Astronomy

An introduction to Astronomy for

the BSA Astronomy Badge

Part 1: The inner Solar System

Our Sun, Sol, is a star at the center of a planetary system we call the
Solar system. So as the Sun slowly sets in the valley, burning
everything, let us begin our odyssey.
If you took a photograph of the Sun from the same location at noon every day
for a year, remembering not to look directly at it, you would see it trace a
path in the sky. It reaches the very top on the summer solstice in June and
the very bottom at the winter solstice in December. This bowling pin shape
is called an Analemma. The Sun is on the rise in this graphic.
The Sun is ¾ hydrogen, ¼ helium and a trace of other elements. With properly
filtered telescopes, we can see sunspots, yellow in this photo, magnetic storms on
the Sun that we see as dark spots, because they are cooler than the rest of the Sun.
In this photo we can see a solar prominence jumping from one sunspot to another.
 The core of the sun is where the nuclear reactions take place. The energy leaves
through the radiative zone. This energy is carried by rising and falling hot gases in
the convection zone to the photosphere, the visible layer from which the radiation and
light escapes through the hot gases of the chromosphere.
 Here we can see just how much larger than the Earth and Jupiter, the largest
planet in the Solar System, the Sun is. You could fit 100 Earths across the Sun.
 The Sun is just an average sized middle aged, 4 billion years old, star. Here we see
how the Sun compares to some of the larger and younger and hotter stars we see in the
night sky. Sirius is the brightest star, other than the Sun, that we can see from Earth.
 Here we see Spica, the largest star from the previous slide and with Earth’s orbit for
comparison, next to some of the largest stars. Our Sun may someday grow to the size
of Betegeuse ( yes, it’s pronounced “Beetlejuice”) but don’t pack your bags just yet.
This will not happen for a few billion years, so we have plenty of time. The Sun is too
small to become an exploding nova or supernova. Notice how it is mostly the older and
cooler red stars than the younger and hotter blue stars that grow to the super large
sizes.
 What happens when a star goes supernova? Here is a Hubble image of the supernova
remnant that we saw explode in 1987. The debris that is forming a circle in the center
of this image is what was blown off by the exploding star. This will eventually form a
nebula, a cloud of gas and dust.
A solar eclipse occurs when our moon crosses in front of the Sun. Eclipse are so awe
inspiring that battles have stopped because of them. During an eclipse is the only
time we can look at the Sun without severely damaging our eyes. Here we can see
some of the flares that can disrupt our communication and power grids. The Sun’s
energy controls our weather by heating our atmosphere, evaporating our water and
driving the winds.
Here we see the shadow of a solar eclipse crossing the surface of the Earth. Eclipses can
last from a under a minute to up to 5 minutes, depending on the orbit of the Moon
and your position on the Earth.
In this graphic we can see the Umbra, the shadow of a total eclipse and the
Penumbra, the shadow of a partial eclipse. A solar eclipse will occur every
year somewhere on the Earth but the next total solar eclipse for North
America will not occur until August of 2017.
Here we can see the paths of solar eclipses until 2025. Notice that in April of
2024 that an eclipse will occur in this area and last several minutes.
The inner planets of the Solar System are the rocky planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth and
Mars. The word planet is from the Greek word for wanderer. Only Mercury and Venus
show phases like our Moon because they orbit the Sun inside of Earth’s orbit.
Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun looks very much like our moon. It
circles the Sun in 88 days at a distance between 28.6 and 43.3 million
miles.
This is one of the latest images of Mercury, taken by the Messenger space probe
in October of 2008. The crater in the center of the image is called Kuiper.
Venus is nearly a twin of the Earth except it is only 67 million miles from the Sun. It takes
Venus 243 days to circle the Sun. It’s surface is often compared to the Bible’s Hell.
The temperature is 475°C and the air pressure is almost 100 times that of Earth.
These photos of the surface of Venus where taken by a probe that was
crushed and melted soon afterwards by Venus’s atmosphere.
The Earth is the third planet from the Sun. It’s average distance from the Sun is 93
million miles or 1 Astronomical Unit (AU). The Earth revolves around the Sun in
365.24 days. This photo of the Earth was taken from Apollo 17.
When a strong solar wind from the Sun hits the Earth’s protective magnetosphere we get
the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australius, the northern and southern lights.
The northern lights have been seen as far south as southern Florida on rare occasions.
One of the strongest Aurora in this area was on the night of March 13, 1989. In
this film you can see how an aurora appears to dance across the sky.
The Moon is Earth’s only natural satellite. It is roughly ¼ the size of the Earth.
In this view of a ‘Full Moon” we can see not only “The man in the Moon”
but also the “Victorian lady reading a book” and “The rabbit”.
The Moon is kept in orbit around the Earth by two forces. The Moon’s inertia
and the Earth’s gravity. If there was no gravity from the Earth, the Moon
would move away from the Earth and orbit the Sun. If there was no
inertia, the Earth’s gravity would pull the Moon into the Earth.
The Moon orbits the Earth in 27.3 days but goes from full moon to full moon (a
synodic month) in 29.53 days at a distance roughly between 221,000 and
253,000 miles. In this graphic, the outer circle is the Moon’s orbit and
shows each phase. Inside the squares is what we see from Earth.
 Here we see some of the more noticeable features of the Moon, such as Mare
Crisium, the 340 mile wide right eye of “The Man in the Moon”. Mare Tranquillitatis,
the Sea of Tranquility, is where humans first walked on the Moon. Copernicus is an
57 mile wide, 800 million year old impact crater.
Mars the “Red Planet” has long been of interest to the people of the Earth. It ‘s
surface has a great abundance of oxidized iron, rust, giving it the red color
it is famous for. Mars’s core has solidified, weakening it’s magnetosphere
to the point that the solar winds have blown it’s atmosphere away into
space, leaving it uninhabitable for humans.
This series of photos shows how Mars seems to go backwards in the
sky. This is called “retrograde motion”. This caused astronomers
many problems in trying to find Mars’s orbit.
It was not until German mathematician Johannes Kepler discovered
that Mars had a highly elliptical orbit that the problem of Mars orbit
was solved. Mars orbits the Sun in 687 days at a distance between
128 and 155 million miles. It’s day last 24.6 hours. The diagram
above shows Kepler’s 2nd Law: that a planet in a elliptical orbit
sweeps out areas of equal size in equal time. The shaded areas are
of equal size and it takes the planet the same amount of time to
move from A to B as it does from C to D.
This photo of Mars, taken by one of the orbiter’s, shows a dust cloud from an
avalanche of ice and dust along sheer cliffs near the north pole. The cloud is
about 590 feet across, and about 625 feet from the base of the cliff.
These graphics show the uniqueness of Mars. The left photo shows how
Olympus Mons a extinct volcano on Mars that is 15 miles high, nearly three
times taller than Mount Everest, would fill the entire state of Arizona. On
the globe to the right you can see Mars with Olympus Mons on the far left.
On the lower central section of Mars is Valles Marinaris, a valley that would
stretch from New York to California if it was on Earth.
Mars has two moons, Deimos and Phobos. These moons are actually
captured asteroids that happened to get too close to Mars. Phobos
speeds around Mars in only 7 hours and 39 minutes. While the smaller
Deimos takes 30 hours and 18 minutes to orbit Mars.
Asteroids mainly are located in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. In this
graphic we see the orbit of the asteroid Ceres as the gray ellipse. All of the
unlabeled white dots in this graphic are also asteroids.
If we view the orbits of many of these other asteroids, we now see that most
of these do orbit between Mars and Jupiter. These are only some of the
thousands of asteroids in the Solar System.
Credits:
Photo of sunset, Kepler’s Law graphic, star size graphics, and Moon phases
graphic (graphics created with AutoCAD, Autodesk Inc.): Steve Smith,
Waynesville, Ohio, USA .

Photo of solar eclipse courtesy of Luc Viatour, Brussels, Belgium.

Film of the Aurora courtesy of Dick Hutchinson, Circle, Alaska, USA.

Graphics of Solar System and asteroid orbits, Mars globe view, solar
analemma, Moon globe, solar eclipse and intro page created with Starry
Night software, Simulation Curriculum Corp.

Mercury Graphic courtesy of ESA.

Mercury image courtesy of NASA, John Hopkins University Applied Physics

Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Other photos and graphics courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech or

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (avalanche photo).