Date: January 28, 2010
Title: A Series of Spectacular Events
Podcaster: Colm Ryan
Link: Colm’s blog: http://woodpigeon01.wordpress.com/
Description: Colm Ryan talks about some key moments during the last 10 years: a spectacular auroral display, an intense meteor storm and strange moving lights in the sky, that convey to him the wonder and delight of amateur astronomy.
Bio: Colm Ryan has been fascinated by the skies for over 30 years and is keenly interested in all things science related. He is an engineering graduate of Univerity College, Cork, Ireland. Colm lives in Ireland and has four children, who amaze him every day by their relentless curiosity about the Universe we live in.
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Transcript:
A series of spectacular events
Hi, I’m Colm Ryan, and I’ve had a keen interest in astronomy for over 30 years.
I come from Ireland, and being an astronomy enthusiast in this country is a bit like being a snow-boarder in Saudia Arabia, or a mountaineer in the Netherlands. Ireland, perched as it is on the north eastern Atlantic seaboard, is the raincoat of Western Europe. We get rainfall around 180 days each year, which is great for our green countryside, but not so good for astronomy. They say that there are two seasons in Ireland : the rainy season and the dry season. The rainy season lasts from the beginning of August to the end of July, while the dry season normally happens on a Tuesday. While this is a bit of an exaggeration, astronomical observation can often be an exercise in futility, and many is the night that I had to pack away my observing equipment in frustration.
So why do it at all? Because when the nights are clear, the skies over Ireland have a beautiful allure of their very own. Smog levels are negligible and we have few problems with light pollution. The Milky Way is clearly visible on many Winter nights, as are the Pleiades, the Hyades and the Orion Nebula.
And then there are the surprise events. The ones that bring back that sense of wonder – the wonder that children experience so often when seeing something for the very first time. The wonder that us grown ups gradually lose as the years go by. I recall three such events in recent times that I will never forget.
It was 2003, October 30th. Halloween night was nearly here. The Sun was angry. The protective magnetic fields around sunspot 486 had collapsed and two enormous coronal mass ejections had burst their way through the Sun’s atmosphere. A hundred billion tons of charged matter was headed for the Earth. In less than a day, our planet was enveloped by this tidal wave of particles, setting off an auroral display the likes of which had not been seen for decades. Despite our high latitude in Ireland, aurorae are very rare, but these solar explosions were so big that the glow extended as far south as Austria and Mexico.
I happened to be driving home when I saw a ghostly glow on the northern horizon. I packed a few things and headed out to the most remote spot I could find close to my house. Twenty minutes later and I was alone in the countryside staring at a shimmering band of pale green light swathing the northern skyline. It was slowly advancing towards me. After a few minutes watching I noticed that the band was kinked in places, and that there were subtle wisps, or rays, in the sky. The color was changing too – from green to a deep crimson red. As the first auroral band approached I began to see more and more detail. Finally, when it was directly overhead, the whole sky was completely lit up. It seemed as if I was watching a gigantic red and green flower, stretching from east to west. I was ecstatic. I had heard and read so much about aurorae for years, but I never imagined how stupendously beautiful they could be. I must have been there for two hours, staring at a light show so rare in this country, I might never see it again.
Incredibly, a few days later, the same sunspot let fly with the largest solar flare ever recorded, but this one was not earth-directed. If it had hit our planet, I fear for the damage it might have done to our satellites and electricity grids.
Now in the early days of 2010, the sun is very quiet. Hardly any sunspots were seen on the solar disk last year. Activity is increasing however, and by 2013, it is probable that the Sun will be awash again with sunspots and solar storms. Who knows what treats await us in the evening skies three years from now?
It was the evening of June 5th, 2002. The day had been bright and balmy, and I was relaxing in the sunroom of my house. Suddenly, I was alerted to a bright object in the sky, way over to the north west. I popped outside to get a better look, and what I saw mystified me. There were not one, but two objects in the sky, both quite close to each other. The higher object was a dazzling white, while the lower object had a distinctly orange hue from it. Initially, the orange object was behind its brighter companion, but as the seconds passed, it began to catch up, until both of them merged together directly above me. The orange object then overtook its companion, as they travelled towards the south-east. What could they have been? Not the International Space Station: a quick check on the Heavens Above website confirmed that it was over the Pacific at the time. Nor were they any other bright satellites. So what were they? Had I seen UFOs?
The answer was that I had just witnessed a Space Shuttle launch from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. At 9.23pm Irish time, the Space Shuttle Endeavour had lifted off from its launch pad in Cape Canaveral on its way to the Space Station. Twenty minutes after lift-off, it was directly over southern Ireland. Its external fuel tank had been jettisoned some minutes earlier but it was keeping pace with the shuttle as it began its re-entry phase. It was this fuel tank that we had seen as a bright orange dot and what we had witnessed was parallax, The fuel tank appeared to be traveling faster, only because it was closer to us, now, than the Space Shuttle.
I have now seen this phenomenon three times, but none exceed my first experience, given that I really didn’t know at that time what I was looking at. With the Space Shuttle programme closing down later this year, it saddens me that such a sight will never be possible again and that time is running out to ever see these familiar sky planes orbiting the Earth. It is hard to believe that the Shuttles have been with us for nearly thirty years. I will miss them when they are gone.
The last experience I want to talk about took place, not in Ireland at all, but in a field outside Boston, Massachusetts. It was November 18th, 2001, and I was over in the US on a two week work assignment. I had chosen my location carefully, as light pollution can be a problem in this part of the world. It was 3.50 am when I arrived at my destination. A security man drove by as I was getting out of the car. He stared at me and self-consciously I avoided his gaze. Wearing 3 tee-shirts, 2 shirts, 1 sweater, a coat, two pairs of pants and three pairs of socks, I proceeded down to the centre of the field, looked up and waited. I didn’t need to wait long. The light show had already begun.
This was the occasion of the 2001 Leonid meteor storm. Each year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Tempel Tuttle, sending tiny particles crashing into our planet at speeds in excess of 150,000 miles per hour. As the atmosphere slows them down, the particles are superheated and for a brief moment they streak through the sky in a blaze of fire. The Leonids are one of the most significant of all the annual meteor displays, but every 33 years or so they can produce showers so spectacular they will be remembered by generations afterwards.
I saw all sorts of meteors that night. I saw big fireballs that lit up the sky. I saw meteors traveling in pairs and even in threes. I saw meteors light up, disappear and light up again, as they skimmed across the top of the atmosphere. Some meteors were short, some crossed the entire sky from radiant to horizon. Every so often a long, luminescent trail could be seen – the embers of a large object colliding with the Earth at breakneck speed. There were so many of them that it seemed, at times, as if the Earth was traveling through a snow blizzard.
In all the events I have described here, a common thread is that I needed no more specialized equipment than warm clothes and a pair of somewhat functional eyes. These occasions were open to everyone who happened to be looking in the right place at the right time. In addition, they are only a subset of the possibilities out there – Iunar eclipses, solar eclipses, comets, asteroid flybys, maybe if we are exceptionally lucky, a supernova might occur nearby in our in our lifetime. All we require is patience and that sense of wonder we had in abundance when we were children.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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