LETTERS
50&25
YEARS AGO
January 1947
An event of far-reaching as-
trophysical consequences oc-
curred at White Sands Proving
Ground on October 10th,
when the ultraviolet spectrum
of the sun at wave lengths
shorter than 3400 angstroms was obtained
from a V-2 rocket at a height of 88 kilome-
ters. The limit of the spectrograph was 1100
angstroms. It is this region of the sun’s spec-
trum which is normally absorbed by the
ozone in the upper atmosphere.
This experiment flown by the Naval Re-
search Laboratory marked the beginning of
modern space-age astronomy. However, not
until 1968 was a major satellite, the Orbiting
Astronomical Observatory, successfully orbit-
ed to study in detail ultraviolet emissions of
celestial objects.
January 1972
Information obtained dur-
ing an Aerobee rocket ascent
on June 14, 1969, reveals that
the continuous spectrum of
[GX 340+0] closely matches
that radiated by a blackbody
of approximately 15,000,000° Kelvin. This is
the first X-ray source whose blackbody na-
ture is established with some confidence.
From these observations it was proposed
that GX 340+0 might be a neutron star, a
highly condensed body in which a mass of
roughly 1⁄2 to less than 2 1⁄2 Suns is packed into
a volume only 10 kilometers or so across. The
first such object to be discovered was the pul-
sar CP 1919+21 in 1967.
In November the planet Mars acquired
two man-made satellites: the American craft
Mariner 9 on the 13th and the Soviet Mars 2
ship on the 27th. These were joined on De-
cember 2nd by another Soviet craft, Mars 3.
The first successful Mars mission was the
Mariner 4 flyby in 1965. Mars 2 was the first
(partially) successful Soviet mission; its lander
failed but its orbiter transmitted data. If all
goes well, Mars will gain another trio of visi-
tors in 1997, two landers and an orbiter.
Eclipse ’72 participants will view totality
from the luxury liner Olympia. To avoid fre-
quent fog associated with the cold coastal
waters, this vessel will steam roughly 1,000
miles east of New York City.
This tour, the brainchild of Phil Sigler, in-
augurated today’s immensely popular sport of
eclipse cruising. On that voyage, meteorologist
Edward M. Brooks proved the value of a
ship’s mobility for successful viewing by find-
ing a tiny hole amid extensive clouds covering
the North Atlantic.
8 Sky & Telescope January 1997
Illuminating a Complex Issue
I read with interest the correspondence
between Don Kurtz and Jeff Hester con-
cerning the color balance of Hester’s M16
image (August issue, page 8). Let me say
at once that this is the finest astronomi-
cal image I have ever seen, and I have no
desire to diminish the wonderful achieve-
ment by Hester and his colleagues.
Although the color balance for this
image was chosen to be in some sense
realistic, it is not possible to achieve
anything approaching realism with the
filter set and detector used (the Hubble
Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Plane-
tary Camera 2). Of course, the narrow-
band filters were selected to obtain the
best scientific data, and they are not
ones you would choose for a true-color
picture that contains both continuum
sources such as stars and the narrow
emission lines of nebulae.
According to the paper by Hester and
his colleagues (Astronomical Journal,
June 1996) exposure times for the oxy-
gen (O III), hydrogen-alpha, and sulfur
(S II) bands were the same — 2,200 sec-
onds. The O III and hydrogen-alpha fil-
ters have similar transmission character-
istics, but the S II filter has a bandpass
twice as wide. Also, the CCD is twice as
sensitive to the red part of the spec-
trum, where S II is located, as it is to the
blue-green O III region. This means that
TRANSMISSION
INCREASING
4980 5000 5020 5040
WAVELENGTH (angstroms)
Color Film
Blu
el
ay
er
INCREASING SENSITIVITY
4000
WAVELENGTH (angstroms)
©1996 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
the signal from continuum sources will be
strongest in the S II image, represented
by red in the color picture, explaining
why all the stars appear unnaturally red.
However, this does not explain why
the emission nebulosity appears yellow.
In published spectra of regions in M16
near the area shown, the hydrogen-alpha
line is more than 10 times stronger than
the S II line and more than four times
stronger than the O III line. In normal,
broadband, three- color pictures of the
nebula the dominant red of hydrogen
alpha is diluted with blue hydrogen beta,
blue-green O III, and scattered light from
dust to give M16’s familiar magenta
shade. But Hester uses hydrogen alpha
as the green channel in his color picture,
and that, with a contribution from O III
in the blue channel, should have made
the nebulosity quite blue-green. I suspect
a bit of creative color balancing was used
to give a more realistic effect. That is fine,
provided the image is not claimed to be
true color, and Hester made no such
claim. Such processing does not detract in
any way from the value of the image as a
scientific document, but it is hardly accu-
rate to call it a close approximation to
true color.
The other point that Hester mentions
in his letter is the way the eye and pho-
tography see such nebulae. He is right
that they are shown in many photo-
graphs as vividly red because many are
TRANSMISSION
TRANSMISSION
INCREASING
INCREASING
H-alpha
6530 6550 6570 6590 6660 6700 6740 6780
WAVELENGTH (angstroms) WAVELENGTH (angstroms)
Above: The bandpasses
covered by the O III, S II,
and hydrogen-alpha filters
r on the Hubble Space Tele-
ye
er la scope’s Wide Field and
y ed
n la Planetary Camera 2. The
e R
Gre color of each filter’s curve
indicates how that band is
represented in the HST
M16 image. Left: How a
typical color film divides
up the spectrum. While
color film is optimized to
reproduce the appearance
of objects in nature, the
three HST filters were
chosen to obtain optimal
5000 6000 7000 scientific data.
dominated by hydrogen-alpha emission.
But not all are. My picture of the Orion
Nebula, for example, shows its inner re-
gions to be yellow because I use a three-
color process that deliberately gives
roughly equal weight to red, green, and
blue light (S&T: November 1981, page
414). The green light of OIII is much
stronger than the red of hydrogen alpha
in the inner part of the nebula, but hy-
drogen alpha dominates farther out.
Mix green and red light, and you get
yellow. This is unlike color film, which is
not designed for photographing nebulae
and has an uneven response across the
visible spectrum. It emphasizes the red
and largely ignores the blue-green emis-
sions, making most nebulae appear arti-
ficially red.
However, telescopic observers of the
Orion Nebula consistently report the
brightest parts as greenish, though I
have never seen it so. Observers are ac-
curately reporting what they see, but
light levels are so low that their eyes are
working on the threshold of color vision,
and the eye is not very sensitive to the
far-red wavelength of hydrogen alpha.
They therefore see only the color to
which the eye is most sensitive — green.
If we could magically turn up the sensi-
tivity of our eyes by some large factor
we would see the yellows and reds in the
Orion Nebula. But we see the nebulosi-
ty of M16 only as red-magenta, because
its light is dominated by hydrogen alpha,
not oxygen emission.
DAVID MALIN
Anglo-Australian Observatory
P.O. Box 296
Epping, NSW 2121, Australia
dfm@aaoepp.aao.gov.au
Astronomy and a
Christmas Classic
Readers may recall that in the well-
known 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life
the opening sequence involves a conver-
sation between angels, who are repre-
sented as galaxies in the sky. Only on
my latest (nth!) viewing of this film did
I notice that the pictured galaxies great-
ly resembled Stephan’s Quintet, a note-
worthy group of interacting galaxies.
After some checking I discovered that
the filmmakers indeed used a photo-
graph of Stephan’s Quintet, with NGC
7320 (first angel) talking to NGC 7318A
and B (second angel). They were later
10 Sky & Telescope January 1997
NGC 7320 (upper right) and NGC 7318A
and B (center) in Pegasus have speaking
roles in It’s a Wonderful Life. Mount Wil-
son Observatory photograph. South is up.
joined by Angel Second Class Clarence,
who is portrayed only as a foreground
star, perhaps due to the difference in
rank. Presumably the photograph was
obtained from Mount Wilson Observa-
tory, but I do not know why this particu-
lar image was chosen or which astrono-
mer (if any) was involved.
Later in the film, after the high school
dance (at about midnight), George and
Mary romantically view a full Moon right
at the horizon. I trust that no astronomer
advised them on this scene.
WOODRUFF T. SULLIVAN III
Dept. of Astronomy
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
The 1999 Total Solar Eclipse
On August 11, 1999, a total solar eclipse
will be visible across parts of Europe
(S&T: August 1996, page 48). Its maxi-
mum duration (2m 23s) can be viewed
from Romania. On the centerline is the
Astronomical Institute of the Romanian
Academy, which has the only major ob-
servatory within the path of totality.
Romanian astronomers have begun
preparations for this event, involving
both the scientific community and the
general public, and we have founded the
International Association ECLIPSA ’99
for this purpose. Anyone interested in
more information should write to the
address below.
MAGDA STAVINSCHI
Astronomical Institute
of the Romanian Academy
P.O. Box 28
R-75212 Bucharest, Romania
©1996 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
Software Accuracy
I read with interest the article in the
September issue on software accuracy
(page 85). I encountered problems simi-
lar to those described when I tried to
use my sky-simulation software to dupli-
cate the lunar occultation of Aldebaran
on the evening of March 9, 1497, which
was viewed by Copernicus when he was
a student in Bologna, Italy.
On my monitor the Moon passed more
than 1 arcminute north of the bright star
without eclipsing it. Two other programs
gave similar results. Before doubting Co-
pernicus I recognized the reason: proper
motion. Aldebaran shifts in declination
by – 0.19 arcsecond per year, which be-
comes nearly –1.6 arcminutes over 500
years. Programs that don’t accurately ac-
count for the star’s motion fail to repro-
duce the occultation.
The occultation, by the way, is the first
certain observation by the Polish astron-
omer. It is reported in his work De revo-
lutionibus. Almost exactly 500 years later
the event will repeat itself, when the
Moon occults Aldebaran on the evening
of March 14, 1997.
CHRISTIAN PINTER
Gerichtsgasse 1c/6
A-1210 Vienna, Austria
I found the article on software accu-
racy interesting but a bit incomplete and
therefore somewhat misleading.
The ephemeris-creation process is a
major scientific endeavor requiring many
years of expert attention. The article gives
the impression that all of the calculations
are done within one of the relatively
small programs that were compared. In
reality, those programs contain either in-
terpolations of an existing ephemeris or
formulas approximating one. These pre-
computed ephemerides are produced by
numerically integrating the gravitational
equations that govern the motions of
solar-system bodies — a time- consuming
process that is orders of magnitude more
complex than simply producing an appar-
ent position from a given ephemeris. To
compute planetary positions over the past
few millenniums requires many hours on
even the fastest PCs or workstations.
E. MYLES STANDISH JR.
Director, Planetary Ephemeris
Development
Mail Stop 301-150
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, CA 91109