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October 2009

ASTRONOTES
Incorporating FRIENDS' NEWSLETTER Spine-chilling Halloween issue! Werewolves and Moon Madness Cosmic Horror How to explore the Universe The sky this month

ARMAGHPLANETARIUM


2 Astronotes October 2009

The October night sky
By Nigel Farrell, Education Support Officer Hello again and welcome once more to our regular monthly guide to the night sky, set for 15 October at around 11 p.m. We are now well and truly into the autumn months and the nights have noticeably begun to draw in. This of course gives a considerable advantage to the stargazer as it will allow a lot more time to observe the celestial wonders of the autumn sky. By mid October the sky should be completely dark by around 9 p.m. and as British Summer Time ends on 25 October at 01:00, remember to set your clocks back one hour. It is worth noting that at this time of year it will be getting perceptibly colder, so if you haven't already invested in some gloves and a hat, now might be a good time to consider doing so. Generally, it is also advisable to have a flask of something warming on hand, in case you are outside for long periods. Some of the familiar patterns that we have enjoyed over the past few months continue to be visible in the October sky. Cygnus, Lyra and Vega are all still observable high in the west. Hercules is mid sky in the WNW, moving toward the north during the early hours.

"We will also see the arrival of constellations which notify us of the onset of the late autumn and winter months."
The Great Square of Pegasus continues to dominate high in the southwest. While the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux, will be low to mid sky in the ENE and will be accompanied by Mars rising in the northeast and good views of Mars will be available in the east as it moves south throughout the remainder of the night. The Moon will be well into its last quarter by the 15th with the new Moon due on the 18th. Moonrise is set to be approximately 04.45, appearing just a few minutes after the planet Saturn in the east. If you have enough time to continue to observe the pre-dawn sky between the 8th and 16th you will be able see a spectacular triple conjunction of planets. The rising Saturn will shortly afterward be accompanied by first Venus and finally Mercury. If you can commit the time to observing these planets for the week between the 8th and 16th you will be rewarded with a striking planetary dance. At the beginning of this Strictly Stellar Show, Saturn will actually rise last but will eventually pass its companions, ending above them both as the planets align once more on the 16th.

Image Credit: Ian Ridpath

Taurus and Orion battle it out among the stars. .


October 2009 Astronotes 3 The mid October sky will also see the arrival of a few constellations which notify us of the onset of the late autumn and winter months. One of these is Taurus the Bull. Though visible relatively low in the ENE from early September, Taurus now occupies a much more prominent position high in the east. The stars of Taurus are relatively easy to find, if one follows the line of Orion's belt, which will be very low in the east, you should come to the supergiant star Aldebaran, which marks the eye of the bull.

"The stars of Taurus are relatively easy to find if one follows the line of Orion's belt."
From there you should be able to make out a V shaped cluster of stars collectively referred to as the Hyades which form the head of Taurus. If you continue to extend imaginary lines through the V you will find the two stars which mark the tips of the bull's exceptionally long horns, Beta Tauri, more commonly known as Elnath, and Zeta Tauri. Located between the horns is the Crab Nebula, although visible through a small telescope or binoculars, it is unlikely you will be able to see any detail of this remnant of a supernova explosion without having access to a fairly substantial telescope. Greek mythology depicts Taurus as a manifestation of Zeus who used the disguise to woo a beautiful maiden called Europa. In Celtic mythology, the constellations of Taurus and Auriga actually come together forming a large pattern telling the story of Hu Gadarn who, it was said, particularly in Welsh folklore, invented the yoke and was the first person to link oxen to the plough. In this assembly of the constellations Hu takes the place of BoЖtes the herdsman, it then moves in line through Ursa Major (the Plough) and continues through Auriga to Taurus the ox. Sadly though, it would appear that the reason for Auriga's inclusion as a link to the ox has long since been lost. The legend states that Hu, by the use of his oxen, rid the land of the "Afanc", a type of water monster responsible for causing floods.

An Orionid Meteor A tiny bit of comet falling from the sky in October 2007. However, it must be stressed that it is unclear as to whether this story is reliable or not. Nevertheless, if the connection to Hu and the Plough is authentic it adds credence to the belief that he was some kind of cultural hero who may have introduced agriculture to the Britons, and thus, it goes some way explaining the legend's relationship to the constellations concerned. For many the end of October culminates in the celebration of Halloween, known to the ancient Celts as Samhain, a Celtic festival marking the end of the old and the beginning of the new. It has long been associated with astronomy as it is a cross quarter day, marking the mid point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

"Mid to late October also includes another celestial fireworks display in our skies"
To the Celts Samhain signified the beginning of winter and was regarded as their New Year. Celtic tradition states that during this time the veil between this world and the Otherworld was so thin that the dead could return to warm themselves at the hearths of, or share a final meal with, the living. It was even said that the Celts sometimes placed the skulls of departed relatives at their doors during this time, and this

Image Credit: Mila Zinkova


4 Astronotes October 2009 tradition has been carried on into the modernday where people place carved pumpkin lanterns in, or outside, their homes (see the next article for more folklore). Mid to late October also includes another celestial fireworks display in our skies. The Orionids meteor shower will be visible between 15 and 29 October, with its peak due to be around the 20th -22nd. The Orionids are caused by Earth passing through dust left over by Halley's Comet and the region from which these meteors appear to radiate is located within the constellation Orion, hence the name. This year, around the peak times, the waxing crescent moon will have set early, and therefore, should allow for excellent viewing, with the best views likely to be in the east after midnight. There are also other fainter meteor showers occurring at the same time, but Orionids should be relatively easy to identify. So, if you see a particularly fast streak of light, try to mentally trace it back towards where it came from, and if you end up at Orion then it is likely you have seen an Orionid. If you are having any difficulty finding Orion simply follow the free sky chart included with this issue. Best of luck, and have fun stargazing.

Moon Phases, Oct 2009
Sunday Sunday Sunday Monday 4 October 11 October 18 October 26 October FULL MOON Last Quarter NEW MOON First Quarter

Moon Madness
By Orla O'Donnell, Education Support Officer It's October and that means it's time to dust off your witch's broom, take your vampire teeth out of the drawer and get ready for Halloween. Halloween night brings out all the ghouls, vampires and werewolves as it was believed that at Halloween the line between the living and the dead is blurred and the dead may walk amongst us. We may not all believe that there is a ghost at our side on Halloween night but there is more to Halloween than spooks and phantoms. Halloween has some interesting links to astronomy, which leads me to wonder about the connection between some other scary folklore, and astronomy. Halloween is a significant astronomical event as it falls on the Cross Quarter date which is roughly half way between equinox and the solstice. An equinox occurs twice a year in March and September and is when the Sun shines directly onto the equator. A Solstice occurs when the tilt of the Earth's axis causes the midday Sun to be at its highest or lowest points in the sky. At the winter
Image Credit: Arroy via Wikimedia.org

Entrance to the Underworld? Newgrange in Co Meath is a 5,000 year old passage tomb which is over 500 years older than the pyramids of Giza solstice the noon time Sun is at its lowest in the whole year and at the summer solstice the noon time Sun is at its highest in the year. Cross Quarter dates like Halloween in October, Lammas Day in August, May Day and Groundhog Day in February fall in-between these two events. In Europe Halloween was first celebrated about 2000 years ago by the Celts who called the


October 2009 Astronotes 5 festival Samhain. The Celts built most of their festivals around astronomical events and the importance of the Sun in their life and that of other ancient peoples is evident in the monuments they constructed. One great example of a monument built to celebrate the Sun is Newgrange in Co. Meath. This is a magnificent stone tomb complex which is fitted with a box window that allows the winter solstice sunlight to illuminate the passage tomb. Halloween is associated with a lot of creepy happenings but it is not the only astronomical occurrence that is linked to the dark side. Look out of the window on a dark autumn night and the vision of a full moon may send chills down your spine. A full moon has long been associated with madness one has only to look at the origins of the word lunatic, which is derived from the Latin word lunacus which in turn owes its origins to the word Luna meaning Moon. cially dementia", and it was this statement that eventually led to the 1845 `Lunacy act' which first treated the mentally ill as patients rather than criminals. Even as recently as the 1940's a solider claimed `Moon Madness' had driven him to murder. Mystical effects of the Moon have been so widely claimed that researchers in both America and in the UK have carried out research on its alleged links with madness and crime. Although a British study conducted in 1976 reported a rise in crimes when there was a full Moon, a 1983 study in the USA saw no particular rise in crime related to a full Moon.

The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the brightest object in the night sky although it gives off no light of its own. We see the Moon due to the reflection of the Sun and as the Moon moves around the Earth different parts of the moon are revealed due to its position in relation to the Sun. These illuminated stages of the Moon are called phases and there are eight in total. The Moon, tiny compared to Earth, has a relatively weak gravitational pull yet it is close enough to extend its influence across 400 000km of space to control the Earth's oceans. It is the Moon's ability to create tides that lead some people to believe that the Moon could influence human behaviour as our bodies are about 60% water. This theory, linking the human body to the primordial oceans, is not taken as literally true today. Yet in history the notion that the moon was responsible for madness was not restricted to old wives tales, it was actually built into the British legal system. In the 1600's the Chief Justice Sir William Hale stated "the moon has a great influence in all diseases of the brain, espe-

The Mystical Moon dominates folklore and the night sky. The effects of a full Moon on animal behaviour are a little bit more conclusive. Researchers in Bradford concluded that you are twice as likely to be bitten by a dog during a full Moon. There are more canine connections; European folklore is full of fanciful stories where a human is transformed into a werewolf or a lycanthrope when exposed to the eldritch light of a full Moon. It is not only werewolves who live their lives in conjunction with the phases of the Moon, modern witches and pagans follow the phases of the Moon as an important part of life. So this Halloween Night be thankful that it is not also a full Moon as all the lycanthropes will be at home watching TV. What better way to stay in doors and have fun on Halloween night than visiting Armagh Planetarium for our annual festivities (see www.armaghplanet.com for more details).

Image Credit: NASA

"The Moon has a great influence in all diseases of the brain"


6 Astronotes October 2009

Ahoy There, Tall Ships!
By Naomi Francey If you didn't hear about this year's Tall Ships 2009 event you must have been on another planet! From 13 to 16 August the Tall Ships took over the Belfast Quays. Armagh Planetarium was represented at the event in the Expo Marquee, organised by Armagh City and District Council. I was at the event on the Friday evening, the rain was pelting down, the passers-by were a sea of umbrellas and the grass had turned into a mud slide. Despite this there was such a great atmosphere at the event, everyone was in high spirits and a buzz in the air. The ships were spectacular, and the rain did not deter people from joining the long queues to get onboard or listening to the live music that was on offer. All round it was a great weekend for all ages. Bon voyage! Naomi prepares to set off on a new mission of discovery. Good luck and come back soon!.

Image Credit: Naomi Francey

Black holes for beginners
By Tracy McConnell, Education Support Officer The term black hole is a familiar one to most of us, but how many actually know what it means? Astronomy books and articles often talk about black holes without any description of just why these objects are so strange. So here is a brief guide for beginners to astronomy. In the late 1700's, John Michell (1724 ­1793) and Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 ­1827) both independently came up with the concept of an object from which light could not escape. Using Newton's Theory of Gravity, they calculated that if an object were compressed into a small enough radius, then the escape velocity of that object would be faster than the speed of light. In 1967 John Wheeler, an American theoretical physicist, applied the term "black hole" to these collapsed objects. A star is a massive ball of gas, and because of its size it has very strong gravitational forces trying to collapse the star in on itself. What stops that from happening is nuclear fusion. The star slowly converts all of the hydrogen and helium in the gas into heavier elements. This fusion process produces a lot of energy that is simultaneously trying to explode the star. For most of the stars life these two forces are in balance. Different sized stars "burn up" and die in different ways depending on their size. For stars that have 10 to 15 times more mass than our Sun, this death is rather spectacular. As the star runs out of material to convert, the nuclear fusion reactions stop (no more outward force) and the gravitational forces cause the star to collapse in on itself, condensing the core and causing heat, until eventually the star dies in a spectacular supernova explosion. The remnant of the star left after the explosion can no longer support its own weight as there is no outward force, and collapses in on itself forming a singularity, a point in space-time in which gravitational forces


October 2009 Astronotes 7 cause matter to have an infinite density and zero volume. As the density of the singularity increases, the light being emitted from what is left of the star is bent around the star. Light has the properties of both a wave and a particle (which are called photons). In terms of photons, this bending is better explained as the photons being trapped into a tight orbit due to the intense gravitational forces. This means that when the density of a singularity reaches the "infinite density", no light can escape. This is why these regions are called black holes. the strong gravity source of the black hole. This material forms what is known as the accretion disc around the singularity. As the material nears the singularity, it heats up and emits X-rays into space, these are picked up by telescopes and satellites. The cousin of the black hole is the wormhole. A wormhole would be two black holes connected to each other, creating a hole in space time, a tunnel that would theoretically provide a means of travelling interstellar distances in a very short space of time. The name wormhole comes from an early analogy: imagine a fly on an apple. The only way the fly can reach the other side of the apple is the long way, over the fruit's surface. But a worm could bore a tunnel through the apple, shortening the trip considerably.

"The science fiction cousin of the black hole is the wormhole"
This does not mean a black hole suddenly becomes a great celestial vacuum cleaner sucking up anything in its path. In order to be sucked up by a black hole, you would have to cross what is known as the Event Horizon, this is a boundary in space-time inside which events cannot effect any outside observer. Nothing inside the event horizon will even appear to exist to those outside. Mathematically speaking, the event horizon is known as the Schwarzschild radius, the range at which light would no longer be able to escape the force of gravity produced by the black hole. This isn't as extreme as you might initially think, for example, if the Sun was replaced by a black hole of equal mass, its Schwarzschild radius would be 3 km, compared to the Sun's actual radius which is about 700 000 km. There would be no risk of the Earth being consumed by such a black hole, it would continue on in its normal orbit as though nothing happened (please remember this is only in terms of the gravitational effects, without the nuclear fusion from the Sun there would be no energy for the Earth's life to survive). Most of the black holes that have been identified (with a small measure of uncertainty) are members of binary star systems (two stars orbiting each other). In such cases material from the neighbouring star would be drawn away by

Cassiopeia A This is an X-ray image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, showing the aftermath of a gigantic stellar explosion in such detail that scientists can see evidence of what may be a neutron star or black hole near the centre. A wormhole in space is the same sort of tunnel; it is a shortcut from one part of the universe to another that reduces the travel time to just about zero. This has lead to them being very popular in the sci-fi genre on both a galactic scale (Star Trek Voyager and DS9) to the more localised (recent movie Jumper). Whereas the science behind wormholes is currently theoretical and no evidence of their existence has been proven, they are still a very hot topic in the science community.

Image Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/Rutgers /J.Hughes


8 Astronotes October 2009

How to Explore the Universe
By Robert Hill, Northern Ireland Space Office Space is a great leveller. In a society which, in spite of its increasing reliance on science and technology, interest in STEM (Science, technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects is worryingly low, astronomy retains a wide, even universal appeal. The International Year of Astronomy provides an ideal opportunity to use that interest in astronomy and space to foster a broader interest in science and related areas. This is one of the primary motivations behind the visit of Dr Andy Newsam from Liverpool John Moore's University (LJMU) to Ireland (North and South). Andy is the Director of the National Schools' Observatory, and an astronomer at the Astrophysics Research Institute of LJMU. He is also the Institute of Physics Schools' Lecturer for 2009 and in June, in an unofficial extension of his tour, he talked to pupils from a number of schools around Dublin and Belfast. Emphasising the role of technology in the development of our understanding of the Universe (starting with Galileo 400 years ago!) and also showing how modern communications technology allows everyone, in particular school children, to explore the universe for themselves with giant, multi-million pound telescopes, Dr Newsam showed how we are improving our understanding of areas as diverse as galaxies billions of light years away, or asteroids on potential collisions courses with Earth. Dr Newsam said "It was such a pleasure to come over for this extension to my tour. One of the most rewarding parts of a scientist's life is sharing our discoveries with others, and the reception from everybody has been wonderful. Many thanks to all those who made it possible." The Southern element of the tour was organised by Dr Lorraine Hanlon of UCD and the North by Robert Hill of the Northern Ireland Space Office and Sean Maguire, Science Adviser to the North Eastern Education and Library Board. Thanks to Andy Newsam for a superb visit. His talks were excellent and the schools really enjoyed them! Further Reading: http://www.iop.org/activity/education/Events/ Schools_and_College_%20Lecture_Series/ page_27031.html

Image Credit: NASA

HST is back! These images are among the first observations made by the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope. At top left we see NGC 6302, a planetary nebula. At top right is a cluster of galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet. At bottom left we see the core of the giant globular cluster Omega Centauri. At bottom right is a view of a pillar of gas and dust in the Carina Nebula.


October 2009 Astronotes 9

The Haunter of the Dark
By Colin Johnston, Science Communicator Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is praised as one of the twentieth century's most influential writers of fantastic fiction. Throughout his life he took a deep interest in astronomy and this enthusiasm informed his work. I will state straight away that his stories are not perfect. Lovecraft was an odd and eccentric man, although he was charming and sociable in person, in his stories he occasionally reveals unpleasant streaks of snobbery and racism which are shocking to today's readers. Even in his best works, the writing can be sometimes awkward. Yet he is worth reading, his stories can conjure a sense of unease and their endings can startle, and as Halloween is approaching I think it is time to look at this amateur astronomer and creator of his own unique genre of horror stories. Lovecraft's early life was unusual and unhappy, clearly influencing his writing and well-being. When he was three years old, his father was institutionalised for a severe mental illness, dying years later in the asylum. Then financial misjudgments led the formerly well-to-do family to fall suddenly into poverty causing their eviction from their family home. Shockingly, later his mother too suffered from mental illness, she also spent the remainder of her life in an institution. Themes of madness and families declining into decay and degeneracy reoccur in Lovecraft's work and throughout his life he was afflicted by odd phobias, bouts of illness and breakdowns. The precocious young Lovecraft was an avid reader but rarely attended school thanks to his severe bouts of illness. Despite his lack of formal schooling, he was well-educated through his reading. Literature, history, chemistry and astronomy were his favourite topics. He received a small telescope as a gift from his mother and by the age of nine he was writing, publishing and selling a science newsletter from door to door in his district. By the time he was twelve, astronomy was his obsession. He specialised in observing the Moon and Venus, obsessing over
Image Credit: via wikimedia.org

HP Lovecraft and his wife Sonia in 1924. what mysteries were concealed by the clouds of Venus and what could lie on the unmapped farside of the Moon. For the next few years he hoped to become an astronomer, but a breakdown prevented him from graduating from school and he never attended college. This was both a source of shame and disappointment for the rest of his life. Instead of practicing science (he never held a job), Lovecraft developed his writing; his early and rather dire poetry and stories were published in amateur fiction magazines. In those pre-TV days, there were mass-market fiction magazines with huge circulations and titles like `Thrilling Wonder Stories' and `Weird Tales' and once he began to sell stories to them he was able to just about support the dwindling family fortune with the meagre royalties from his writing. Strangely he made more money as a ghostwriter writing fiction for others (including Harry Houdini) than from works under his own name. He lived in Providence, Rhode Island with a couple of elderly aunts (apart from a brief period in New York during his unsuccessful marriage) in what Arthur C. Clarke called "genteel poverty". Throughout his life he continued his astronomical hobby, observing comets, Saturn and a solar eclipse in 1932, attending lectures from leading astronomers and physicists and visiting the Hayden Planetarium. He welcomed these distrac-


10 Astronotes October 2009 tions from his hard life; Lovecraft was suffering from malnutrition when he died from cancer at the age of 46.
Image Credit: Apavlo via Wikipedia.org

Lovecraft's early stories were classified as "Weird Fiction" at the time, today we would describe them as fantasy and horror. His prose was dense, archaic, sometimes lurid or unintentionally hilarious, but often hypnotic. He persisted in developing his art and over the years he developed his own genre, often called "Cosmic Horror" today. Cosmic Horror largely eschews the standard tropes of horror stories; haunted houses, vampires and so on. There are still monsters, and Lovecraft was good at imagining monsters, but his bestiary of Deep Ones, Shoggoths, Mi-Go and other shambling, unspeakable Things are just the tip of the iceberg. The real horror lies underneath. A typical Lovecraft's character might be holidaying in rural New England, exploring Antarctica or just researching an ancient artwork when he gradually comes face to face with the stark realization that we live in a cold and uncaring Universe, vast and ancient, shared with creatures not only utterly alien but also hostile and superior to humanity. At the moment, they are largely quiescent but one day "when the stars are right" these beings will turn their full nightmarish attention to the human race and inevitably descend to our fragile planet to devour us or worse. Ladd Observatory As a boy HP Lovecraft regularly visited this institution to view the sky through its telescope. As an adult he was appreciative of the patience the staff showed him, as he realized he had been a "pompous juvenile ass with grandiose astronomical ambitions".

"...still the Pole Star leers down...winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message"
The advance of science was his inspiration; contemporary discoveries in this and other sciences of biology, geology, and physics, suggested to Lovecraft that the human race was insignificant and transient on the cosmic scale. As Charles Stross, author of several works inspired by Lovecraft, has pointed out "he had Edwin Hubble's cosmology to work with, not Bishop Usher's". Throughout his stories Lovecraft shows

an appreciation of current astronomy and related sciences. Two of his early stories (and not really typical of his work) are "Polaris"(1918) and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919). In "Polaris" the narrator sees the eponymous star as somehow malevolent, under its influence he relives a past life as a member of a lost civilization which existed 26 000 years ago when the Earth's precession made Polaris previously the Pole Star. In the latter story, a psychiatrist discovers his patient, a brutish hillbilly, is `possessed' by an apparently benign cosmic being (unique in the Lovecraft canon) which is somehow opposed to the "Demon Star" Algol. The story drops in a long reference to the nova GK Persei observed in 1901. Later stories became increasingly science fictional, what looks like the supernatural is probably the application of incomprehensible and vastly superior extra-terrestrial (or even extra-dimensional) science. For example, the evil Keziah Mason (no relation to our Director I hope) in "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932) had "an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter". She uses this knowledge to escape her captors by opening what we would nowadays call a wormhole and fleeing to an alien planet orbiting a triple star "between Hydra and Argo Navis".


October 2009 Astronotes 11 "The Colour out of Space" (1927) describes the fall of a strange meteorite (carrying the spores of a very alien organism) in a rural community and the awful fate of a helpless family as the maturing extra-terrestrial parasites prey on them. In the description of the attempted scientific analysis of the fallen body, Lovecraft shows knowledge of meteorites that was up to date with contemporary science. Yuggoth. Two of the stories he wrote towards the end of his life describe how Earth was colonized by alien beings in prehistory, relics of their presence are waiting to be found by unwary archeologists. This was almost forty years before Erich von DДniken and his imitators tried to sell this idea as fact! Both stories show Lovecraft carried out extensive research into geology and palaeontology. "At the Mountains of Madness" (1931) tells of a doomed Antarctic expedition and its disturbing discoveries about Earth's previous tenants. In "The Shadow out of Time" (1935) the protagonist is left deeply traumatized after he experiences a bizarre form of amnesia (he is, however, an economist, so perhaps he is undeserving of our sympathy). To describe this story's plot further would be to utterly spoil it so I shan't. During his lifetime he never became a popular or critical success, but after his early death, a handful of his admirers continued to promote his work and today more than 70 years later HP Lovecraft is better known than ever. Were he alive today it is intriguing to imagine what new terrors today's astronomy and cosmology, with their black holes, plutoids, dark matter, multidimensional theories and so on, could conjure from his imagination. Further reading: Collections of Lovecraft's stories are available from various publishers, notable examples include `Necronomicon ` from Gollancz and S.T. Joshi's annotated anthologies published by Penguin in the UK. Clarke, A.C, Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography, Gollancz, London,1989 Williams, Stuart, The terror out of space, Popular Astronomy, Vol 55, No 4, October-December 2008 The Pluto system seen from the surface of one of its moons This artist's impression is the best view of these worlds we will have until the New Horizons probe flies by in 2015. It probably will not send back images of Lovecraft's mighty cities of black stone "things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten". http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/interest/astrnmy. asp http://www.scribd.com/doc/2665483/LovecraftA-Scream-of-Stars

"...a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune... Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing `Pluto'"
In his youth, Lovecraft had dreamt of a transNeptunian planet, "a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system", which he called "Yuggoth". In his 1930 story "The Whisper in Darkness", a hapless pair of folklorists discover that legendary beings said to haunt isolated mountain tops in Vermont are very real visitors from this world, and they are starting to take notice of us...Lovecraft explicitly states that Yuggoth is in fact the then-recently discovered Pluto. I am sure that one day a Kuiper Belt Object will be named

Image Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)


12 Astronotes October 2009

Image of the Month

The spooky Halloween atmosphere is alive and well in many of the amazing objects in space. The above nebula is a stunning example. Found in the constellation of Cepheus, this delightfully frightful dark nebula is known as SH2-136 or vdB141. Like any other stellar nursery, dense dust clouds ranging in size and shape are pulled together in the complex process of star formation. However, let your imaginations run wild for a moment and you might see a terrifying creature on the right, stretching between the two bright yellowish stars, chasing after two helpless people, who might well be running for their lives.

Can you see it? It's an interesting study of how your perception can change how you see something. On the one hand, The holiday spirit might lead you to see what I have just described, a ghoulish nightmare, on the other hand, it's an interesting image of a stellar nursery, showing the births of new stars. Happy Halloween. (Caption by Tracy McConnell, Education Support Officer)

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Astronotes, Incorporating Friends' Newsletter is published monthly by Armagh Planetarium, College Hill, Armagh, Co. Armagh BT61 9DB Tel: 02837 523689 Email: cj@armaghplanet.com Editor: Colin Johnston ©2009 Armagh Planetarium All rights reserved