end to that they even thought that some of the big dark lava fields or vegetation because of the dust storms that come and go without the vegetation is going through seasonal changes there's a real picture of Mars today that is a big canyon it's much deeper than the Grand Canyon and would stretch completely across the United States from L.A. to New York if any of your additions and corrections like that contact me at genentsworthagmail.com this has been the skies over Colorado for April 2022 keep looking up