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Binocular beauties Scan the summer skies

Amazing aurora Northern lights on the Prairies

n00bz in space Video games with an astro twist

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WHAT HOLDS GALAXIES TOGETHER? Canadian scientists wait for pandemic’s end to research true nature of dark matter PAGE 41

JULY/AUGUST 2021 • $7.99

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Waiting for dark When Canada reopens, its scientists may have their best chance yet at discovering the true nature of dark matter.

Ivan Semeniuk reports.

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Editor’s report Allendria Brunjes

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SkyNews briefs

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Reader gallery July/August star chart

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RASC spotlight

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Chris Vaughan explores the best non-Messier objects of the summer.

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This summer promises a prolific meteor shower and planetary meetups. Brian Ventrudo explains.

SharpStar’s new 94mm hits a sweet spot for aperture, price and portability. Read more

by Alan Dyer.

BEGINNER SKY

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Nicole Mortillaro focuses on easy-to-find summertime binocular targets.

Stuart Heggie

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Hacking your scope Blake Nancarrow has tips on how to tinker with your telescope.

Practical science Teachers are opening doors for students interested in real-world research.

Elizabeth Howell reports.

Summer of binos

Parting shot

EXPLORING THE NIGHT SKY

Perseids and giant oppositions

GEAR REVIEW

Sweet SharpStar

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BEYOND MESSIER

Warm weather sights

A marathon for all Warren Finlay encourages you to try a new-object star-hopping marathon.

James Edgar

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Apollo jubilee In July, Apollo 15 reaches its 50th anniversary since launch. Randy Attwood has more.

Letters to the editor

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F E AT U R E S

Games in space An aerospace engineer, an outreach coordinator and an editor walked into a video game spacecraft. What happened next?

ON THE COVER Alan Dyer shot this image of the Milky Way and galactic core area, pictured on July 27, 2020, over Mount Andromeda (left) and the Athabasca Glacier (right) in the Columbia Icefield, which straddles Alberta and British Columbia. This is an exposure blend of four 1.5-minutes frames untracked at f/2 at ISO 1600 for the ground, followed immediately by three 1.5-minute frames at f/2.8 and ISO 3200 for the sky. The sky exposures were tracked on the iOptron SkyGuider Pro tracker, and Dyer took all shots with the 20mm Sigma Art lens and Canon EOS Ra, with the lens adapted to the camera with a Metabones adapter.

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

D E PA R T M E N T S

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EDITOR’S REPORT

By Allendria Brunjes

The Cygnus Wall, a part of the North America Nebula (NGC 7000). The image is made of 80 fourminute exposures taken May 13 and 14, 2021, from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, using an Explore Scientific 127 FCD100 (f/7.5) telescope and a ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera. (Spilios Asimakopoulos)

Doomsday determinations AS I’M WRITING THIS , COVID-19 is still very much a factor in

my life and likely in yours, too. It consumes a lot of my time and mental space, as I worry about myself, my loved ones, my compatriots, the world on the whole. It’s a doomsday scenario come to life, one that governments worldwide have been planning a response to for decades and that I — even in the weeks preceding March 2020’s lockdowns in Canada — never expected to actually occur.

This issue has a few articles that talk about how the pandemic has affected our views of the Universe from here in Canada, and how professional and amateur astronomers are getting by.

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

“Waiting for dark” is about an international collaboration that was delayed due to COVID-19. Ivan Semeniuk writes that the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has been creating a next-generation dark matter detector housed at SNOLAB, which was supposed to go live this year but has been delayed until 2022. It’s Canada’s next best hope at discovering the true nature of dark matter, a kind of invisible glue that holds galaxies together.

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For those just starting out in astronomy in cities, it can be tough to learn about the stars when you can’t see many of them. While camping and escaping city lights may not be on the agenda for most of us due to travel restrictions, in “Beginner sky,” Nicole Mortillaro has provided a list of binocular targets visible even from bright urban areas.

From the Hercules Cluster to the Sagittarius Star Cloud, she’s got a great list of sights for newbie astronomers.

Speaking of newbies — or n00bz — if you’re looking for a different way to interact with your friends in an astronomical

way while being socially distant, check out “Games in space.”

Jenna Hinds, Benoit Larouche and I spent a few nights playing multiplayer astronomy-related games while on Zoom.

These LAN parties of the 21st century were an excellent way to be social without being together.

I read a story like “Grades of outer space,” about students across Canada helping conduct citizen science projects, and I’m reminded that while we’re sitting at home, we can all play a part in the science that investigates our little world and its surroundings.

All that said, COVID-19 is not the only doomsday scenario we face. Another potential disaster that is currently being researched around the globe is an asteroid hitting Earth.

In the SkyNews brief “OSIRIS-REx heading back to Earth,” Theo Nicitopoulos writes about how the mission is uncovering details about the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, not only revealing what’s hidden beneath but contributing to planetary defense.

Similarly to how research into COVID-19 and vaccines has opened entirely new fields of science, research into nearEarth objects has peeled back layers to our Solar System’s beginnings and the origins of our planet — and how we can protect it from doom.

And so, at the risk of sounding like a YouTube video stuck on repeat, my column in this issue has again looked at the problems we’re facing and the hope on the horizon. Despite everything going on, we can continue studying the Universe and our place in it while trying to be safe, healthy and supportive of one another. •

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Randy Attwood is an amateur astronomer and space exploration historian. He is the former executive director of The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Mercurial adventures After reading “This Week’s Sky” articles online by Chris Vaughan about this spring’s appearance of Mercury, I thought I would share my experiences with the little planet.

On April 24, Mercury was supposed to be visible with optical aids quite close to Venus, so I thought I should take my chance. Being a permanent resident in Canada and an Austrian citizen, I am in Austria, about 100 kilometres southwest of Vienna, until the end of June. We are living here in a valley at about 680 metres elevation. The landscape toward the southwestern horizon is quite low, as the valley stretches in this direction. Unfortunately, to northwest — where Venus and Mercury would set this night — there are mountains up to 1,400 metres blocking the view.

I knew I had to get up to an elevated area on the opposite side of the valley to get the required lower horizon. There is a spot, sitting at about 1,000 metres in elevation, which seemed good enough for me and which can be relatively easily reached within one hour.

Dusk sky, April 24, 2021

Mercury?

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

The next question was which kind of instrument to take with me. I decided to take the camera Canon PowerShot SX70 HS. Its zoom lens corresponds to 1,365mm, which helps to find objects in a still-bright sky within a maximum of 30 minutes after sunset.

Though the sky was not very clear, there were openings and I really could find bright Venus in the excellent viewfinder of this camera. I could never discover Mercury, though it was relatively bright at about -1.7. Checking the photos, I found a little dot where Mercury should have been relative to Venus — but I am not sure if this dot is really caused by Mercury or if it is just a pixel failure.

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May 3 was the next clear evening and so I tried again.

This time, the skies were really clear. Of course, I could find Venus again before Mercury. After Venus had set behind the mountains, I could really spot Mercury, maybe five minutes later. This time, I used my Canon EOS Ra with a 200mm lens. It should be mentioned that focus peaking helped to find Mercury. When Mercury was close to setting (a little bit more than 30 minutes later), the Pleiades were already vaguely visible on the monitor of the camera.

Mercury’s brightness had dimmed to about -0.9 compared to April 24. Mercury was visible to the naked eye, if you knew where to look.

Venus and perhaps Mercury, April 24, 2021

These were my little adventures with Mercury.

Gerhard Salhenegger Mürzzuschlag, Austria

Mercury and the Pleiades, May 3, 2021

SKYNEWS BRIEFS The image on the far left shows a supernova discovery in a galaxy called 2MASX J02235170+2121302.

The image to the left shows a supernova discovery in Galaxy NGC 5157.

Both images were captured using the GSNST survey’s 17-inch Planewave telescope (f/6.8) and FLI Proline 16803 CCD camera. In both images, the fuzzy spots near the marked points are the galaxies where the supernova events were found.

In search of stellar explosions Canadian researcher Malhar Kendurkar, discoverer of 94 supernovae last year, talks about launching the Global SuperNova Search Team

story. My hunt for these celestial events is really a kind of search for where we came from and how the early Universe formed and expanded.

supernovae. Today, GSNST consists of nine astronomers from Canada, France, India, the United States and Argentina, with telescopes located in Canada, France, Spain, Chile, Argentina and the United States. I am serving as principal investigator from Canada.

When a star explodes, it shoots elements and debris into space. These particles form new stars, planets and everything else in the Universe. Searching for and studying high-redshift supernovae will lead us to a greater understanding of the early Universe.

The GSNST team conducts all-sky surveys, scanning the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres every three days to search for astronomical transients, such as novae and supernovae, as well as the optical counterparts of gammaray bursts and gravitational waves.

As an observational astronomer, I began my research in astronomy in 2014. Having always been fascinated by the night sky, my passion for pursuing astronomy and astrophysics began when I was completing high school, and it was the driving force behind my chosen field of study in post-secondary education. After discovering my first variable star in 2017, I decided to monitor supernovae discoveries through professional sky surveys. I began studying supernovae and published papers in peer-reviewed journals like the Information Bulletin on Variable Stars and The Astrophysical Journal Letters in collaboration with research institutions like the California Institute of Technology and Ohio State University.

In 2020, the team discovered four supernovae, and I discovered 94. So far this year, I have discovered 36 supernovae.

We haven’t found any transients; we hope to find a rare transient this year, or maybe a gamma-ray burst like we found last year.

NEARS ITS DEATH — are intricately tied to Earth’s origin

Analyzing the data helps us to know intrinsic and extrinsic details of any astronomical objects, in contrast to studying a single object in space. The sky surveys produce a grander scope of the Universe by way of examining hundreds of galaxies each night.

Since 2018, I have monitored over 14,000 galaxies, and to date, I have discovered 143 supernovae.

In 2018, I launched the Global SuperNova Search Team (GSNST) with just two researchers, one in Canada and the other in France, to search for supernovae. In the first year of scanning the skies, I discovered three supernovae and was moved to focus my research primarily on time domain astronomy — the study of how astronomical objects (supernovae, novae, variability of accreting black holes, variable stars) change with time.

Going forward in 2021, GSNST is set to discover 200 supernovae and additionally increase variable star discoveries. We’re constantly evolving, and I am actively procuring research grant opportunities to build six robotic telescopes in northern British Columbia to advance the search for astronomical transients in Canada — and hopefully, in so doing, gain a greater understanding of the early Universe. →

GSNST is the first sky survey in Canada dedicated to the search for astronomical transients and the first international project launched in Canada to search for and study

— Malhar R. Kendurkar is the president of The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Prince George Centre and a principal investigator on the Global SuperNova Search Team.

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

SUPERNOVAE — STELLAR EXPLOSIONS THAT OCCUR AS A STAR

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SKYNEWS BRIEFS

OSIRIS-REx heading back to Earth The OSIRIS-REx mission continues to shed light on what near-Earth asteroid Bennu’s surface is like, including what’s hidden beneath, contributing to planetary defence billion measurements that were used to create a highresolution 3D model of the asteroid.

NASA’S OSIRIS-REX SPACECRAFT IS HEADING BACK TO EARTH

after spending more than two years studying asteroid Bennu, conducting in-depth surveys and a touch-and-go to collect a precious sample of the rocky surface.

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, SecurityRegolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) left Bennu’s vicinity on May 10, almost seven months after the spacecraft’s robotic arm punched into the surface of Bennu’s Nightingale Crater and fired a charge of pressurized nitrogen gas to blast fine-grained debris into the sample return capsule.

Above: A view of the Nightingale sample site from March 7, 2019.

Below: An image of the Nightingale sample site taken on April 7, 2021, after OSIRIS-REx’s October touch-and-go maneuver. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

The calculation shows that Bennu’s bulk density is quite low, meaning that there is a lot of empty space within the asteroid. OLA’s shape model was also used to examine the craters on Bennu to gain insight into what could be beneath the surface. Some of the crater shapes showed that there could be large boulders of higher strength, along with a north-south distribution of large subsurface boulders, Daly said.

On April 15, NASA released images from before and after the touch-and-go, with images from an April 7 flyover clearly showing that the spacecraft left its imprint on Bennu in the form of a small crater and a dislodged boulder.

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

“We weren’t sure if the amount of energy that we put into the surface with the impact would be enough to see a visible mark,” said Ronald Ballouz, planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. “But we definitely changed the surface — and the car-sized boulder that was kicked up was definitely a surprise.”

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The post-touch-and-go survey is also helping to understand what is holding Bennu’s surface together. The mission team is currently examining the observations to see whether the asteroid’s surface is held together by cohesion — think about how flour can clump together, Ballouz said — or if the rubble on Bennu’s surface is just held together by the asteroid’s weak gravity, which is 100,000 times weaker than gravity on Earth.

Survey data is providing clues about what is beneath Bennu’s surface. The OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA), which the Canadian Space Agency contributed, collected close to three

“With OLA, we produced a very high-quality and accurate shape model that allowed us to refine the calculation of Bennu’s bulk density to include the volume of all of the terrain features, including the boulders and craters,” said Michael Daly, lead instrument scientist for OLA and director of the Centre for Research in Earth and Space Science at York University.

All of this information is important, as Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid and also a potentially hazardous object, with latest calculations showing a 1-in-2,700 chance that Bennu will impact the Earth between the years 2175 and 2196.

While the chance of Bennu and Earth colliding is very low, orbits of asteroids can drift over time. One factor is the Yarkovsky effect, when heat from sunlight is emitted off the surface of an asteroid, creating a small thrust that can change the asteroid’s orbit. OLA shape data will help predict Bennu’s future orbit and Earth-impact probability. As well, the April flyover data also shows how OSIRIS-REx interacted with the surface, providing information on how much material was moved and agitated for a known input energy. This could certainly help if we ever need to nudge Bennu’s orbit, Ballouz said.

— Theo Nicitopoulos

SKYNEWS BRIEFS

SPACEX, ONEWEB, AMAZON, TELESAT

— these companies plan to send up constellations of mini-satellites in the coming years to provide broadband access to underserved areas, like those in Canada; however, a new report by Canadian scientists warns that we need to preserve our skies for scientific and cultural reasons.

The submission to the government of Canada and the Canadian Space Agency was led by Aaron Boley, Canada Research Chair in Planetary Astronomy at the University of British Columbia.

“Enhancing search and rescue capabilities and connectivity throughout the world are non-trivial things that we can’t just discount,” Boley said. “At the same time, we’ve got to make sure that whatever is put out there is done in a way that does not preclude us from continuing to develop space and does not severely damage the night sky.”

The report urges Canada to work on a “dark and quiet skies” report on both national and international levels. It suggests that Canada update broadcasting licences for companies providing internet, television or similar satellite services in Canada. For example, Canada could stipulate it will only accept services if the satellite broadcasting the signal is dark-sky compliant.

Canada on board for James Webb Space Telescope TEN CANADIANS HAVE BEEN SELECTED

to lead teams that will use the James Webb Space Telescope for scientific observations, with another 72 serving as co-investigators.

Webb is the next generation of space observatory, orbiting in a stable location between the Earth and the Sun — a Lagrange point — to peer far into the Universe. Its work will be vast, encompassing areas like studying exoplanet atmospheres, refining the cosmos’s expansion rate and learning about how early galaxies were formed. The telescope is expected to launch this fall, if final preparations go to plan, and after a commissioning period it will lean hard into scientific work around 2022.

Given Webb’s huge span of capability and the long wait time to get it in space — it was supposed to launch in 2007, but faced a few technical, logistical and budgetary problems along the way — the telescope has a huge backlog of interest from scientists eager to stretch their research with the new capabilities.

“Anyone in the world could put in a proposal,” said Sarah Gallagher, an astronomy professor at Western University who also serves as the science advisor to the president of the Canadian Space Agency.

“We have gotten a lot of support, and I’m very happy to say that we have had contact with the Canadian Space Agency about it, as well as Global Affairs Canada, to discuss it further,” Boley said of the report, which was put online in pre-publication format in March.

Canada is allocated a certain amount of minimum telescope time because of its hardware contributions to the telescope. The accepted Canadian proposals include study of objects like black holes, galaxies and extrasolar solar systems as well as the fundamentals of star physics, endeavouring to follow up on previous observations done by Canadian teams. •

— Elizabeth Howell

— Elizabeth Howell

Stay informed on the latest in Canadian space news at skynews.ca

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

Canadian astronomers urge action on satellite constellations

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March’s magnetic onslaught This year, Canada’s prairie provinces saw northern lights dance across nights of crystal clear skies around the spring equinox. Here’s a sampling of images caught by SkyNews readers across Alberta.

STRATHCONA SOUVENIR

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

Lukas Gornisiewicz was driving in Strathcona County, Alberta, late on March 19, 2021, when he noticed the wave of light heading up the horizon in the northern part of the sky.

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“I checked the spaceweather.com website and it stated that the aurora KP was already at 6, and a G2 storm was in progress,” he said. “Over the course of the night, the aurora went right overhead, and the northern lights were venting in the sky through the entire night.”

Gornisiewicz said the aurora lasted over four hours, with the best part occurring March 20, 3 a.m. to 4:30 a.m.

He said he took his images with a Canon 60D camera and a Sigma 10mm f/2.8 DC HSM Fisheye lens.

↑ AURORAL ANTIQUE March and April were busy months for astrophotographer Siv Heang Tav. The part-time server by day and astrophotographer by night spent the season capturing the Milky Way and aurora borealis, sharing her beautiful photos and videos of the night sky through social media.

Heang took this image of the aurora near Kathryn, Alberta, during a moderate G2-class geomagnetic storm on the night of March 19-20, 2021.

← BEST SHOW IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Learn more about forecasting and how to see the northern lights at skynews.ca/aurora-watch

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

Vincent McDermott doesn’t need a fancy camera to capture a memory. The Fort McMurray, Alberta, journalist used his iPhone 11 to take this shot of the northern lights show, visible from his neighbourhood early on March 20, 2021.

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ROVING THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON Apollo 15, a mission focused on lunar exploration and science, reaches its 50th anniversary since launch

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

By Randy Attwood

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Apollo 15 lunar module pilot James Irwin (left) and commander David Scott (centre) pose on the 1-g training rover. Command module pilot Al Worden stands next to the rover with his left hand on the subsatellite. (NASA)

Irwin, the United States flag, the rover, and the lunar module, with the Mount Hadley Delta in the background. (NASA)

IN THE SPRING OF 1971, the Apollo program was in full swing. The successful Apollo 14 mission had restored NASA’s confidence after Apollo 13’s failure in 1970. There were only three missions to the Moon left, and they were to concentrate on lunar exploration and science.

It was in this environment that 50 years ago this summer — on July 26, 1971 — the Apollo 15 mission began. Its landing site was in the Imbrium Basin, surrounded by large mountains and beside a sinuous trench where geologists hoped to find remnants of the large body that struck the Moon and formed the basin.

Three days after launch, the astronauts were in orbit around the Moon. On July 30, the crew made a perfect landing. After a night’s rest, the crew crawled out of the lunar module (LM) and began exploring. Upon setting foot on the Moon, commander David Scott exclaimed, “Man must explore, and this is exploration at its greatest!”

During the three-day mission, the crew would carry out three lunar excursions, deploy surface experiments and collect rock and soil samples. Apollo 15 was the first mission to carry a vehicle to the Moon, allowing the crew to travel farther, carry more equipment and collect more rock samples. It even had a navigation system, which would help them in their lunar excursions.

Scott was the commander on this all-Air Force astronaut crew. He had flown before on Gemini 8 with Neil Armstrong and on Apollo 9. The other two crew members were space rookies: James Irwin would land on the Moon with Scott, and Alfred Worden would stay in the command and service module (CSM) in lunar orbit.

The astronauts first took a drive to Hadley Rille, a lunar trench geologists thought may be volcanic in origin. The lunar rover carried a communications system that could

A view of the scientific instrument module bay from the lunar module. (NASA)

transmit voice and data, along with live colour television, directly to Earth. Mission Control controlled the camera, so as the crew worked collecting samples, the television panned and zoomed in on the crew and interesting lunar features. The quality of the television was much better than the quality during the previous missions. You could clearly see the astronauts bounding across the lunar surface kicking up dust.

After a couple of hours of collecting samples, the crew returned to the LM and set up a series of surface experiments, which would work for months after they left, transmitting the results directly to Earth.

While Scott and Irwin explored the lunar surface, Worden used high-resolution cameras in lunar orbit to take pictures of various features of the lunar surface.

Over the next two days, Scott and Irwin used the lunar rover to visit various areas. Near the end of their visit, Scott performed a demonstration: in full view of a television audience, he simultaneously dropped a geology hammer and a falcon feather in the lunar vacuum. They hit the ground at the same time, proving Galileo’s theory that all objects fall at the same speed in a vacuum.

Before leaving the Moon, the crew parked the lunar rover 150 metres east of the LM so the rover’s camera could provide the first live view of a lunar liftoff.

Once Apollo 15 was safely home, NASA could look forward to 1972, when astronauts would make the last two trips to the Moon and NASA would approve the post-Apollo space shuttle. There were no plans to return to the Moon; the shuttle and ultimately the International Space Station would consume most of NASA’s budget for the next 50 years. It is only now that there are new exploration programs in development, which will return astronauts to the Moon this decade. •

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

This frame from Irwin’s pan shows the view south along Hadley Rille. Scott is reaching under his rover seat to get the Hasselblad camera equipped with a 500mm lens. (NASA)

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Introducing the NOSH marathon Not the right place or right time for a Messier marathon? Try a newobject star-hopping marathon

The author, with his favourite nosh in hand, waiting for darkness before doing a NOSH marathon. He says the best part of a NOSH marathon is that you get to choose a nosh to snack on during your night of observing.

By Warren Finlay THE MESSIER MARATHON, which involves observing all the Messier objects in a single night, is an all-night affair that is mostly about being in the right place at the right time. It requires having a cloudfree night during a five-day new Moon window in March, and observing from a location within a couple thousand kilometres of 25 degrees north latitude. For most amateur astronomers, it’s not a realizable observing challenge.

This is why I’ve instead mostly been doing NOSH (new-object star-hopping) marathons. The goal of a NOSH marathon is to observe, in one night, as many objects that you’ve never seen before as possible, all found by star hopping.

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

The NOSH marathon levels the playing field between advanced and beginning observers, since if you’re an experienced observer, your new objects will be dim and hard to find. If instead you’re a newer observer, you’ll be finding brighter objects, but your star-hopping skills probably won’t be as speedy.

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A NOSH marathon can be done at any time of year. It also doesn’t have the set-instone finish line of the Messier marathon — whatever number of new objects you observe in a night of NOSHing is a success.

And the best part of a NOSH marathon?

You get to choose a nosh to snack on during your night of observing.

Finally, if star hopping isn’t your thing, you can just do a new-object marathon with GoTo or digital setting circles. But that’s a “NO marathon,” which unfortunately doesn’t involve nosh.

TIPS

I’ve done quite a few NOSH marathons over the years, so I’d like to share some tips with you.

CHOOSING TARGETS

Most important is your choice of possible target objects. Observing planning software is a real help here, as are the usual compiled observing lists of brighter objects. Personally, I like to choose most of my new objects directly from the NGC and IC lists, but here you need to be careful since there are quite a few nonexistent and duplicate objects, as well as inaccurate magnitudes in some planetarium software that can mislead you when making your list. Wolfgang Steinicke’s Revised NGC and IC list (klima-luft.de/steinicke/ngcic/ngcic_e.htm) is helpful in this regard. The website cometchasing.skyhound.com lists the latest comets; consider adding one or two you haven’t seen. Also, check rochesterastronomy.org/supernova.html to see if there is a new supernova that you could add to your list of targets.

DOING A TRIAL RUN

Regarding the number of objects to observe — I suggest you do a trial run on just a few new objects to estimate your average time per object.

Really skilled star hoppers might average a few minutes per object, but newer observers might take considerably longer. And if you think you’re a hotshot star hopper, consider that Arizona astronomer Don Machholz averaged 52 seconds an object while star hopping to 599 deep-sky objects during his “massive marathon” in a single night on April 3-4, 1981! To be fair, Don had seen all the objects before, so it wasn’t a NOSH marathon, but it’s still an impressive feat. William Herschel’s “night of discovery,” which is the basis for the Herschel Sprint, involved 74 new objects in one night. But Herschel didn’t actively star hop; instead, he let objects drift into his scope. For your first NOSH marathon, a reasonable goal is probably something like a few dozen targets.

KEEPING TRACK

An essential part of NOSH marathons is keeping an up-to-date searchable database of all objects you’ve ever observed. I use a simple spreadsheet, but observing planning software also works here. And if you can’t get to a dark site to observe the deep sky, you can make a list of a couple dozen double stars or features on the Moon that you’ve never observed and still do a NOSH marathon. •

By Alan Dyer

GEAR REVIEW

A new name in premium telescopes, SharpStar offers a range of refractors, with their new 94mm hitting a sweet spot for aperture, price and portability.

Above: The SharpStar 94EDPH can be used visually with the included 2-inch and 1.25-inch adapters. With the optional 0.8x reducer (above, left side of telescope), the telescope can take wide images of deep-sky fields, such as Messier 35 and IC 443 in Gemini, shown here.

Nicely filling the bill is the SharpStar 94EDPH, a 94mm apochromatic refractor with a fast focal ratio of f/5.5. It is one of the newest models from SharpStar Optics based in Jia-Xing, China.

Mechanics The SharpStar’s included clamshell-style tube ring comes with a convenient carrying handle, slotted for bolting on other accessories. The ring also holds a small dovetail shoe compatible with the Sky-Watcher standard for finderscope brackets. No finder is included, so count on adding a red dot finder for using the telescope visually.

The 2-inch focuser is a very smooth rack-and-pinion unit with dual-speed action for both coarse and 10:1 fine focusing, →

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REVIEWING A SHARPSTAR REFRACTOR

I’VE LONG MAINTAINED that a refractor with an apochromatic (colour-free) lens in the 4-inch (100mm) aperture class is the perfect portable telescope for both observing and imaging. If I were restricted to owning only one telescope (heaven forbid!), it would be such an instrument.

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SharpStar 94EDPH

sharpstar-optics.com/index.php/en

Flattener photo performance An unprocessed “out-ofcamera” image (opposite right) of the Coma Star Cluster in Coma Berenices, taken during twilight, shows the slight corner vignetting. The closeup (at right) shows the superb sharpness of stars in the corners of a full frame camera, a Canon EOS Ra.

Field flattener and filter

Altitude-azimuth mounting For those who would like full GoTo functions for visual use, the SharpStar 94mm mates well to Sky-Watcher’s AZ-GTi mount. (See the review in the September/October 2020 issue of SkyNews.)

Star diagonals and eyepieces are usersupplied.

The field flattener/ reducer is a required option for imaging.

Its tube separates to reveal internal threads that accept a 2-inch (48mm) filter. On the camera side, the reducer accepts T-rings with wide M48 threads.

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Equatorial mounting

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For those who wish to explore astrophotography, the Sky-Watcher EQM-35 equatorial mount would be a solid yet light and portable choice. It is shown here with an autoguider and Wi-Fi controller from ZWO.

Available at select dealers in Canada and the U.S.

PLUSES

MINUSES

CAN $1,700 for optical tube assembly with case CAN $420 for optional 0.8× flattener/reducer

Excellent optics and mechanics

Very slight residual false colour

I judged the SharpStar’s colour correction, while very good, a notch down from the best. But keep in mind, the best costs two to three times what the SharpStar 94EDPH does.

On cool spring nights, the same star tests revealed no sign of astigmatism, and just a trace of spherical aberration. Stars snapped into sharp focus with near textbook-perfect Airy disk patterns. At low power with a premium Tele Vue 41mm Panoptic eyepiece, stars were tack sharp across an impressive 5.4-degree field of view.

I consider the SharpStar a terrific value in an apo refractor that will provide great views of the Moon, planets, double stars and deep-sky objects.

The entire focuser can be rotated to place the focus knobs at a convenient angle. The back of the focuser is also equipped with a camera-angle adjuster for framing photographic fields.

Rotating the camera does not shift focus.

The locking dew cap extends seven centimetres to protect the main lens, but retracts to make the tube 44 centimetres long for transport. The 94EDPH comes with an aluminum case just big enough for the telescope, but with no room for visual or astrophotography accessories.

Optics The 94mm uses a triplet objective lens with two elements made of low-dispersion ED glass. However, the exact grade of glass — as spec refractor aficionados like to know — is not disclosed. Under demanding star tests, bright stars and the Moon’s limb showed negligible false colour when in focus; there were no blue halos as there are on achromatic refractors or even some doublet apos.

When racking through focus, the diffraction patterns of bright stars showed a magenta rim inside focus and a cyan tint outside focus. In side-by-side tests with my classic 105mm f/6 Astro-Physics Traveler and the original Astro-Tech TMB f/5.5 92mm from Astronomics, the SharpStar ranked third for colour correction, with the other two apos showing very little — if any — colour in their defocused diffraction disks.

Such perfection, requiring the use of the most premium glass, yields excellent depth of field — as star images shift in and out of focus with the seeing conditions, no colour appears.

With the SharpStar, I did see flashes of false colour under wobbly seeing conditions.

Astrophotography The beauty of most refractors is that they work equally well for photography. Reflectors often need to be optimized just for imaging, with features such as oversized secondary mirrors that compromise their visual use.

However, with a few exceptions, most refractors do require the addition of an accessory field-flattener lens to ensure stars record as pinpoints across the camera frame.

The 94mm is complemented by an optional four-element flattener, which also reduces the focal ratio by 0.8× to a fast f/4.4. This produces an equivalent focal length of 414mm and a generous field of 5 by 3.3 degrees with a full-frame camera.

The combination worked very well. While not perfect, edge sharpness was certainly better than I see with many of my refractor/reducer combinations. This is a telescope ideal for deep-sky imaging, but you can also enjoy just looking through it.

Recommendations As do most apo refractors, the SharpStars come only as tube assemblies, but with Vixen dovetail plates compatible with most mounts. For grab-and-go visual use, you could mate the 94mm to an altitude-azimuth mount such as Sky-Watcher’s manual AZ5.

For astrophotography use, the SharpStar 94EDPH could form the core of a deep-sky imaging rig, with an equatorial mount, autoguider and accessories, for about CAN $4,000, not including the all-important camera.

In all, if I had to give up all my scopes but one, I think I could be very happy living with the 94mm SharpStar to serve all my telescopic needs. •

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the latter perfect for precisely focusing cameras. The focuser can be locked down when heavy eyepieces or cameras are attached.

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By Nicole Mortillaro

BEGINNER SKY

SUMMER SKY BINOCULAR BEAUTIES

Messier 11 “Wild Duck Cluster”

Messier 10 Globular Cluster

Scutum

Ophiuchus

Messier 8 “Lagoon Nebula”

Globular clusters are made of dim, distant stars.

Through binoculars, they will look like faint smudges.

Take a look at the July/August 2020 issue of SkyNews for a wonderful article, “Choosing beginner binoculars” if you’re looking for some tips on buying a decent pair of binos.

Sagittarius

Scorpius

Corona Australis

Toronto, Ontario • July 16, 2021, 12 a.m. EDT

Messier 24 “Sagittarius Star Cloud”

1 Who among us doesn’t love summer nights — as brief as they may be — and just sitting beneath the stars, perhaps with the sound of crickets nearby and the brief flash of fireflies punctuating the calmness?

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This is our second “pandemic summer.” And while there may be light at the end of the tunnel, we’re looking for ways to spend time outdoors and soak up all we can safely before the cooler weather is once again upon us and we’re forced to spend more time indoors.

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You may also be looking for activities to enjoy with the family, and luckily, astronomy is a great one that everyone can enjoy. Yes, lying under the curtain of stars (if you’re fortunate enough to escape city lights) is wonderful, but perhaps you’d like to take a closer look at what’s in the sky.

Not everyone can afford to buy a telescope, but binoculars are a great, relatively inexpensive way to see the cosmos. And, even better, there are a lot of summertime targets to enjoy using binoculars. Let’s take a look at just some you can find.

Looking at the centre of our Galaxy Sagittarius and Scorpius are front and centre in the southern sky in July and August, and as they’re located at the heart of the Milky Way, they’re both rich with nebulae and stunning star clusters — both open and globular.

I’m going to mention a few of them here, but I recommend taking a pair of binoculars and scanning the region. Even in the light-polluted city of Toronto, you will be quite amazed at just how densely packed the area is. Last July, while looking for Comet NEOWISE, I turned my binoculars to the south, over Lake Ontario, and was gobsmacked with what I could see. (Fig. 1) One of the most obvious things in Sagittarius is Messier 24, or the Sagittarius Star Cloud. It’s actually quite pronounced, particularly under dark skies and can be found at the tip of the “teapot lid” of Sagittarius. The cloud lies roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth and is about 600 light-years wide. In binoculars, roughly 1,000 stars are visible.

The Lagoon Nebula is a bright emission nebula and star-forming region that lies about 4,000 light-years from us. Binoculars will reveal an open cluster within: NGC 6530, which lies almost directly in the centre of the nebula itself.

In nearby Scutum, you can also find the Wild Duck Cluster, or Messier 11, a beautiful open cluster that is a stunning sight through binoculars. It contains roughly 3,000 stars, making it one of the densest open clusters in the night sky.

Hercules Messier 13 “Hercules Cluster”

Corona Borealis

Ursa Major

Clusters, clusters, clusters Looking towards Ophiuchus, you can find Messier 10, a globular cluster. This one is a dimmer glob, but a pair of binoculars and a decent dark sky should reveal its densely packed core.

But there are two stunning globulars that you can find even in moderately dark skies: Messiers 13 and 3. (Fig. 2) Messier 13, the great Hercules Cluster, is second to none when it comes to globular clusters in northern latitudes.

Only Omega Centauri — which is visible from extreme southern latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere — is better.

Messier 13 holds roughly 100,000 stars and lies about 25,000 light-years from us. In extremely dark-sky conditions, you

Star charts by Allendria Brunjes (Stellarium)

Sagittarius and Scorpius rise above Lake Ontario. (Malcolm Park)

Draco

Boötes Arcturus

Messier 3 Globular Cluster

Canes Venatici

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might even be able to pick out this monster without the aid of binoculars.

Nearby is Messier 3, found in Canes Venatici. The easiest way to find it is by looking for Arcturus, the brightest star in Boötes and looking to the star’s right, by about 10 degrees.

While not as bright as Messier 13, it’s another globular treat.

Planets!

In August, you can find Saturn and Jupiter rising in the southeast about an hour after sunset. Unfortunately, they don’t get much higher in the sky than about 30 degrees, and even then only around 2 a.m. But if you’re keen on staying up until the wee hours of the night, they make a great sight.

You might even be able to make out Saturn’s pancake shape through binoculars, but with Jupiter, you can have even more fun. Binoculars reveal four of Jupiter’s brightest moons — Io, Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. But these moons don’t stay put. Instead, they orbit Jupiter and change position night after night. Take out the binoculars to see their movement over a week. It’s a fun exercise!

And finally, let’s not forget our nearest neighbour, the Moon.

Binoculars are a fantastic way to change the Moon from a flat, bright dish-like object in the sky to one where you can make out craters and peaks among the lunar maria (seas). I would recommend waiting for a quarter Moon and avoiding a full one, as a full Moon is extremely bright through binoculars and will, of course, ruin your night vision. So maybe keep this one for last.

Happy viewing! • Read “Show our Moon some love” in our September/October 2020 issue of SkyNews for more lunar viewing tips!

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Nearby, and a little bit to the right of the teapot lid, is Messier 8, also known as the Lagoon Nebula. This is another fairly obvious target and can be seen as having a bit of a reddish colour to it.

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By Blake Nancarrow

Blake Nancarrow’s Celestron SP-C8 on its Vixen Super Polaris equatorial mount.

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1a

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Tinkerer Blake Nancarrow regularly fixes objects and makes new things.

Here are his tips on transferring those skills to your telescope

1b

A close-up of Vixen mount’s new declination vernier and polar axis time plates, which Nancarrow designed, printed and secured to his telescope, with the help of a few other Vixen owners.

WHEN I BOUGHT MY FIRST TELESCOPE IN 1990, I didn’t know it was missing

3

Nancarrow’s polar scope cover, coming into existence out of a 3D printer.

4

The design for Nancarrow’s camera holder for the awkwardly positioned finder scope.

TIP:

Keep your eyes darkadapted. Save the small pieces of red plastic wrapper from Babybel cheese to cover bright blue, green and yellow LED lights on your laptop, power supplies and other accessories.

pieces — so I made them. When I started regularly multitasking during clear evenings, observing visually while imaging for aurora or star trails, I made a second dew heater controller. And when my commercial replacement eyepiece dew strap broke, I made a new one.

I created my own star tracker with an integrated altitude-azimuth base, eyepiece cases and portable 12-volt power tanks. I have modified power and data cables, head lamps, tripod clamps and power supplies.

We live in an amazing time. We can read paper materials, watch instructional videos and participate in forums of like-minded people all around the world and do more than we can imagine. A determined person can make 3D parts, build electronic circuits and program computers. They can hack something to improve it, all the while saving money, reducing waste and learning new skills.

A measure of success When I had finally saved up the money, I bought a Celestron SP-C8 at a consignment sale (Figs. 1a and 1b).

This was my dream telescope, relatively compact with a decent aperture.

I procured the 8-inch SchmidtCassegrain atop a Vixen Super Polaris equatorial mount from EfstonScience in Toronto. In short order, I learned its features, viewing nebulae and planets and imaging the Moon.

Years later, I found out the used telescope was missing pieces.

On comparing my mount to photos on the internet, I discovered the declination vernier and polar axis time plates were missing. The old glue had failed. No doubt, this contributed to

my frustration trying to use the setting circles and made polar alignment nearly impossible.

I reached out to fellow owners, asking for close-up photos, and a few Vixen owners helped me out. I fired up Adobe Illustrator, carefully adjusted the drawing scale, and printed new plates. In fact, I updated the declination vernier with additional tick marks to allow for greater accuracy. I secured the paper plates under packing tape to resist water (Fig. 2).

3D print jobs When I purchased the telescope, I did not receive the polar scope’s skyward port cover nor the rearward eyepiece cap. Determined to fix this, I enrolled in free 3D printing classes and used the local public library’s digital innovation lab equipment.

My first 3D-printed object was the top port cover. It was a simple design in AutoDesk 123D, but I was exhilarated. This object simply hadn’t existed before. I designed it on a computer — and 12 minutes, four grams of PLA plastic and less than a dollar later, I had a useful part for my telescope. Later, with help from Royal Astronomical Society of Canada member Ward LeGrow, his Ender printer and orly_andico’s rearward cap (Fig. 3) data file on the Thingiverse website, at last I had all the missing pieces.

I didn’t stop there.

My current grab-and-go, the Meade ETX 90 telescope, has a ludicrously tiny, straight-through 8 × 21 finder scope that is impossible to use. You can’t get close enough. When you do, you either move the scope, or it’s positioned in a back-breaking, neck-kinking way that only a Cirque du Soleil performer can use. →

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2

21

5

6

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TIP: Need a new case for your expanding eyepiece collection? Pop into your local department store hardware section and pick up an inexpensive aluminium tool case. Then visit a furniture store for some foam sheets. Remove the tops from cleaned food cans (careful, they are sharp) for circular cutting tools.

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These were game-changing moments and I’m still reeling at the possibilities presented by 3D printing.

Tools of the trade I’m committed to learning about electronics and components to fix things, whether in the car, around the house or at the telescope.

TIP: Need dew heaters for your camera or finder scope? Visit your favourite automotive store and pick up some cup warmers that plug into the cigarette lighter adapter.

Cut off the cigarette lighter adapter plugs and solder or crimp in place RCA male plugs. Connect to your dew controller and you’re keeping dew and frost at bay while saving money.

A few years after my first trip, I returned to EfstonScience and visited the other side, the science department, picking up a Maxitronix 300-in-One Electronic Project Lab (Fig. 5). To this day, I use it along with various loose resistors, transistors, capacitors and an integrated breadboard for testing and prototyping. RASC Toronto Centre astroimager Dietmar Kupke gave me many parts and tools, further augmenting the shop.

All this put me in good stead when I decided to build my own dew heating controller to supplement my first unit (Fig. 6). In building my own custom, deep red, dimmable flashlight using pulse-width modulation, I knew the broad strokes. Still, I considered other approaches. After reading Rick Saunder’s article in the October 2014 edition of the Journal of The RASC — “Fun With Arduinos, Part 3: Anti-Dew Heat Control by Arduino” — I reached out. He shared his notes and files and I thought seriously about this new path.

In the end, I went the traditional route and finished in two months, or 32 hours of work. The free Express SCH and PCB software helped me design and plan the circuit and board layout and 3D tools

to position components. It was a challenging but satisfying project — my most complex build. Now I have an efficient fused custom controller with four outputs, two independent output settings, load indicators, reverse polarity protection and a long input power cord.

It works very well. Being able to make my own electronic accessories is wildly fulfilling.

Minicomputers and other makers I’m terribly intrigued by Arduino and Raspberry Pi, the rise of maker groups and tool libraries and the recognized right to repair.

Those active in this field include Arushi and Artash Nath, young and inspiring RASC Toronto Centre members who pursue programming projects and have garnered international hackathon awards. I’m fascinated by RASC member Steve McKinney’s efforts to get plate-solving, auto-guiding and focusing control happening at or on the telescope with small, low-power Wi-Fi computers replacing tethered laptops. Guylain Rochon, Ottawa developer of the Backyard camera software, is also working hard to get only one wire going to the telescope.

I know learning small computers will be, for me, another game changer.

It’s extremely satisfying and fun repairing things to keep stuff out of landfills, extend lifespans and usability, consume less and save money. I really like how many projects use the entire body with physical work and brain power, requiring an array of skills like project management, communication, budgeting, soldering and math. I love learning on the Cloudy Nights Forum and Stargazers Lounge, and sharing my hacks through my blog and website and at meetings.

Maybe there aren’t as many people grinding mirrors and making their own telescopes these days, but there seems to be a vibrant and growing community of people using new technology to enhance their enjoyment of astronomy. •

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So I 3D-printed a custom adapter to securely hold a right-angle camera finder to the eyepiece of the finder scope (Fig. 4, Page 21). First, I prototyped an adapter out of cardboard, elastic bands and foam to determine the overall form and dimensions. With my micrometer, I carefully measured the ends of the finder and right-angle adapter. Once again, in the free AutoDesk 123D, I designed the part and figured out a way to install it.

Version 1.0 works great, turning sessions with the ETX into enjoyable and productive nights rather than expletive-filled frustrating events.

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BEYOND MESSIER

By Chris Vaughan

Summer night sight-seeing Some of the summer’s best deep-sky targets can be spotted in binoculars and then explored through your telescope

DURING CANADIAN SUMMER NIGHTS, the Milky Way Galaxy extends from the south-

ern horizon and arcs overhead through the Summer Triangle of bright stars — the perfect destination for celestial sight-seeing.

Everyone tends to turn their telescopes to the terrific objects on Charles Messier’s list, especially the Hercules Cluster, the Ring Nebula and the bright nebulae in Sagittarius. But there are many more sights to see, even without a telescope. Allow me to be your guide to some spectacular non-Messier objects that you can first view in your binoculars or unaided eyes and then explore in more detail through any size of telescope.

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Planning our trip

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The evenings from July 1 to 13 and July 31 to August 11 will be dark and moonless, but I’ve included some star clusters that will tolerate some moonlight, too. I’ve provided each object’s common name and/or the NGC/IC catalog number, plus the RASC’s Finest NGC number (FN ***) for anyone who is working toward that observing certificate. (The entire Finest NGC list starts on Page 318 of the 2021 Observer’s Handbook.)

All of these suggestions are in the eastern sky after astronomical twilight, and will transit the zenith after midnight, providing you with many hours of viewing or imaging time through the least amount of Earth’s distorting atmosphere.

The southeastern sky as seen from the latitude of Toronto at 11 p.m. local time on July 11 annually. (Adapted by Chris Vaughan from Stellarium)

TIP: The light from nebulae is composed of specific wavelengths (colours) that are generated when gases glow due to the radiation emitted from stars near or inside them. Filters make nebulae more visible by allowing only those wavelengths to pass through your eyepiece.

Narrowband Ultra-High Contrast (UHC) and Oxygen III (OIII) filters work particularly well on emission and planetary nebulae, and can also improve views of reflection nebulae. Broadband Light Pollution Reduction (LPR) or Skyglow filters generally increase contrast for nebulae, galaxies and clusters by darkening the sky around them.

Swim the Cygnus Loop If your sky is very dark, direct your binoculars towards the right side of the bend in Cygnus’ lower (southeastern) wing. Your field of view will be nearly filled by a tattered, faint ring — the Cygnus Loop, or Veil Nebula. The object, which spans 2.5 degrees of sky, is the remnant of a supernova explosion that occurred 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. The Veil rewards exploration with your telescope, especially through a low magnification eyepiece equipped with an OIII or UHC filter. The Western Veil Nebula or NGC 6960 (FN 099a) is sometimes called the Witch’s Broom Nebula.

It brightens markedly where it transects the naked-eye star 52 Cygni, so you can use that star to reliably find the nebula in any telescope. Once there, look for a band of nebulosity curving across your field of view and then use small motions to follow it around to the opposite side of the loop where it brightens again in the Eastern Veil Nebula or NGC 6992 (FN 099b).

Another approach is to kick off from 52 Cygni and “swim” directly across, but be sure to stop and enjoy the wisps of fainter nebulosity in the interior as you go; NGC 6979 brightens between the northern tips of the main segments.

Travel the North America Nebula Let’s finish our summer vacation in Cygnus. Hide the bright star Deneb just beyond the top of your binoculars’ field of view and look for a slightly brightened triangle. It is often visible with unaided eyes, too. That’s the North America Nebula or NGC 7000 (FN 100). A particularly dark sky might reveal to you that this hydrogen-emission nebula is part of a larger complex several degrees across.

Above: The Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, also known as the Veil Nebula, covers a patch of the summer sky equal to about five full Moon diameters. Luckily, the brightest section of the Western Veil passes close to the bright star 52 Cygni. Aim your optics at the star and then follow the structure around its perimeter. (Oleg Bouevitch) Below: This image of the North American Nebula, taken in 2018 by RASC Toronto Centre Member Sailu Nemana, spans approximately 5 degrees (the field of view of common binoculars). Note the dark ring around the Bird’s Nest cluster. (North up, East to left)

A few star clusters shine inside NGC 7000. The Bird’s Nest cluster or NGC 6996 is close to its northern edge, where Hudson Bay would be located. This cluster is so-named because a dark dust ring encircles a dozen or more stars — the eggs! About mid-way between the Bird’s Nest and Florida, look for a loose grouping of stars comprising the open cluster NGC 6997. Finally, slew to “Vancouver” and look for the open cluster Collinder 428 sitting 0.25 degrees southeast of the reddish, magnitude 6.2 pulsating variable star V1981 Cygni. •

Read more about summer objects at skynews.ca

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Put a low magnification eyepiece in your telescope and trace out the nebula’s distinctive shape and its interior structures (nebula filters will help here, too). A round region of opaque dusk serving as the Gulf of Mexico is flanked by a bright arc for “Mexico,” and a peninsula for “Florida.” The latter hosts an embedded star to mark Orlando’s theme parks. Fittingly, a lane of that dark dust (designated LDN 935) separates a lobe of the main cloud into the one-degree-wide Pelican Nebula or IC 5070 sitting off the coast of Florida. The bird perches between the 5-magnitude foreground stars 56 and 57 Cygni.

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Canada’s night sky for July/August Compiled by James Edgar • Cartography by Glenn LeDrew

CELESTIAL CALENDAR

* Impressive or relatively rare astronomical event

JULY 1 Last quarter Moon JULY 4 Uranus near crescent Moon (pre-dawn); Mercury at greatest elongation west JULY 8 Mercury 4° south of crescent Moon (pre-dawn) JULY 9 New Moon, 9:16 p.m. EDT JULY 11/12 Crescent Moon near Venus and Mars (evening twilight) (see Page 28) JULY 13 *Venus 0.5° north of Mars (evening) JULY 17 First quarter Moon

AUGUST 1 *Double shadow transit on Jupiter, visible in western Canada (3:05 a.m. PDT) AUGUST 2 *Saturn reaches opposition (see Page 29)

Early July: Late July: Early August: Late August:

AUGUST 8 New Moon, 9:50 p.m. EDT

AUGUST 12 *Perseid meteors peak, 3:00 p.m. EDT (see Page 30)

USING THE STAR CHART:

AUGUST 15 First quarter Moon

JULY 21 *Venus 1.2° north of Regulus JULY 23 Full Moon at 10:37 p.m. EDT

AUGUST 19 *Jupiter at opposition (see Page 31)

JULY 23/24 Saturn near full Moon

AUGUST 20 Saturn 4° north of waxing gibbous Moon

JULY 28-29 South Delta Aquariid meteors peak

AUGUST 22 Jupiter 4° north of full Moon; full Moon at 8:02 a.m. EDT

JULY 29 *Mars 0.7° north of Regulus

AUGUST 27-28 Uranus 1.5° north of gibbous Moon

JULY 31 Last quarter Moon

AUGUST 30 Last quarter Moon

PLANETS AT A GLANCE

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DATE

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11:30 p.m.

10:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m.

Dusk

AUGUST 10/11 *Venus near thin crescent Moon (evening)

AUGUST 18 *Mercury within 0.2º of Mars (evening) (see Page 30)

JULY 25-26 Jupiter 4° north of gibbous Moon

Our chart shows the major stars, planets and constellations visible from Canada and the northern United States within one hour of these times:

MAGNITUDE DIAMETER (") CONSTELLATION

VISIBILITY

Mercury

Jul. 1 Aug. 1

0.8 —

8.8 —

Taurus Cancer

Morning —

Venus

Jul. 1 Aug. 1

–3.9 –3.9

11.2 12.7

Cancer Leo

Evening Evening

Mars

Jul. 1 Aug. 1

1.8 1.8

3.9 3.7

Cancer Leo

Evening Evening

Jupiter

Jul. 1 Aug. 1

–2.7 –2.8

45.0 49.0

Aquarius Aquarius

Evening Evening

Saturn

Jul. 1 Aug. 1

0.4 0.2

18.3 18.6

Capricornus Capricornus

Evening Evening

Uranus

Jul. 1 Aug. 1

5.8 5.8

3.5 3.6

Aries Aries

Evening Evening

Neptune

Jul. 1 Aug. 1

7.9 7.8

2.3 2.3

Aquarius Aquarius

Morning Morning

The edge of the chart represents the horizon; the overhead point is at centre. The faintest stars depicted shine at magnitude 5.0 — a little brighter than what you can see under ideal conditions. On a moonless night in the country, you will see more stars than are shown here; deep in the city, you will see fewer. (The planets, when visible, are plotted for the dates as marked.)

The star groups linked by lines are the constellations approved by the International Astronomical Union as a way of mapping the night sky.

The chart is most effective when you use about one-quarter of it at a time, which roughly equals a comfortable field of view in a given direction. Outdoors, match the horizon compass direction on the chart with the actual direction you are facing. Don’t be confused by the east and west points on the chart lying opposite their location on a map of Earth.

When the chart is held up to match the sky, with the direction you are facing at the bottom, the chart directions match the compass points. For best results when reading the chart outdoors, use a small flashlight heavily dimmed with red plastic or layers of brown paper. Unfiltered lights greatly reduce your night-vision sensitivity.

Never miss another celestial event! Get updates from This Week’s Sky in our weekly newsletter. skynews.ca/newsletter Also consult the Observer’s Handbook, published

by The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, available at rasc.ca or by calling 1-888-924-7272.

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ROTATING NIGHT SKY: During the night, the Earth’s rotation on its axis slowly shifts the entire sky.

This is the same motion that swings the Sun on its daily east-to-west trek. The rotational hub is Polaris, the North Star, located almost exactly above the Earth’s North Pole. Everything majestically marches counterclockwise around it, a motion that becomes evident after about half an hour.

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EXPLORING THE NIGHT SKY

By Brian Ventrudo

Perseids streak dark skies Short Canadian summer nights radiant with prolific meteor shower and planetary meetups The nights are short at this time of year, but it’s worth the effort to stay up late and do a little stargazing. Venus brightens the western sky after sunset all summer, while Jupiter and Saturn reach opposition in August. Mars also lingers low in the west and makes a close approach to Venus in July and Mercury in August. The Perseid meteor shower runs from late July through mid-August and peaks with the Moon mostly out of the way. And, as always at this time of year, it’s great fun to grab a pair of binoculars or a small telescope and enjoy some celestial sightseeing along the arc of the Milky Way from the constellation Cygnus through Sagittarius.

DATE: July 11-12, 2021

TYPE: Conjunction

TIME: After sunset

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Twilight meetup of Venus, Mars and the Moon

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Venus and Mars spend the next couple of days tightly paired less than a degree apart from each other low in the twilight sky over the western horizon after sunset. At magnitude -3.9, Venus outshines Mars by a factor of 200.

On July 11, a slender crescent Moon lies about five degrees to the right of the pair. On July 12, the thickening Moon moves about eight degrees to the upper left. The magnitude 1 star Regulus lies farther left. Binoculars help pull the scene out of the slowly-darkening summer sky. Mars continues to sink toward the horizon as summer continues on its way to conjunction in October.

The Perseid meteor shower from Gap Lake, Alberta, on August 13, 2020. The image is a stack of 25 10-second frames. (Siv Heang Tav)

VIEW: Naked eye, binoculars

Leo

Moon Regulus

5° field of view

Mars

Venus

Collingwood, Ontario • 10:15 p.m. EDT

DATE: August 2, 2021

Saturn reaches opposition Since last year’s opposition, the beautiful planet Saturn has worked its way eastward along the ecliptic and now lies in the constellation Capricornus about 20 degrees west of much-brighter Jupiter. As it reaches opposition today, Saturn lies about 74 light-minutes from Earth and reaches a peak brightness of magnitude +0.2.

Saturn lies a little farther north on the ecliptic compared with last year. But Canadian observers still need a good view of the southern horizon and steady air to get the best view of the planet and its magnificent ring system. At

opposition, its rings span about 42 arcseconds, presenting a beautiful sight through any small telescope.

In the days before and after opposition, the rings can appear to brighten considerably, as their tiny particles catch the Sun’s full illumination — a phenomenon known as the Seeliger effect or opposition surge. Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, with its thick, orange atmosphere, is visible even with binoculars.

Telescopes of 150mm to 200mm aperture can reveal the lesser moons Enceladus, Dione, Tethys and Rhea. →

TYPE: Opposition TIME: All night VIEW: Naked eye, binoculars, telescope

5’ field of view

Hyperion

Titan Rhea

Dione Tethys

Enceladus

Saturn Ecliptic

Jupiter Capricornus

5° field of view

Microscopium

Piscis Austrinus

Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island • 11:15 p.m. ADT

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Charts by Allendria Brunjes (Stellarium)

Aquarius

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Perseid meteor shower peaks The Perseid meteor shower peaks today.

This year, a waxing crescent Moon gets out of the way before midnight, making it much easier to see the fainter meteors.

Predictions place the peak of the shower in the mid-afternoon hours of August 12 (at 7 p.m. UTC). This suggests the early morning hours of August 12 offer the best bet for meteors for Canadian observers.

But it’s worth looking on the night of August 12 into the morning of August 13, as well. At its peak, observers may see as many as 60 to 80 meteors per hour flash across the sky. They blaze through the upper atmosphere at about 60 kilometres per second and vaporize about 120 kilometres above the Earth’s surface.

The Perseids are active from late July through mid-August, so summer stargazers have plenty of time to enjoy the spectacle. If possible, find a place away from city lights to see the faintest meteors. They can appear anywhere in the sky and trace their path back to the radiant in the constellation Perseus. This reliable and usually-prolific meteor shower, which has been observed since classical times, occurs as the Earth passes through dust left in the wake of Comet 109P/Swift–Tuttle.

DATE: August 12, 2021

TYPE: Meteor shower

TIME: Early morning

VIEW: Naked eye

Cassiopeia

Andromeda

Triangulum

Camelopardalis x Perseids radiant

Perseus

Lynx Auriga

Taurus

Orion Gemini

Prince George, British Columbia • 3:25 a.m. PDT

5° field of view

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Mars

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Mercury

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia 8:35 p.m. ADT

DATE: August 18, 2021

TYPE: Conjunction

TIME: After sunset

VIEW: Binoculars, telescope

Mars and Mercury meet Mars passes within 0.1 degrees of Mercury on August 18.

The pair is visible in the daylight sky — an ideal target for a well-aligned GoTo telescope with a high-magnification eyepiece. Or even better: wait until just after sunset when the two planets are just over the western horizon. A pair of binoculars can pull them out of the twilight sky. Much-brighter Venus lies about 20 degrees to the left and slightly above.

(Note: When attempting to observe Mars and Mercury in daylight, take great care not to accidentally glimpse the Sun!)

DATE: August 19, 2021

TYPE: Opposition

TIME: All night

VIEW: Naked eye, binoculars, telescope

Jupiter reaches opposition Jupiter reaches opposition, rising in the southeast as the Sun sets in the west-northwest. The planet shines at magnitude -2.9 tonight, brighter than anything else in the night sky except for the Moon and Venus. Tonight, the planet lies about 33 light-minutes from Earth.

Like Saturn, Jupiter has worked its way eastward and northward along the ecliptic compared with last year. It’s nearly 10 degrees farther north than in 2020, which helps Canadian observers get a better view. At opposition, Jupiter’s retrograde (westward) day-to-day motion brings the planet — just barely — over the border from Aquarius into Capricornus. For telescopic observers, nights of steady seeing bring the fine detail in the belts and zones of this gas giant into sharp relief. Jupiter’s four largest moons — the Galilean moons — are also at their brightest and largest near opposition, and all four resolve into tiny disks through a telescope at moderate-to-high magnification. Even a pair of binoculars reveals the constant motion of these four little worlds that make the Jovian system so interesting to observe. In addition, Io’s shadow will transit over the planet between about 1:50 and 4 a.m. UTC. • Brandon, Manitoba • 11:00 p.m. CDT

Ecliptic

Saturn

Jupiter

Capricornus

18’ field of view

Ganymede

Io

Europa

Callisto

(shadow transit)

Never miss another celestial event!

Get updates from This Week’s Sky in our weekly newsletter skynews.ca/newsletter

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

Charts by Allendria Brunjes (Stellarium)

Microscopium

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GRADES OF OUTER SPACE Citizen science is opening doors to astronomy and space science for the next generation of students across Canada

By Elizabeth Howell

Students from Mary Anne Goater’s class at Nanaimo District Secondary School in British Columbia participate in loading flatworms in a tube for the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. (Mary Anne Goater)

HOW MANY JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS CAN SAY THEY’VE SENT SOMETHING TO SPACE?

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Sofia Sejutee is one of the very few who can. A former student of Highlands Junior High School in Edmonton, Alberta, she won a competition in early 2020 to send brine shrimp flying in space.

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Sejutee said she became fascinated with the subject because a space station or a spaceship is a closed-loop biology system.

“Nutrition, health, sustainability — that’s really important in space, especially in an unsustainable environment,” she said in an interview.

Sejutee loaded her brine shrimp into their space tube just weeks before the novel coronavirus pandemic erupted.

Despite new quarantine restrictions, the shrimp made it

safely to the International Space Station with the popular Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP).

The opportunity sparked her interest in biology and other forms of science, which she is now pursuing at Ross Sheppard High School in Edmonton.

“Those real-life experiences where they have hands-on science is brilliant,” said Sarah Graham, Sejutee’s teacher during the experiment.

SSEP — a joint program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education, working closely with NASA commercial experiment provider Nanoracks — is just one example of how students across Canada are getting real space experience in a school environment. →

STUMBLING INTO CITIZEN SCIENCE

Citizen science projects are activities backed by scientific organizations, allowing regular people like you and me to volunteer and contribute to scientific research. I stumbled onto my first project at the beginning of quarantine in March 2020, but I was too intimidated by it and didn’t really give it a chance.

The opportunity to participate in a citizen science project arose again in my astronomy class at John Abbott College in Montréal, Québec. We were required to choose an ongoing project through Zooniverse, and the project I took on was the Radio Galaxy Zoo: LOFAR. The goal of this project is to help an algorithm identify supermassive black holes and star-forming galaxies. The algorithm will sometimes mistakenly identify a single radio source as several, so humans are required to rectify these errors.

In the image, the yellow lines represent the recorded radio waves and the blue ellipticals represent what the algorithm believes to be different radio sources.

The solid blue elliptical is the source that we are investigating.

After going through a short tutorial on how to do so, based on the recorded radio waves, you must identify if any of the dotted blue ellipticals are actually part of the same radio source (the solid blue

elliptical) and not distinct sources. Additionally, you must also sometimes identify the optical source of the radio waves. You can also help the scientists identify low-quality or problematic images. There definitely is a learning curve, but the tutorial helps make this project accessible.

While fun, I found it tiring and still a bit out of my reach as a student, so I stopped working through it for a while. Then one day, after a conversation with my former astronomy professor, I decided to look back into the Galaxy Zoo project. I genuinely could not remember why I had been so intimidated at first. I no longer had the obligation of working on it, so it was easy to pick up during down time and between classes. It was my small way to contribute to actual scientific research with what little time I can spare as a student.

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As a high school science student, it sometimes feels like I can’t really contribute to the scientific community yet, as I’m inexperienced and still learning.

By Eve-Lyn Abi Nader School: John Abbott College, Québec Astronomy prof: Karim Jaffer

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“THEY LEARNED SCIENCE ISN’T JUST READING A BOOK AND PARROTING A MULTIPLECHOICE QUESTION.” — Mary Anne Goater, teacher at Nanaimo District Secondary School

TRIVIAL TASK ON A MASSIVE PROJECT Last semester, my classmates and I got to choose a research topic in the Zooniverse citizen science catalogue. At first glance, many of the subjects can come off as daunting, but Zooniverse really does an incredible job breaking down the projects and how we can be of service.

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I wanted to do something that was mysterious and outside my understanding at the time. I went with an experiment involving gravitational waves.

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The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was (and still is) asking for amateur scientists to help train one of their artificial intelligence programs. They asked us to differentiate between three different results in their data analysis involving frequency, time and energy for one of their instruments. Results look

By Adrian Blanchet School: John Abbott College, Québec Astronomy prof: Karim Jaffer

like a blip, a whistle or something in between, and we differentiate between them.

While this task is rather trivial to us, it is certainly not to a computer program that needs to analyze huge amounts of data in order to make accurate predictions. We are here to help steer the program in the right direction.

Zooniverse does an incredible job introducing topics to an audience that has had little to no exposure to the material. I do wish they addressed a more experienced audience — the platform is fertile ground for introducing and collaborating with cutting-edge astrophysics research.

This research piqued my interests in gravitational waves, and I’ll surely visit Zooniverse again for more!

BEYOND THE CLASSROOM Students with stable internet connections can informally participate in citizen science work in space with programs like Zooniverse, the American Association of Variable Star Observers and Canada’s Let’s Talk Science, which has worked with a few astronauts to run student control experiments on the ground for work performed on the International Space Station. Graham is just one example of a teacher bringing the experience to the classroom independently with success.

Carl Savage teaches Science Research Methods 12 at Ballenas Secondary School in Parksville, British Columbia. Some of his students having also had space projects fly through SSEP — his students’ Sprouts in Space project grew alfalfa sprouts on the ISS — as well as through a University of British Columbia CubeSat that flew on a student-built rocket during the Spaceport America Cup in 2018.

Savage noted that for Sprouts in Space, the students found that sprout seeds grown in space were healthier than a

control experiment on Earth. The UBC CubeSat was somewhat intimidating to the students at first, as they were only in high school, but they dove in with enthusiasm, Savage said. Moreover, one student each from the CubeSat and Sprouts in Space projects won the prestigious Canadian Schulich Leader Scholarships that honour student work done in science, engineering, technology and math.

Both Graham and Savage noted that students pursuing reallife science are more likely to consider careers in the field in high school and university, and that it builds confidence in related scientific literacy skills like evidence-gathering and the scientific method.

“All learning should be attached to a reason for understanding. Citizen science projects give that reason. Through these projects, students get to see how knowledge is applied to real-world science. It shows that what they are learning has value and helps build new knowledge,” Savage said.

ASTRONOMICAL RESULTS

Graham was so proud of her school’s “astronaut” that she created a picture of Sejutee in a spacesuit that remains pasted to the wall beside her desk. “For those classmates to even know someone who sent something into space is unique,” Graham said. “They know that, and the pride within that, including the diligence of Sejutee and how much effort and time went into the project.”

Mary Anne Goater’s class at Nanaimo District Secondary School in British Columbia was another beneficiary of SSEP, launching an experiment that sent flatworms to the ISS in 2018. Participating students Megan Poteryko, Parker Davie and Abigail Sitler all graduated having had their work fly in space, a feat that would make even university students proud.

The students also visited the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida during their time at the launch.

Goater said that in hindsight it was “pressure, pressure, pressure” for all students involved, but the entire class got benefits from their efforts to have their projects fly in space, even though only one project was selected. Around 50 student proposals were submitted to SSEP from two classes: Goater’s and fellow educator Martha Parker’s. The teachers encouraged everyone to work closely together.

“Cell phones were used for research,” Goater said. “They learned how to use Google Scholar and cite primary sources, which is extraordinary for kids in Grades 8 and 9 … They learned science isn’t just reading a book and parroting a multiple-choice question.”

Another benefit the students learned was that at the cutting edge, everybody asks questions — including the teacher.

“Every teacher should have that opportunity to do [space] science, because it allows teachers to learn to say, ‘I don’t know. Let’s find the answer,’” Goater said.

“You won’t look dumb in front of your students,” she added.

“For the students, the onus is on their learning, not someone showing them how to do it.” •

“ALL LEARNING SHOULD BE ATTACHED TO A REASON FOR UNDERSTANDING. CITIZEN SCIENCE PROJECTS GIVE THAT REASON.” — Carl Savage, teacher at Ballenas Secondary School

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Sejutee’s brine shrimp grown in space were bigger than on the ground, matching her hypothesis that they would expand due to the floating effects of microgravity. Given the chance, she said she would willingly run the experiment again by varying effects, such as when she froze the shrimp for analysis, to see if the results are consistent.

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SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

THE PLAYERS :

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Looking for a fun way to connect with people through computer games that are out of this world?

SkyNews looks at multiplayer games that have an astronomical twist

BL

AB

JH

Dr. Benoit Larouche. Mission manager at Space Flight Laboratory, amateur cyclist, occasional ultimate player and poor crimper of rocks. Was alive before the internet was popular and was raised on the frustration of Battletoads and Paperboy. Spends 9 to 5 putting satellites in space, then spends 5 to 9 flying spaceships around the galaxy.

Allendria Brunjes. SkyNews editor-in-chief and glider pilot. Grew up playing Star Fox, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Star Trek on Windows 3.1. Occasional Leeroy Jenkins.

Can’t wait for Kerbal Space Program 2 to come out.

Jenna Hinds. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s outreach coordinator and Robotic Telescope project lead.

Enjoyed Portal and SOMA in university. Because of this article, she is now addicted to Elite Dangerous.

Watch the n00bz Jenna, Ben and Allendria will be streaming their gameplay for all to watch through the summer. Keep your eyes on skynews.ca/games-in-space for times and dates!

Hours, even days

This complex, beautifully designed game is an artform unto itself. It’s a grand strategy sci-fi, played as a multiplayer or with AIs as neighbouring civilizations.

It’s huge. There’s a lot to track, including resource extraction, technological advancements, personnel management, military expansion, colony growth and neighbouring empire relations. And it’s all in space.

The technology advancement tree is non-linear.

You can’t just follow a preset plan and expect

The game scratches a Sid Meier’s Civilization-inspace itch that I didn’t realize I had. It brings together my desires to explore the Universe, manage an expanding and technologically advancing empire and solve and handle interesting problems.

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Travel between systems uses hyperlanes for faster-than-light travel.

Travel within a solar system is bad enough, but space between stars is so big that humans are nearly incapable of rationalizing it. Hyperlanes are a clever way to limit where you can go but still represent how big space really is.

CAN $43.99 on Steam

discoveries to lead to what you want. Rather, there is a choice of technological advancements that are selected at random for all possible progressions. This reflects the reality of random discoveries.

We all felt the game had a steep learning curve and could use more training to bring new players up to speed. Possible actions aren’t always intuitive, and there’s so much involved in gameplay that it’s easy to miss something important (like building farms to feed your people, for instance). →

This game was my favourite on the list.

From SimAnt to the Caesar series, I love societybuilding games. This one checks all the boxes and has the added bonus of being based in space.

The graphics are sublime, even on my seven-year-old MacBook Air. What’s more, I think this is a good beginner’s guide to the issues coming up as humanity stretches beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Real-life mining companies are talking about extracting resources in space.

Are we ready logistically and legally to mine the Moon?

AB

From Paradox Development Studio

The game is a great way to show students interested in space exploration the extent of what’s involved and that there are multiple roles and angles from which you can approach the field.

Without populations to mine alloys, grow food and run the government, the system would fall apart. As humans begin to explore farther from our home planet, we will run into similar situations. If we colonize Mars, we don’t only need astronauts or engineers. We need botanists, software developers, plumbers — you name it.

JH

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

Windows · Mac · Linux Also available on consoles

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Windows · Mac · Linux Also available on consoles

Less than an hour

Does Halo’s Cortana ever remind Master Chief to stop for a sandwich? Does Metroid’s Samus ever take a nap?

An element of humanity that is overlooked in almost every space game ever is the fact that we require regular maintenance and are burdened by our basic needs. Out of Space zeros in on these — and makes your friends worry about them, too.

The premise is that you’re moving into an apartment with some roommates in space. The place has an infestation of alien creatures that you need to take care of before you can power all

This is a fantastic cooperative game for improving communication and team coordination. Even the early levels are difficult to overcome without a concerted effort that really optimizes everyone’s efforts. I liked the feel and pace of the game. It builds up well from the initial start to its peak right before you complete the level. The space theme of this game is a little weak, though — it could have been set on Earth with rats and slime, and it wouldn’t have lost anything in the gameplay.

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

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CAN $17.49 on Steam

of the rooms, which is how you beat the level.

While cleaning and setting up rooms, you have to manage your hunger, sleep and money. Meanwhile, the alien infestation continues to spread and reinfect cleaned rooms. Playing as a team means you also have to pay attention to your teammates and coordinate your efforts — otherwise, things quickly get out of hand.

It’s a cute, comical game that at first glance feels like it is only for young kids. Given repeated failures, however, we came to realize how difficult it can be to manage our own needs while trying to accomplish a common goal.

Telling my friends to take a shower, fighting insect invasions, guiltily snagging the last piece of pizza — this game did remind me of living in a university dorm. In the same way, this game shows how people have to really work together to live together in small spaces during stressful times. Imagine how important every little task and detail became for the Apollo 13 astronauts after the explosion or the ISS crew after the ammonia leak was detected — focusing on the task at hand is essential.

AB

From Behold Studios

It is what it is: a fun, goofy game set in space. While there are perhaps not many scientifically-accurate elements (no space bugs are popping out of the walls of the ISS), it does demonstrate how quickly things can go wrong in a self-contained environment. With only three of us playing, we needed every bit of everyone’s energy at almost all times to keep bugs from taking over. If one of us had decided to not help, let alone sabotage the ship, we would have lost.

JH

1-5 minutes per round

This game became popular during quarantine last year, garnering a following that includes United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and PewDiePie. It’s a fantastic party game with simple instructions, but the strategy can definitely be deep and involved. Basically, you’re a crewmember on a spaceship, and everyone has tasks to ensure the ship gets to its destination. If you complete the tasks, the crew wins. However, one (or more) of the crew is a secret alien and is trying to kill off the entire crew. They win if they manage to foil the systems or kill enough crewmembers.

For an aerospace engineer like me, this game highlights some fun mechanics of potentially working and travelling in space. Constant maintenance ensures everything goes smoothly.

When on board the International Space Station, astronauts typically get only two hours a day of free time, but 100 hours a week doing regular maintenance. I felt Among Us was even more fun when playing on Zoom. The jump when someone gets murdered, the look of disappointment when they realize it was their friend — it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

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CAN $5.69 for Windows Free for iOS, Android

The fun occurs once the first dead body is discovered or the ship is sabotaged. Anyone can present evidence and accusations at crew meetings (where the body was, who was safe, who looked “sus” or suspicious). Votes are cast to eject someone from the airlock. If it’s the imposter — you win! If not, you continue with your tasks.

The suspense in the game is almost instantaneous, as everyone begins their tasks and crewmembers start following each other — either to perform tasks on the same side of the ship or to attempt to murder you. →

I love this game.

The gameplay is quick and intense, and it’s fun whether you’re a regular crew member or the “imposter.” It’s easy to learn, and it doesn’t require a huge investment in equipment or time. I feel like it plays on the fact that any little thing going wrong — or person going rogue — on a spacecraft can lead to the failure of the mission and general doom.

AB

From InnerSloth

Similar to Out of Space, Among Us is another somewhat silly game. The game does a good job of showing what happens when you have to deal with mutinies and saboteurs.

JH

So much of extended human spaceflight involves interpersonal relationships. If astronauts don’t get along on the yearslong trip to Mars, that could lead to potentially catastrophic results. This game kind of demonstrates that, in a very goofy way.

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Windows · Android · i0S Also available on consoles

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Windows only

A very long time

Elite Dangerous calls itself “the definitive massively multiplayer space epic.”

There isn’t really a “point” to the game. It’s kind of choose-your-own-adventure, with opportunities to change careers and try different options.

After learning to fly and gaining some street cred, you can explore the galaxy by hopping from star to star at three different speeds.

Only one is truly accurate (in kilometres per second), while the others allow for easier and more engaging game use by letting you thwart the speed of light.

As you pilot through different star systems, much like life, you can choose what you get out of it.

This game is everything I ever wanted, allowing me to pretend to live in a future where you can own a spaceship capable of travelling between star systems, earning credits and upgrading your ship and equipment. It is a completely open concept.

You can explore star systems and sell scientific data, hunt down pirates, harvest materials or even play as a courier/messenger. There is no end goal, no purpose leading you from point A to B. SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

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As an aerospace engineer, I love this game.

I love this game. I worry about how much time I will be spending playing this game, particularly given that the goals are self-imposed, which means they’re limited only by your curiosity. I want to buy a capital ship. I want to explore the corners of the galaxy in a space-minivan. I want to go mining some asteroids and I really want to shoot down some pirates. Did I mention you can even have friends join your crew?

From Frontier Developments

CAN $39.99 on Steam

The galaxy is set up much like ours, and the naming convention for stars in the game is very similar to real life: a random mishmash of different styles. Some are named in different languages (one star system is called “Nanabozho,” an Ojibwe/Indigenous trickster), some are named strings of letters and numbers (LHS 993, for example) and some have long, complex names that are related to the type of stars in the system.

I initially had trouble getting into the game.

Verification codes didn’t work for my new Frontier account, the game did not recognize my controller, the keyboard-only controls were horrible and I had to turn off my VPN to join “open play,” where I got fined because the same key that analyzes objects also fires the gun. Becoming an aerospace engineer, building a starship and learning to fly in real life might be easier than playing this game and investing in the recommended PC and joystick.

AB

This is my favourite astronomy-related video game. Of the ones we’ve played, this one has the most scientifically accurate depictions of space. My favourite part of this game is something we do now, here on Earth: scanning solar systems.

As you enter one, you can “honk,” or briefly analyze it. After, you can go in and scan at specific wavelengths to figure out what exactly is there.

Exoplanet research is doing something similar, just from Earth instead of from within the star system.

JH

Two colliding clusters of galaxies, together called Abell 370, reveal how dark matter is both more abundant and less interactive than ordinary matter. The dark matter cannot be seen but it can be mapped (blue glow) based on how its gravity distorts the view of objects in the background. The map shows that when the galaxy clusters collided, their associated concentrations of dark matter passed through each other with little disturbance.

(NASA, ESA, D. Harvey (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland), R. Massey (Durham University, UK), the Hubble SM4 ERO Team and ST-ECF)

Once the COVID-19 pandemic is over, Canadian scientists may have their best chance yet at discovering the true nature of dark matter →

By Ivan Semeniuk

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WAITING FOR DARK

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WHEN MIRIAM DIAMOND DREAMS OF TRAVELLING AFTER THE PANDEMIC, often the journey she has in mind involves heading down a two-kilometre-deep mine shaft to a subterranean laboratory where she and her colleagues hope to solve one of the biggest mysteries in science.

Diamond is an astroparticle physicist. Her quarry is dark matter, an unknown substance whose existence astronomers have repeatedly confirmed based on the gravitational pull it exerts on stars, galaxies and the Universe as a whole. Physicists have established that whatever dark matter is, it does not match the properties of any known particle. Finding out what it is made of would not only answer a long-standing question — it would open up an exciting new frontier in the quest to understand the origin and nature of the cosmos.

Dark matter is one reason that researchers normally flock to SNOLAB, Canada’s underground physics facility that operates within a working mine near Sudbury, Ontario. As one of the deepest such labs in the world, SNOLAB can screen out the cosmic rays that pummel the Earth’s atmosphere and surface, allowing particle-detection experiments that search for dark matter to be conducted with unrivalled sensitivity. But down in SNOLAB’s windowless tunnels and caverns, the task of screening out a contagious coronavirus presents an even greater challenge.

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“As you can imagine, social distancing is kind of tough,” said Diamond, who is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

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Diamond is part of an international collaboration called the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or SuperCDMS, which for the past seven years has been creating a next-generation dark matter detector housed at SNOLAB. The team’s efforts were meant to reach a major milestone with the switching on of the experiment this year. But that has been delayed until 2022, because the pandemic has slowed the pace at which the experiment can be made ready. In the meantime, the motivation for the experiment has only grown, together with hopes that it may help point the way out of a confusing maze of theoretical possibilities that particle physicists now find themselves in.

“

Once people started thinking about it, they realized you could have a plethora of phenomena that match the signature of dark matter. And that’s hugely broadened our perspective for what kind of experiments we need to do.”

— David Curtin, University of Toronto, assistant professor; Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Particle Physics

An artist’s impression of the halo of dark matter thought to surround and permeate our Milky Way Galaxy. As our Solar System moves through the galaxy, it is also moving in relation to this invisible halo.

This should create a “wind” of dark matter particles that physicists hope to detect as it passes through the Earth.

(ESO/L. Calçada)

The origin of that maze begins with the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, located near Geneva, Switzerland. The achievement completed the standard model of particle physics, the theory which describes the behaviour of all known forms of matter.

“I definitely had to reassess my own preconceptions of what kind of a dark matter candidate was most likely,” said Diamond, who did her PhD work at LHC during that time. “Nature, of course, has its own ideas, which are completely independent of whatever our favourite pet theory is. And it has a way of humbling us.”

At the time, theories strongly hinted that at least one more new particle outside of the standard model might turn up after the Higgs was identified. Such a particle would be a likely candidate for explaining dark matter. (The Higgs itself cannot be dark matter, because it rapidly decays into other particles.) But the hints proved to be false leads. So far, the LHC has found no additional new particles.

But being humbled by nature can also be liberating, explained David Curtin, a colleague of Diamond’s at the University of Toronto who is working on new theoretical models for dark matter. “Once people started thinking about it, they realized you could have a plethora of phenomena that match the signature of dark matter,” he said. “And that’s hugely broadened our perspective for what kind of experiments we need to do.” →

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

Chasing shadows

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Above: The heart of the SuperCDMS experiment is made of diskshaped silicon and germanium detectors arranged in stacks. If a passing dark matter particle of sufficient mass bumps into the nucleus of an atom inside one of the detectors, the energy it deposits can be detected, and its signal distinguished from the signal caused by a collision with a particle of ordinary matter. The experiment can also search for lower-mass dark matter particles if they interact with electrons in the detectors.

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

(Matt Cherry/SuperCDMS Collaboration/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

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Right: SuperCDMS is one of a number of dark matter detection experiments installed at the Canadian underground physics facility SNOLAB, which is located within a mine near Sudbury, Ontario. Experiments at SNOLAB are well-shielded from cosmic rays that bombard Earth’s surface and would overwhelm detectors hunting for dark matter.

(SuperCDMS Collaboration/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Particle pursuit Some of those experiments include looking for variations on what scientists were anticipating at the LHC. These are called weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPs, and they have long been the front runner in the search for dark matter. WIMPs could be more massive than the ordinary matter particles we already know about, but interact with them only very rarely. That’s why SNOLAB is such a good place to look for dark matter of this type, since most WIMPs adrift in space will simply pass through the solid Earth without interference. But if one occasionally bumps into an atomic nucleus in a detector, such as in one of the supercooled germanium or silicon crystals that sit at the heart of SuperCDMS, then its passage can be recorded.

The fact that WIMPs have not yet shown up at the LHC does not rule them out as a possible explanation for dark matter. It could be that they are lighter and more abundant than researchers were originally expecting to see, but they are simply much less likely to interact with ordinary matter. It could also be the case that there are many types of dark matter particles that interact with each other through forces that physicists have not yet discovered.

The standard model of particle physics includes at least 17 particles, depending on how you count them, together with their antimatter equivalents. Considering that the dark matter in the Universe is known to outweigh standard particles by more than five times, it may turn out to be a naive

oversimplification to expect that all of that dark matter is made up of just one thing, Diamond said.

Curtin is studying ideas for how such particles might have formed early on in the history of the Universe. Rather than “freezing out” all at once, as the Universe cooled in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, he said that dark matter may have “frozen in” — meaning that it built up more gradually as the occasional byproduct of collisions between particles of ordinary matter in the very early Universe.

Dark matter of this type might be too low in mass to trigger experiments designed to look for WIMPs. However, Diamond said SuperCDMS has an alternative observing mode in which lighter particles of dark matter are detected not by bumping into atomic nuclei, but into electrons which are far easier to knock around.

Meanwhile, other experiments, including others at SNOLAB and elsewhere, are also racing to fill in the picture. Many have been similarly constrained by the pandemic, which means the next couple of years could see a boom of important results as the data finally start rolling in. For Diamond, that means the real answer could be discovered all the faster.

“Under the optimistic scenario where we do find something, we are going to have to share all of our different puzzle pieces with each other to get the overall picture.” •

These events are taking place at the North Frontenac Star Gazing Pad at 5816 Road 506 between Plevna and Fernleigh. Check NorthFrontenac.com events calendar for event updates. Events begin at sunset.

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE. EVERYONE IS WELCOME. BRING YOUR BINOCULARS AND TELESCOPES IF YOU HAVE THEM.

Contact Corey Klatt, Manager of Community Development for more information. recreation@northfrontenac.ca, 613-479-2231 x233 northfrontenac.com/en/open-for-business/dark-sky-preserve.aspx “North Frontenac Township Dark Sky Preserve” is also on Facebook

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

JUNE 20, 1 – 3 PM: Sun Party. Theme: Our Star, The Sun. Father’s Day, so bring your Dads and Granddads out for an afternoon delight.

JULY 10: Theme: Our Place in the Universe. The Summer Milky Way and other galaxies.

AUGUST 12: Special Event! The Annual Perseid Meteor Shower. Beginning at dusk and continuing all night long. The Moon will not interfere with our viewing this year, so take advantage of North Frontenac’s famous dark skies. Bring a reclining lawn chair or air mattress and, of course, a “Thermos™”of coffee or hot chocolate to help you make it through the night (or as long as you care to stay). No alcohol!

AUGUST 14: Theme: The Deep Sky. Featuring galaxies, nebulae and clusters.

SEPTEMBER 4 & 5 (LABOUR DAY WEEKEND): Theme: Autumn Constellations.

OCTOBER 9 & 10 (THANKSGIVING WEEKEND): Theme: The Giant Planets. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

45

RASC SPOTLIGHT

Dear SkyNews readers From the desk of Robyn Foret, president of The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada MARS IS GARNERING A LOT OF ATTENTION THIS YEAR and for all the right reasons.

The United Arab Emirates, China and the United States all have active missions.

UAE’s Hope orbiter plans to build a complete picture of Mars’ climate, studying how it changes over time. A model of modern collaboration, Hope is managed by the UAE with participation from United States’ scientists and engineers and was launched on a Japanese rocket.

China launched its Tianwen-1 mission, with an orbiter and Zhurong rover, making China the first nation to send both an orbiter and a rover on its first attempted mission to Mars.

The lander plans to search for pockets of water using radar.

The United States thrilled us with the dramatic landing of the Perseverance rover and its companion helicopter, Ingenuity. Perseverance is a one-tonne beast with an ambitious array of instruments that include spectrometers to determine chemical composition and to search for organic compounds, imagers looking for signs of microscopic life, radar to search for water, a weather station and a device that will extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce oxygen. Ingenuity is offered as a technology demonstration.

All of these missions produce incredible images to inspire a new generation of explorers and promise to provide unprecedented amounts of data from another world for scientists to study. It was this aspect of the Mars missions — the return of data and images — that had me thinking about the early days of Mars exploration.

As a youngster growing up in the Gemini and Apollo era, I wrote a letter to NASA requesting any information they might share with me and sending along a dollar for their efforts.

To my great joy, I received reports on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and the mission report from Mariner 6 and 7 from the then-named Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas.

They also sent me my dollar back.

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Fast forward to today’s advanced computing capability and transmission rates, and we begin to appreciate how many, many aspects of science and engineering come together to bring other worlds into our very hands. And coupled with advances in modern space exploration, it’s likely that the first person to step foot on Mars is among us today.

Exciting times, indeed! • (Morgan Foret)

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

Mariner 6 and 7 were the first of three planned dual unmanned missions, and they used television cameras to transmit 200 images back to Earth. They also carried out six experiments as they made a flyby of Mars, 2,000 miles above the surface. The report noted the great improvement over predecessors in their capacity to return data. Mariner 4 transmitted data at a rate of 8.3 bits per second. Each image took more than eight hours to transmit.

Mariner 6 and 7, launched five years later, transmitted 16,200 bits per second and the high-resolution, three-million-bit images took just over three minutes each to transmit.

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47

RASC SPOTLIGHT

Helping Harry IN APRIL 2018, retired anesthesiologist and Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Service Award winner Brian Lucas returned to the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia from Uganda, where he had been teaching medicine. Brian spoke to me about 13-year-old Harry Andinda, a teen interested in astronomy. Brian asked if I would become Harry’s pen pal and answer his questions about astronomy. I accepted.

Harry started by sending me astronomical questions, but within a month was asking me to send him astronomical quizzes. He was seriously interested in astronomy. At the end of July 2020, he asked me: I would like to know the probability of a person like me getting employed in a space-related organization. I have realized that there are very few Blacks who make it and most of them are African Americans. Is there any chance of a pure African to work in the space industry?

I asked astrophysicists I know for responses.

Joalda Morancy, a Black master’s student at the University of Chicago, Illinois, wrote to him, as did Rob Thacker, a former RASC board member, past president of CASCA and professor in the Department of Astronomy and Physics at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Rob described this as a “tricky question.” He said Nigeria and South Africa were making considerable investments in astronomical science, adding that Mbarara University in Uganda had astronomy courses, that a paper from that university was published at a recent International Astronomical Union conference and that Priscilla Muheki appeared to be conducting a PhD there.

Rob told Harry that strong international students stand a chance of getting really good scholarships at most Canadian institutions, as well. He wrote about Margaret Ikape, a Nigerian student working on a PhD at the University of Toronto, and Stephen Robinson-Enebeli, a Nigerian student who became a Canadian citizen in 2018 and is doing a graduate degree at the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

SKYNEWS MAY/JUNE 2021

Rob went on to say:

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While there remains systemic racism within science, individuals from underrepresented groups that do well do often end up getting supporters who help make connections for them. My own inclination is that Harry’s biggest challenge is getting the right background preparation … My advice for a high schooler would be to focus on your math and physics. Astronomy can be learned in a degree, but being good at math and physics is necessary to get into a university.

In August 2020, I sent Harry the Solar Observer’s Handbook I wrote for RASC. A short while later Harry responded:

Harry Andinda stands with his new telescope, shipped to Uganda from Canada.

I’m writing to tell you that I received the package.

Thank you very much for the handbook. I will use it but as for now, I don’t have equipment. I will search for the most affordable and see if I can afford to purchase them.

I felt like an idiot! I had not asked Harry if he owned a telescope — it had not occurred to me.

I was determined to correct this. Our Sunshine Coast Centre regularly received donations of telescopes from the public, which we would then refurbish to use as loaner scopes. Among the collection, I found a Bushnell NorthStar 114mm Newtonian reflector GoTo telescope. I tested it and cleaned it up and purchased batteries for the drive and the viewfinder.

One of my neighbours, Javier “Jack” Castro, is an Argentinian electrical engineer who has donated time installing internet connections for children in South America. He was interested in one of our donated telescopes, and delivering it to him, I told him Harry’s story.

Jack happily donated the hundreds of dollars necessary for mailing Harry’s telescope to Kabale. The board of the Sunshine Coast Centre approved this and supplied eyepieces for the telescope, and the package arrived in January.

RASC has agreed to give Harry a youth membership.

If you’d like to further help Harry’s quest to become an astrophysicist, please contact me and I will put you in contact with him.

— Charles Ennis 1st vice president, RASC Member of the Sunshine Coast Centre

RASC SPOTLIGHT

THROUGH TIME’S LENS

Gear for numbering the cosmos UNTIL ABOUT 50 YEARS AGO, the only portable

aids to calculation were mechanical, and the simplest and most elegant of such technologies was the slide rule, which owed its effectiveness to the logarithmic scale (an invention of Galileo’s day). During the rise of 20th-century astrophysics and the first space age, the slide rule was the preferred symbolic attribute of the engineer and scientist (or those who aspired to that status).

The portrait from the mid-1930s is of the cosmologist and science popularizer Sir James Jeans, duly shown with a slide rule as a symbol of his craft. In the group of slide rules, the second from the top is contemporary with Jeans, and is in fact the very model that was owned

by Albert Einstein, Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev. The yellow-bodied rule it is the model that flew on the Apollo missions. The two others have Canadian connections. Unlike many other technologies, these superseded instruments work as well today as when they were manufactured and require neither software upgrades nor batteries.

(Reproduced courtesy of the Specula astronomica minima)

Exoplanet education amateurs can make meaningful contributions. But in order to learn how to contribute, the barrier for access and knowledge can sometimes be pretty high. We’re offering a course this summer to help break that barrier down.

This July and August, we’ll host a course covering how to search for and image exoplanets transiting in front of their host star using RASC’s Robotic Telescope and open-source image-analysis software. The same skills can be applied to imaging variable stars, and you can even join us live to image with the scope!

What are exoplanet transits?

Exoplanets, or planets around stars other than our own, are unbelievably common in the galaxy. Exoplanets can be detected as they pass between their host star and our

telescopes here on Earth. This happens in our own Solar System, too, with the two planets that orbit between us and the Sun: Mercury and Venus.

By looking for regular dimming patterns as planets pass between their star and us, we can find exoplanets and determine their size and orbital period, or how long it takes them to orbit their star.

For those that know me, I am an amateur astronomer just like most of the members of RASC. I never studied astronomy in school and only learned how to do this while at this job. It has been the highlight of my time at RASC, and I can tell you from my own experience that actually finding the dip in brightness in any given set of data is one of the most rewarding feelings I have ever felt! • — Jenna Hinds, RASC outreach coordinator

SKYNEWS MAY/JUNE 2021

ASTRONOMY IS ONE OF THE FEW SCIENTIFIC FIELDS to which

49

PARTING SHOT

By Stuart Heggie

Until we meet again WE BID FAREWELL AT THIS TIME OF YEAR to many astronomers’

SKYNEWS JULY/AUGUST 2021

favourite photographic subject: the Orion Nebula. In deep evening twilight, it is sitting exactly on the western horizon, too low to see anymore and we have many months before we’ll see it rising in the east again in the wee hours. With the Hunter setting with the Sun, astrophotographer Stuart Heggie said he thought this image was a good choice for a “parting” shot.

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Messier 42 — the Orion Nebula — is a stellar nursery, a large cloud of gas and dust where stars are born. At about 1,300 lightyears away, it’s the closest large star-forming region to Earth.

“M42 is like a favourite book: every time you revisit it, there’s something new there, something you didn’t appreciate until now,” he wrote. “As software and hardware tools improve, we gain the ability to delve more creatively into what Orion has to offer. It never gets old!”

Messier 43, also known as De Mairan’s Nebula, is a star-forming region separated from M42 by a lane of dust. Sharpless 279, the Running Man Nebula, sits at left in this image.

Shooting from his home observatory near Lucknow, Ontario, Heggie gathered the data March 21, 2021.

The picture is a composite image of Hydrogen-alpha and RGB subs, and there were 79 in all: • •

RGB: 9 × 1 minute + 9 × 3 minute + 5 × 5 minute Hα: 4 × 30 minute + 6 × 3 minute

Heggie said he used an AP155 EDF telescope with a 4-inch field flattener and Focuser Boss II motorized focuser.

The mount he used was a Paramount MX, and the camera was a Moravian G4 (16803) with Astrodon Gen2 HαRGB filters. •

There’s beauty in the void.

Capture it.

September/October 2021

2020 Readers’ Choice Award Winner Ian Barredo

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