SCSUAstronomy.com adds cartoons!

We are proud to announce that Jim Bertram, an employee of SCSU with a humorous take on life has offered to take on the job of “editorial cartoonist” for SCSUAstronomy.com…. The title itself is a take on the Cosmological Constant, which Einstein added to his General Relativity equations to balance against gravity.

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Ice Pillars over Saint Cloud

This past Saturday night, I noticed an interesting light display in the skies over Saint Cloud. It looked like an odd version of aurora, a bunch of lit-up columns of light running vertically into the sky, but unlike aurora, they were not moving in any way. Today, one of my former students showed me some photos taken by his cousin, SCSU student and local artist Dan Mondloch. They were beautiful and exactly what I had seen. To quote Dan:

I took [these photos] on Saturday Night, December 3rd around 9:30 to 10:00 pm. I took them [near] Seberger Park.

A quick discussion with Dave Williams revealed he had seen this odd display also and as it turns out he had also found out what it was. It turns out so many people saw this display that the National Weather Service Central Region Headquarters saw fit to write a press release about the phenomenon. It turns out these ice pillars occur very rarely. Basically, conditions that cause ice crystals to form in the upper atmosphere, giving us ‘sun dogs‘ and ‘moon dogs‘, can, under very rare circumstances, occur much closer to the ground. When it does, we see these pillars of light, which are really light sources near the ground reflected off the ice crystals in the air. A chilly explanation of a beautiful phenomenon.

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Icy activity in the E ring (of Saturn)

About a year ago now, the Cassini mission to Saturn achieved one of its mission objectives by landing a probe (called Huygens) on Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan is interesting because, among other things, it is the only moon in the solar system with a significant atmosphere. Significant enough to potentially support life, although it would be a very strange life indeed living in something we would consider a petrochemical soup.

However, while Titan got all the media attention, planetary geologists (of which I am only an amateur) have also been very interested in another moon of Saturn which goes by the moniker Enceladus. Enceladus is a little snowball of a world, only about 500 km across. It orbits Saturn once every 1.3 days, close enough to place it within Saturn’s outermost (and extremely faint) “E” ring. In fact, it appears to orbit within the densest part of the E ring, but more on that in a bit.

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Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire!

This month gives us a chance to see some nice “Shooting Stars”, or meteors. Meteors are bits of sand and debris from comets that strike our Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.

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A very cool picture of the very first stars

I teach a cosmology course every once in a while, and it is a testament to modern astronomy that cosmological observations are becoming commonplace enough that I have to revise my class notes extensively every time I teach the course.

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