Solar eclipse just one way to observe cosmic drama, astronomers say

Real astronomers don’t consider Friday a big deal. Even though there’s a solar eclipse. And a supermoon. And it’s the spring equinox. All on the same day.

The Internet has carried stories this week marking Friday and its rare celestial combination. But astronomers locally just grin. So does Steve Hawley of Lawrence.

Hawley, an astronomer at the University of Kansas, was the NASA astronaut who parked the Hubble Space Telescope in Earth’s orbit, where it made incredible discoveries in the universe.

But he plans to mark Friday not by contemplating equinoxes but by watching TV, to learn whether his Kansas Jayhawks will play Wichita State in an NCAA Tournament game on Sunday.

But here is why passionate astronomers, including those in Wichita, don’t care as much about Friday as they care about other days:

They look at the sky all the time. So they know that most of the rest of us ignore the wild stuff going on above us nearly every day.

They know that a new, bright nova lit up suddenly in the constellation Sagittarius a few days ago. And that we’ll have a total lunar eclipse on April 4. And most of all, they know what people can do now with cameras.

Supermoons? Meh.

Take a look

If you really want to see something cool with the moon, Hawley said, go look outside just after sunset Saturday. You’ll see a really thin crescent moon low on the horizon, right beside Mars, with Venus just above and to the left.

That’s a pretty sight, he said, and you don’t have to stay up late or be an astronaut or astronomer to appreciate it.

Or you can take a pair of binoculars and look at that new nova blowing up in Sagittarius.

There’s a total lunar eclipse coming April 4, a Saturday, starting at 5:17 a.m.

But most of all, astronomers say, there are awesome new things even amateurs can do now with cameras.

In just the last five years or so, advances in digital camera technology have made it possible for even low-budget amateur star-gazers to take awesome color photos of galaxies, giant multi-colored gas nebulae, and the richly colored atmospheric bands on Jupiter and Saturn, among other things.

Passion for astronomy

Astronomers are a small but passionate tribe in Wichita.

Kris Thomas Flory, who grew up in Newton, says the local astronomers group – the Kansas Astronomical Observers – includes only a few dozen people, but they bring in speakers and help budding new astronomers learn how to star-gaze.

Another star devotee, Mark Logan, says Wichita is one of the great spots to live if you want to look at stars, partly because of the Lake Afton Public Observatory, and also because it takes only minutes to drive out of town, away from city light.

Do that on a clear, moonless night, Logan said, “and you can see the Milky Way from horizon to horizon.”

The passion never goes away. Hawley, after five NASA missions and a lifetime as a professional astronomer, still gets out his telescope on his back deck in Lawrence once a week in good weather and points it out there.

These people know there is all sorts cool stuff to see.

Most of the objects we see – galaxies, stars, nebulae, supernovas – don’t exist anymore, at least not in the form we see. The giant objects are so far out that the light they gave off took thousands or even millions of years to get to us.

So astronomers and the rest of us are looking at the past, even when we look at Jupiter, in our own solar system neighborhood, because even it is so far away that it takes the light from Jupiter about 40 minutes to get to us.

Flory takes photos of cool things like the Andromeda galaxy or the Orion Nebula. Photos can be stunning these days, said Greg Novacek, director of the Lake Afton Public Observatory and its 16-inch Cassegrain reflecting telescope.

Not long ago, only astronomers with a lot of training and expensive gear could photograph galaxies or nebulae effectively. And it still drove them to distraction with the patience and precision work involved in keeping a camera shutter open for a long time, Novacek said. The light is dim from those distant objects.

But now, with digital cameras, astronomers can do a little move called “stacking,” where in just minutes, you shoot a bunch of frames, then use a software program to “stack” the images, producing photos that look spectacular.

Sharing the love

Logan sells telescopes, tripods, microscopes, rockets and other equipment and toys to Wichita’s astronomers and other science enthusiasts. He runs the Science Education Center on Lincoln just west of I-135. Customers are likely to encounter either him or his employee – his mother, Shirley.

Logan remembers a good day in astronomy in the late 1970s. He persuaded his mom to get out of bed just past 5 a.m.

Up in the sky, he told her, was the moon, most of it dark, just a crescent sliver floating up there in vast sky. He told her something really cool was about to happen.

He already had the cross-hairs of his telescope trained on the dark of the moon, but told her they’d be able to see what was about to happen also with the naked eye. He said she felt grumpy and irritated about being awakened so early to take part in her son’s obsession.

But then it happened.

Logan already knew the moment it would happen, and he counted down. One, two, three!

Suddenly, from behind the dark of the moon, a light appeared, “like there had been a nuclear explosion on the moon,” he said.

The planet Jupiter, hidden behind the moon, suddenly popped into view like a light.

It was cool, he said. And he shared it with his mom.

“OK,” he recalled her saying. “I’m not mad anymore.”

This story was originally published March 19, 2015 at 11:07 PM with the headline "Solar eclipse just one way to observe cosmic drama, astronomers say."