ISPECTRUM Issue 13/May - June 2015
MAGAZINE
Personalised
Medicine
Jupiter the Lord of the Night Sky
The Enigma of the Thracians
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CONTENTS Features
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18 03 Personalised Medicine Use of Personalised Medicine in the prevention of disease and the maintenance of wellness 08 Barriers affecting the availability of Personalised Medicine 12 Personalised medicine - part of everyday life
15 The Enigma of the Thracians and the Orpheus Myth 16 Fighting spirit 18 Journey to the Past 21 Orphic Mysteries 23 The Devil’s Throat
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25 Jupiter the Lord of the Night Sky Observe top spring objects with a robotic telescope 29 Galileo and the Telescope 32 Jupiter the Lord of the Night Sky
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editorial Dear Readers, I am really glad to bring you this latest issue which is full of varied topics, all equally interesting. Our contributor Ellie Pownall goes into personalised medicine. In recent years, the path of medicine has progressed both scientifically and socially; one of these recent developments is the ideology of personalised medicine. Personalised medicine is an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. Also in this issue, I make my own contribution with ‘The Enigma of the Thracians and the Orpheus Myth’. The Thracians are well-known for their exuberant fighting spirit; but the history of a population is not just built on its wars and the exploits of its soldiers and leaders, as is usually read in encyclopaedias and history books. Spread across South East Europe were groups of men and women who were highly skilled in working with refined metals, were followers of a delicate mystique that worshipped the mother goddess and had complex funerary rituals immersed in symbolism. And to top off the final contents, John Baruch walks us through Jupiter, the lord of night sky, and an attractive proposal. Our computers take us into amazing worlds where anything is possible but reality can also deliver the amazing. How about using computers to take us into the real world, to control robots that will take images for us of the far distant reaches of the Universe?
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Mado Martinez Editorial Director
Ispectrum magazine
Published Bimonthly
ISSN 2053-1869
Editorial Director Mado Martinez, madomartinez@ispectrummagazine.com Art Director Rayna Petrova raynapetrova@ispectrummagazine.com Contributing Editors Bradley Terblanche Laura Hayes Contributing Writers Ellie Pownall John Baruch Images www.commons.wikimeadia.org , www.morguefile.com , www.freeimages.com
www.ispectrummagazine.com admin@ispectrummagazine.com +44 7938 707 164 (UK)
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Personalised Medicine Use of Personalised Medicine in the prevention of disease and the maintenance of wellness
by ellie pownall website
www.ispectrummagazine.com
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n recent years, the path of medicine has progressed both scientifically and socially; one of these recent developments is the ideology of personalised medicine. Personalised medicine is an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Scientists believe that this new approach to medical treatment will cut costs on the NHS, improve overall health and ensure patients have more urgent treatment and better facilities with the financial benefits from this new scheme. An article from the New England Journal of Medicine states that “major investments in basic science have created an opportunity for significant progress in clinical medicine �, reflecting optimistic views on the future of the personalised scheme and high hopes for its impact in basic scientific discovery.
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Examples of this new social development in medicine includes the personalised medicine summit taking place in the Life Science Institute, University of British Columbia , in partnership with the Personalized Medicine Initiative, Genome BC and LifeScience BC on Sunday 7th-9th of June this year. Professor Terry Allen, Conference Organizer, describes that “in many ways, British Columbia (BC) constitutes an ideal testing ground for putting a personalised medicine rogramme into practice, with its highly integrated singlepayer health care system, its ethnically diverse, well-educated population and its advanced expertise in the development and application of molecularly-based medicine .” This scheme aims to use pharmacogenomics and other ‘omics’ analyses to guide diagnosis and treatment and manage, interpret and use big data in a new system of data consolidation to access improving health care in BC and investment in basic and translational research to advance personalized medicine discoveries. This aims to create a better knowledge of the maintenance of wellness in the public and eventually create 6
new development in personalised medicine beyond what has already been discovered.
Another example of the progress and breadth that personalised medicine has reached is in the PMWC (personalised medicine world conference) held in Silicon Valley 2014. This conference provides the entire range of people involved in personalise medicine, and each speaker gives a unique take on the developments of the future. Brook Byers, senior partner in KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), even goes as far to say that “this is the best personalised medicine conference there is today .” From 400 attenders and 41 speakers in 2010 to 1000+ attendees and 100+ speakers, is it clear to see there is growing interest in the area of personalised medicine with more than 40 companies investing in the development of the scheme, socially and technologically.
Dr George Church, Harvard Medical School, helped to develop the first direct genomic sequencing method and the human genome
project; he explains the importance of personalised medicine: “I think this is something easy to misunderstand, in that 100% of the people are at risk of some disease; this doesn’t mean that everybody
has it, but they don’t know until they get genetically tested. As the price comes down, it seems an obvious choice to find out if you do have a genetic disease, for example breast c a n c e r ”. H e
describes the process of testing the presence of genetic diseases: “genetic material in your file, not 7
requiring family history, as many people are the first person in their family that have diseases, can therefore be stored until symptoms present themselves or doctors can act on the genetic information that has been discovered”. This evidence of new ways to quickly act upon genetic diseases such as cancer and therefore decrease the chance of a morality. To have access to this information will also enable parents to dis-
cover the inherited genetics of future offspring and therefore be able to prepare both socially and finically to aid the living standards of their children such as the current development of medical care surrounding Down’s syndrome in infants. The use of personalised medicine
will provide a basic network of medical information for both doctors and patients to access, which would otherwise be difficult to discover, and thus prevent or become aware of potential future diseases in both offspring and relatives.
Indeed, there are many ethical issues surrounding person8
alised medicine due to the open depth of information about each patient. Reagan Kelly is a PhD student at the University of Michigan , and he explores the problems surrounding personalised medicine and if these will be easy to overcome. He states the three main issues surrounding the drawbacks of this new scientific development are protecting patient privacy, protecting
patient autonomy and allowing access to personalised medicine. In previous years, patients have always had the right to retain information about their health and wellbeing from both insurance companies and the government, yet do these personal rights also apply to genetic makeup? What uses are acceptable for genetic information, and if a person has this information collected for use in risk profiling or diagnosis, should that then automatically commit them to allowing their data to be used for diagnosing and profiling others? As people have a right to refuse treatment and have personal privacy when it comes to diagnostics, how will this work when relatives also potentially encounter the same issues? Cost is also a massive issue in personalised medicine -- as 46 million people are without health insurance, how will companies ensure everyone receives personalised medicine? And will the benefits of cost cuts to everyday NHS be spent on attempting to achieve personalised medicine globally? These outline the fundamental issues in the personalised medicine scheme
in which many scientists and legal advisors have worked throughout the years to address and overcome, and the article below explains how they have succeeded.
An article named ‘Personalized Medicine: Ethnical, Legal and Regulatory Issues’ explains that “although tests and companion diagnostics exist to improve prescribing and care outcomes, physicians typically do not have the detailed analyses of clinical information needed to select optimal drug treatments and dosages on the basis of a patient’s unique genetic profile, physiology, and metabolic 9
sive, this will massively save on hospital expenditure and improve the economics of medical industry. The article also states that “the recently enforced regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) could obviate some contentious privacy battles, particularly those arising within immediate families, by requiring all patients to consent to disclosure of private health information and to authorise access to specific third parties”. This therefore reduces the amount of caution regarding privacy and dignity within personalised medicine, and this aids to ensure the treatment is both fair and continues to offer patient disclosure in medical practice. The article somewhat answers the concerns regarding personalised medicine in Regan Kelly’s work and thus enables scientists to focus more on developing the process of the personalised scheme and eventually put the ideas stated in the ethnic, legal and regulatory article into play.
processes. In the absence of what is needed to know to deliver personalised medicine, physicians can easily continue to use a certain amount of trial-and-error methods when they evaluate treatment approaches ”. Along with the statistics from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) stating that more than 770,000 deaths or injuries a year are due to adverse reactions to treatments, this shows that the benefit of personalised medicine massively outweighs the issues highlighted previously. These deaths also cost up to 5.6 million per hospital per year, which shows that although trying to implement personalised medicine around the globe will be expen10
An article named ‘the Future of Coverage and Payment for Personalised Medicine and Diagnostics’ also states the progress personalised medicine has made to modern day health care. For example, non-invasive maternal blood testing. In the past two years, non-invasive prenatal
testing for trisomy disorders, such as Down’s syndrome, has begun to rapidly replace traditional amniocentesis methods. There is also multi-analyte assays with algorithms (MAAAs). Another technological achievement includes the development of MAAAs, which help physicians plan
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the management and in many cases reduce the overtreatment of diseases as diverse as breast, prostate, colon, ovarian and thyroid cancers. Several of these tests are FDA approved, which expands their potential as widely distributed platform-based kits. This table below also
shows the newly developed scheme in which the American Medical Association (AMA), which controls the standard code set for the communication of outpatient and laboratory services between providers and payers, has developed more than 100 new codes for genetic tests and deleted the former ‘stack codes’ for molecular test processes. This enables an easier pro-
and economically suggests that the idea of personalised medicine will eventually become a regular part of everyday life and therefore both reduce the costs on the NHS and improve health conditions or disease awareness of a large majority of the globe.
Patrick Conway, MD, states that “innovation
gests that personalised medicine is becoming gradually more popular and consumers, although having little say in health care systems’ protocol, would surely be for a physician to have access to a diagnostic test to pick the right, as opposed to the wrong, treatment. The maintenance of wellness for patients will undoubtedly be much higher, due to a larger amount of medi-
The mass progress both medical and economically suggests that the idea of personalised medicine will eventually become a regular part of everyday life
cess for both insurance companies and medical personnel, which will aid the transition into personalised medicine being global. The mass progress both medical
is happening broadly across the country. The promise of personalised medicine and innovation is amazing, and we’re already seeing dividends ”. He sug12
cal information for personnel to make decisions regarding both treatment and diagnosis. Of course, the cost would be worrying to the average consumer,
yet the ‘the Future of Coverage and Payment for Personalised Medicine ’ article states that “from the public and payer perspective, the marginal cost of the benchtop chemistry is only a small part of the test’s value to the health care system, which is measured in years of life extended, quality of life and the avoidance of drugs that are not helpful”. It seems that once the finalised scheme of personalised medicine takes off, it is only natural that the tax payer will feel both strain and benefit over the new system, as there is a belief 13
that this new scheme of having medicine personalised will be overall cheaper than the previous ‘trial and error’ tactics that costs money for improper medicine usage.
Overall, there is no doubt that the use of personalised medicine will improve health and maintenance of wellbeing due to the ease in identifying diseases at early stages using genetic information already logged for medical personnel. Although, there are some issues surround-
References: 1.
The Path to Personalised Medicine -- The
New England Journal of Medicine- Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., and Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. 2.
http://www.personalizedmedsummit.
com/ -- Terry Allen, Professor Emeritus, Conference Organizer 3.
http://pmwcintl.com/index.php - Brook
Byers on PMWC 4. Reagan Kelly is a PhD student at University of Michigan -- Science, Policy, and Ethics in Personalized Medicine 5.
Personalized Medicine: Part 2: Ethical,
Legal, and Regulatory Issues F. Randy Vogenberg, Carol Isaacson Barash, Michael Pursel
ing the price and cost effectiveness for aspects, such as insurance, hospitals and the tax payer. Arguably, experts are working tirelessly to create a sound scheme which can work in many different environments and economic budgets, to eventually make personalised medicine a global scheme where all of the general public will have the ability to maintain medical wellness.
P T. 2010 November; 35(11): 624-626, 628631, 642. PMID: 21139819 6. ‘The Future of Coverage and Payment for Personalised Medicine and Diagnostics’ -The Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) , Bruce Quinn 7.Patrick Conway, MD Deputy Administrator for Innovation and Quality & Chief Medical Officer, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services at the Tenth Annual State of Personalized Medicine Luncheon hosted by PMC March 15, 2014
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The Enigma of the Thracians and the Orpheus Myth by mado martinez website
www.madomartinez.com
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mollusc we only find a trace of fossilised shell, from a human we find much more than just remains: we find pyramids, mounds, sculptures, coins, tools, weapons, scripts, treasures, houses, palaces, altars and more.
he passage of the millennia has brought us traces of ancient civilisations that shone enough to make their cultural glimpses last through the ages. Humanity itself has featured in the art, culture and funerary rites of these civilisations, so whilst from a 15
the people were that mixed with the Thracians around 5,000 years ago, from which Thracian civilisation itself would emerge. But it is known that there were some who came from the North to the Balkans with their livestock, finding a place with a bright and attractive culture. It was the intermingling between the local population and the new arrivals that allows us to talk today of the Thracians.
All of this, in light of archaeology, allows us to know more about our ancestors. But for some of them, like the Thracians, what has been discovered barely casts a shadow over what is still unknown. There are many mysteries surrounding this ancient civilisation that occupied what is now Bulgaria and some adjoining parts of Romania, Greece and Turkey. In archaeological terms, evidence of civilisation in Bulgarian lands dates back thousands of years. Not coincidentally, it was found in Provadia (Bulgaria) the oldest prehistoric city in Europe, dated between 4,700 BC and 4,200 BC, in a fortified settlement of 350 inhabitants. On the other hand, we know that for years the world’s oldest golden treasure was not found in Sumeria, nor in Egypt, nor in pre-Columbian America but in Varna (Bulgaria) and dates from 4,600 BC.
fighting spirit The Thracians are well-known for their exuberant fighting spirit; but the history of a population is not built only on its wars and the exploits of its soldiers and leaders, as it is usually read in encyclopaedias and history books. Spread across South East Europe were groups of men and women who were highly skilled in working with refined metals, who were followers of a delicate mystique that
Scientists and archaeologists still harbour serious doubts about who 16
Old, historical map of ancient Thrace, 1585
worshipped the mother goddess, and who had complex funerary rituals immersed in symbolism.
There are many puzzles that arise when we investigate the ancient Thracians. For example, they had a rare ability for discov-
ering and extracting natural deposits without harming nature. Archaeologists and anthropologists continue to be surprised by the kinds of advanced technological practices that the Thracians were using. If, as some scholars believe, they were intermingling with the people who inhabited 17
Bulgarian lands since ancient times, they presumably exchanged knowledge, and their wisdom swelled as they incorporated the skills, practices and information of the other culture.
So what mysteries remain from the first
Thracians over 5,000 years ago? Although we know of some Thracian names and words, apparently they lacked their own alphabet and came to use Greek and Latin characters to perform certain inscriptions. However, this Indo-European language spoken by the Thracians is still a mystery and no one has been able to decipher it... yet. Some bilingual inscriptions in Greek characters written in Ancient Greek and Thracian that were discovered in Northern Greece could perhaps shed some light in helping to decipher the contents of the Thracians texts, something that certainly would reveal important information about the people of whom we still know hardly anything.
Journey to the Past
The Thracian burial rite is one of the most compelling evidences of belief in the afterlife and immortality of the soul. The Valley of the Thracian Kings is in the region of Kazanlak, where we can find several grave mounds, making this area a real route of the funeral ritual (over 500 burial hills). We are in the realm of the Odrisios (fifth century to the fourth century BC), ruled by the King III Seuthes. Their mounds did not reach the colossal size of the pyramids of Egypt, but the Thracian funeral process had many things in common with the Egyptian one, not least the idea of resurrection and an afterlife. We drove to 18
the ancient necropolis of the city of Seuthes III, called in those days Seuthopolis, and headed to the mound-tomb of the King himself.
The remains of Seuthes III were buried with his horse, his weapons and a bronze statue of his own image that had been placed in a special chamber of the tomb, according to the Orphic funeral practices. Thus, we are reminded of Iberian funerary rituals in which the warrior was buried with his weapons but placed in a way that neutralised them, rendering them completely unusable. Why? The texts of the ancient Greek geographer and historian
Photo credit:By Ann Wuyts [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
my point of view. If the human being whose life was destroyed with the advent of death was meant to revive in the Hereafter, so the objects had to ‘die’ to revive again. Death was considered to be the beginning of a new life. In this passage, the spirit of the deceased travelled to reach the heavenly abode where they would stay. On this trip, they needed to carry everything they would need.
Bronze Head of Seuthes III (end of 4th - beginning of 3rd c. B.C.), Golyama Kosmatka mound, Kazanlak
Herodotus shed light on this mystery. He claimed that whatever was destroyed or made unusable during funeral rites would become useful for the afterlife. The logic of this philosophy is overwhelming and beautiful, from 19
The most valuable thing for the elite of the Thracian warriors was their horse and their wife, though we do not really know in which order! So not only did they sacrifice their horse, but also their favourite wife.
Was it cruel? If, as the ancients used to say, the Thracians wept at births and cheerfully sang at their deaths, far from being a cruel act, the Thracians probably considered it an honour. In fact, wives are said to have argued over who would have the honour of being the chosen one. As the Greek poet Hesiod said: “When a husband dies, his wives, which are many for each one, argue in competition held by the determination of those who are their close friends and relatives, and claim them to be the deceased husband’s dearest one. The wife who comes out victorious and honoured with a judgement in her
favour, which is full of praise and applause of men and women, will be beheaded by a kin hand over the grave of her husband and is bur20
ied beside him, while the ones who lost the case, that is for them the greatest infamy, remain mourning their misfortune”.
Photo credit:By HM-ISKRA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Tomb of Seuthes III– the famous Thracian ruler of the Odrysian kingdom
Orphic Mysteries The Thracians worshipped Ares, the god of war; Sabazios, the sky father god; and had faith in the Sun, son of the goddess Bendis, the incarnation of perfection and immortality. The most popular cults were the Dionysian mysteries, which surely came to Greece from Thrace, along with the cult of Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries. Following Orpheus’ footsteps, I ascended to the top of a mountain to the ruins of an abandoned place called Perperikon in Southern Bulgaria. It is a real city temple, which can still be seen in the stone altars that were part of a temple dedicated to the God of wine and sexual ecstasy, known by the Greeks as Dionysus and Bacchus by the Romans. It is the most sacred and
Bacchus
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important place dedicated to the Dionysian cult, which consisted of sexual orgies and sacrifices. But Orpheus, who according to legend had been a disciple of Dionysus, argued against these practices in the name of Apollo, the god of reason. According to ancient legend, this act of defiance resulted in his conviction and murder at the hands of the mae-
cult proclaimed asceticism, was against sacrifice and taught the transmigration of souls Some archaeolo- and mankind’s capacgists maintain that the ity to experience the Thracians’ musician divine, although they god could have been had to be initiated in a real character who order to learn to break resided in the Bulgarian free and rise in a state Rhodope Mountains of “happy immortality”. and would had been Without being initiated, a Dionysian priest who one could not experihad access to hidden ence happiness in the knowledge of Egyptian afterlife. and oriental sages. His nads, the female followers of Dionysus.
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Photo credit:By Renaud71 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The ruins of the ancient city of Perperikon, Eastern Rhodopes
the Devil’s Throat The Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos wrote a poem referring to a woman who died without having access to the Orphic mysteries: “After you die, you will lie without anyone remembering or missing you with sorrow, because you did not enjoy the roses of Pieria. You will be ignored, as well, in the house of Hades, floating wandering among the dark deceased”. Was Sappho a follower of the Orphic mysteries? Possibly yes.
Candidates had to be accepted into the Orphic mysteries, which were esoteric and only disclosed to those who managed to be initiated. The initiates were required to then save and protect the knowledge they were taught. Sappho’s poems speak of reverence to the Orphic religion on more than one occasion, for instance, in one she speaks of rising over the affliction of death, considering it a sin to lament at the Muses’ Home, because as she said: “I’d rather die listening to this song (Orpheus with his lyre)…”. 23
The Head of Orpheus
According to mythology, Orpheus descended into the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, and did so through the Devil’s Throat, a cave in the Rhodope Mountains, South East Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church follows doctrines explained by the ancient creeds of the apostles, where it is described the moment in which Christ had to descend into hell to defeat the devil and release the righteous. Here, we see some parallels in the accounts of both Orpheus and Jesus. Both had to go down to the depths of hell, to “die” and to come back to life transformed. They both preached that humans have souls that would be judged at the moment of death and would pay for their actions. They both practiced ceremonies that included rituals such as turning water into wine. Furthermore, the brutal murder of Orpheus was considered a sacrifice to redeem mankind for its sins. The similarities are interesting to say the least. 24
A n A udience w ith J upiter the Lord o f the N ight S k y
by
John Baruch, Edward Hand, Chris Tallon, Dan Hedges. Bradford Robotic Telescope. University of Bradford UK.
john@telescope.org
Photo credit:NASA
O
ur computers take us into amazing worlds where anything is possible, but reality can also deliver the amazing. How about using computers to take us into the real world, to control robots that will take images for us of the far distant reaches of the Universe? One such robot is the Bradford Robotic Telescope, situated 25
high on the northern side of Mount Teide on the Spanish island of Tenerife at the Instituto Astrofisica Canarias Northern Hemisphere Observatory. This is one of the few autonomous robots available on the web: www.telescope.org. See below for a free offer code for you to use it with Ispectrum.
OBSERVE TOP SPRING OBJECTS WITH A ROBOTIC TELESCOPE Ispectrum has teamed up with the University of Bradford to bring you one month of access to their robotic telescope, free with this magazine. The Bradford Robotic Telescope is located in the best observing site in Europe, 8000ft above sea-level on the island of Tenerife. From this prime location, this fully-autonomous observatory takes pictures of the night sky. Unusually however, its main purpose isn’t academic research. Rather, it is taking images for members of the public, for school children and for amateur astronomers all
over the world, who are able to request images from the telescope via the website. These images are scheduled automatically and taken for you while you’re sleeping. Log on to the website a few days later and your very own images are waiting for you. All the raw data collected is available and online image processing tools are provided to make sure you get the most from your pictures.
What you can see
Jupiter Galileo turned his telescope onto Jupiter just as you can with the robotic telescope and was able to see the bright planet with its tiny family of moons just like the planets going around the Sun.
The Moon A favourite of astronomers for centuries, take a simple image of our nearest neighbour up close. Take detailed images of craters and watch as the moon changes of the lunar month.
The Hercules Globular Cluster Global clusters are among the oldest structures in the galaxy, around 11 billion years old. This one is thought to contain around 300,000 stars. Might there also be a black hole at its centre?
The Milky Way The Robotic Telescope comes equipped with two wide-field cameras. The widest is able to capture our own galaxy in all its glory. Glowing areas of star formation and dark obscuring dust show up clearly.
The Andromeda Galaxy The closest large galaxy to our own, Andromeda is on a collision course with our own galaxy. As a result it appears very large in the sky and makes a great target for the mid-field camera.
The Dumbbell Nebula This is a bright planetary nebula: the remnants of a dying star and a peek into the future of our own Sun. The red areas are ionised Hydrogen and Nitrogen, with Oxygen showing up in green.
HOW TO GET YOUR FREE MONTH’S ACCESS 1. Go to telescope.org 2. Enter the access code EUROPA 3. Try out imaging the six objects above 26 for one month
Photo:ŠBradford Robotic Telescope
Tell the telescope what you want it to do, and it will service your request and send it back to you without any human intervention. It collects all the requests, and as soon as it is dark, it checks the weather to see if it is safe to open its dome, schedules its observing and sets off. You can do real science with the telescope and follow in the footsteps of the pioneers like Galileo.
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The Bradford Robotic Telescope is located in the best observing site in Europe
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It was Galileo who made the first telescope following a rumour that a Dutch optician had built such an instrument. In his hands, the telescope changed the world. The date was January 1610. It was already known that the Earth was a sphere since Magellan had sailed around the world and returned in 1522 to be followed by the Englishman Drake in 1580. There was also the terrible idea published by Copernicus in 1543 that the Earth along with 29
all the other then known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) all circled the Sun just like the Earth, and like the earth by implication, they could easily have rivers, mountains, animals and people. The idea was terrible and clearly wrong for the guardians of thought since the Bible was quite clear. God only tried his hand at creation once, and it was here on this special place Earth – but the proof that the Earth was a sphere, both
Galileo Demonstrating the New Astronomical Theories at the University of Padua.
A replica of the earlest surviving telescope attributed to Galileo Galilei, on display at the Griffith Observatory.
the Magellan and the Drake expeditions had returned home sailing only west, unearthed some terrible implications. Heaven was clearly up there and hell down below, but if the Earth is a sphere, then the centre of the Universe as created by God was hell.
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Copernicus helped get out of this dilemma showing that ‘down below’ was not the centre of the universe – the Sun was. But there was the other terrible implication with the ideas of Copernicus that were even more unacceptable: the idea that there were other similar planets and Man was not alone in the Universe. For the Catholic Church this was too much, and Copernicus was clearly wrong; they would live with the hell conundrum. It was clearly
very hot just below the surface of the Earth since we had found volcanoes breathing fire. Copernicus must be wrong. Galileo with his telescope threatened to turn all this on its head in two ways. One was Venus: a clear proof that the planets did not go ‘round the Sun was that Venus hardly changed its brightness, and if it went around the Sun, it would surely be much brighter when it was near the Earth a n d fainter when it was far away; and a n y w a y, it would have phases like the Moon. No-one had seen anything like phases
with Venus, but Galileo with his telescope could see clear phases with Venus, which also explained the brightness. When Venus is near, it is apparently bigger, but only a small part of it is illuminated. When it is far away, it is smaller and fainter, but the whole disc is illumi-
nated. The size and the phase cancelled each other out and kept the brightness of Venus the same as it orbited the Sun. For the orthodox Catholic view the unvarying brightness of Venus was proof that it did not go ‘round the Sun, and only when Galileo could show the phases of Venus to everyone did these ideas change.
Venus
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Photo:ŠBradford Robotic Telescope The four largest satellites of Jupiter are easily seen in a small telescope and were first observed by Galileo.
The other more dramatic discovery involved Jupiter. After Venus, the Sun, and the Moon, Jupiter is the brightest object in the sky, and at the moment (spring 2015), it is prominent high in the sky in the
early evening. Galileo turned his telescope onto Jupiter just as you can with the robotic telescope and was able to see the bright planet with its tiny family of moons, just like the planets going around 32
the Sun. The faint line of dots of light change their position every night sometimes disappearing behind Jupiter or each other as Jupiter follows its majestic journey around the Sun. You can see these
Jupiter with its Great Red Spot, and Jupiter’s four largest moons, known as the Galilean satellites. From top to bottom, the moons shown are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The Great Red Spot, a storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere, is at least 300 years old. Source:Wikipedia
Photo credit:NASA
volcanic object in the solar system, blasting out sulphur with mountains higher than Everest. It orbits Jupiter in just under 2 days, but it is Europa that will probably receive the most attention because it has oceans under a thin surface of ice, and the general view is that liquid water is the best place to look for life.
moons and their daily motion the same as Galileo did. Ask the telescope to take images of Jupiter for a few days and you too will see these tiny spots of light move around the planet. Check exactly how to do it by finding images in the image gallery. With a bit of care and by using different exposures, you should also be able to see the Great Red Spot on Jupiter: a giant storm that has been raging for at least 400 years and which is big enough to engulf the Earth. The moons themselves are uniquely interesting; Io, the moon nearest Jupiter, is the most
With multiple requests to the telescope, you will be able to measure the orbital time of the moons of 33
he was shown the instruments of torture and forced to stop looking at the stars and remain silent about the motions of the planets around the Sun. He was pardoned in 1992 by Pope John Paul II. You can have all these delights for free unless you decide to subscribe. There are no instruments of torture‌ just £5 per month.
Jupiter and with some effort appreciate the first measurements of the velocity of light, since the time of disappearance of a moon behind Jupiter can be measured exactly and so can the orbital period. We need to add on the time the light takes to get to us; the distance from Jupiter to the Earth varies by the diameter of the Earth’s orbit: about 16 minutes in light time as we circle the Sun. You can enjoy a foray into the history of science and much more with the robotic telescope. For Galileo, he achieved everlasting fame, but in his lifetime, 34
“Orpheus with his Lute made Trees, And the Mountaine tops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing. To his Musicke, Plants and Flowers Ever spring; as Sunne and Showres, There had been a lasting Spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the Billowes of the Sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet Musicke is such Art, Killing care, and griefe of heart, Fall asleepe, or hearing dye.” - Shakespeare
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