Visually Impaired Amateur Astronomer Helps Everyone See the Cosmos

Tim Doucette was born with congenital cataracts, rendering him totally blind. He underwent numerous surgeries before he turned 20 to remove the lenses of eyes as well as scar tissue. A side effect of the surgeries was that his pupils were permanently dilated. He now has 10 percent of what is considered typical vision.

Doucette is also the co-founder of an observatory in Quinan, Nova Scotia, that caters to a wide range of visual abilities. 

The Canadian town, located 3 hours west of Halifax, is near several dark-sky preserves, and now plays host to tourists from places such as Africa and Spain, thanks to the dedicated work of the Doucettes. Doucette and his wife, Amanda, built a wooden dome from the remains of an old cottage and set up a 14-inch (36 centimeters) Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope inside of it. They now host up to 10 people at a time year-round who come to look at the moon, planets and deep-sky objects.

The observatory is a short walk from the Doucettes' backyard, and on the land of one of their relatives.

"This sort of observatory was supposed to be a retirement project," Tim Doucette told Space.com. "I could see it materialize when we had plans to move here [two years ago], so it was pretty exciting."

Doucette said he wants his visitors to leave the observatory with a better appreciation of the Earth and humanity's place in the cosmos. He also has made it his mission to bring that love of astronomy to anyone, even if theyhave a visual disability, he said.

Different views

Surprisingly, Doucette's vision impairments have given him a unique advantage in pursuing amateur astronomy. Unlike most people, he can see in ultraviolet light, since the lens of the human eye filters that kind of light and his lenses were removed.

"For example, the Ring Nebula — some people look at that and see the ring part of it and maybe one of the stars in the middle," he said, adding that he can see more detail.

Doucette provides "astro-tours" to people who visit the observatory, and said he can customize the tours for many visual disabilities. When he used to live in Moncton, New Brunswick, in Canada, he once hosted an astronomy session for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. One of the visitors had very low vision and could see only black and white, so Doucette suggested the man look at the moon. The visitor was able to see the moon's craters, which he recognized from his youth. 

"It was quite emotional, and a good feeling to help him out," Doucette said.

Expansion plans

Most of Doucette's visitors find information about him online, but he has also received referrals from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, the Tourism Industry Association of Nova Scotia and the Starlight Foundation.

Doucette operates the observatory year-round, for half of each month, when the moon is at its darkest. He takes care of doing the tours and showing guests astronomical objects, while his wife provides snacks. 

Even when winter temperatures outside dip to -4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius), Doucette assures visitors that body heat from 10 people will keep the dome toasty for a while, even with the top open.

Sometimes, the Doucettes will have bigger groups on site if there is something extra to see. An example was the Perseids meteor shower, when some people watched the show outside the dome while others stayed inside to look through the telescope.

Doucette said he is already thinking about next tourism season. "We're looking at having kind of a sleeping-under-the-stars experience. People are looking for a place to camp and spend the whole night under the stars."

He said he also plans to offer more alternatives when cloudy nights arise, and perhaps one day add on to his small dome so that more people can use the telescope.

'UFO' Seen in Live Space Station Video Is Just Fluff

On the internet, UFO sightings are a dime a dozen.

Shaky hand-held videos of "lights in the sky," armchair conspiracy theorists seeing odd shapes in archived Apollo photos, horribly pixelated Youtube videos edited from zoomed in portions of other Youtube videos... all are fair game. But with much sadness, the vast majority can be quickly explained away with an ounce of rational thought. But the news cycle must go on and the tabloid press has a knack for seizing on the occasional blurry and badly edited video with eerie music and reporting it not only as news, but as "proof" that we're not alone in the universe.

Currently making the rounds on the conspiracy-fueled web is yet anotherYoutube video posted by Streetcap1, a pretty well-known ufologist who studies space videos and photos to find strange artifacts that may not be easily explained. In this recent UFO outing, the posted video depicts edited footage from the live International Space Station HD Earth Viewing Experiment.

Using high-definition cameras on the space station, we can log into the site whenever we like to get live videos 250 miles above Earth. It's beautiful and I strongly recommend you taking some time to check it out. But, sometimes, eagle-eyed viewers have spotted strange goings on in the footage from low-Earth orbit.

In a recent DNews article, I analyzed another video uploaded by the same user that apparently contained evidence of a UFO that seemed to fall toward the limb of the Earth before pausing its descent when NASA "cut the feed." After analyzing archival footage from the ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment, it quickly became clear what the bright object was. Every 90 minutes at dusk, the space station camera would see the same bright dot drop to the horizon. That dot was Venus.

But why did NASA cut the feed? I hear you cry. Well, NASA didn't cut the feed. The International Space Station passed out of range of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) that are used to relay the HD video to Earth. The live feed drops signal all the time throughout its orbit, but the fact that the feed just happened to drop as the UFO (Venus) made its descent was enough for some to think "conspiracy!"

In this recent video, posted on Sept. 30, there's yet another bright dot at the limb of the sun, so it appeared Venus was up to its old tricks and pretending to be a UFO. But this time, it wasn't Venus. The explanation was evenmoremundane.

Once again, after poring over archival footage on the ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment website for Sept. 30, there would be regular day-night cycles every 90 minutes (the length of one "day" on the orbiting outpost) and frequent "loss of signal" notifications.

Very quickly it became clear that there was a pretty huge object in the frame. But that object had nothing to do with anything outside the space station. It was inside the space station! 

Introducing the Unidentified Fluffy Object:

Although I can't find the precise moment* that Streetcap1 saw in the live feed, the lower part of this errant piece of fluff (possibly a strand of fiber) appears to be in approximately the same location. Before the rising sun could illuminate the whole of the hair, revealing its true fluffy nature, the feed cut out and allowed the viewer to make up his or her own mind as to what it actually was. In the case of the tabloid press, this obviously meant "conspiracy" and "aliens." In reality, it meant the camera needed a dust-off.

If the feed didn't cut out, this is what the big reveal would have looked something like:

So the moral of the story is: Just because there seems to be a weird light in the sky, it's not necessarily a UFO, sometimes it's a very identifiable piece of fluff.

'Spaceman' Speaks! Astronaut Mike Massimino Takes Questions Live Tuesday

Former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, known for flying on two space shuttle missions to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, will appear live with Space.com Oct. 4 at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT) to discuss his new memoir and take questions about his career and what it's like in space.

The new book, "Spaceman" (Crown Archetype, 2016), coming out Oct. 4, follows the dramatic story of Massimino's path to space and what it was like to fix, in his words, "the greatest scientific instrument ever built" from an orbiting perch hundreds of miles above Earth. 

Since his time at NASA, Massimino has proven a devoted science communicator — he is the senior advisor for space programs at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, teaches at Columbia University and evenappeared on CBS' "The Big Bang Theory". In "Spaceman," he details the challenges and successes of his work with NASA, and offers a vivid look at what it's like to go to space.

Do Black Holes Die?

Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and the chief scientist at COSI Science Center. Sutter is also host of Ask a Spaceman,RealSpace, and COSI Science Now. 

There are some things in the universe that you simply can't escape. Death. Taxes. Black holes. If you time it right, you can even experience all three at once.

Black holes are made out to be uncompromising monsters, roaming the galaxies, voraciously consuming anything in their path. And their name is rightly deserved: once you fall in, once you cross the terminator line of the event horizon, you don't come out. Not even light can escape their clutches.

Hawking to the rescue

In the 1970s, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkingmade a remarkable discovery buried under the complex mathematical intersection of gravity and quantum mechanics: Black holes glow, ever so slightly, and, given enough time, they eventually dissolve.

Wow! Fantastic news! The monster can be slain! But how? How does this so-called Hawking Radiationwork?

Well, general relativity is a super-complicated mathematical theory. Quantum mechanics is just as complicated. It’s a little unsatisfying to respond to "How?" with "A bunch of math," so here’s the standard explanation: the vacuum of space is filled with virtual particles, little effervescent pairs of particles that pop into and out of existence, stealing some energy from the vacuum to exist for the briefest of moments, only to collide with each other and return to nothingness. 

Every once in a while, a pair of these particles pops into existence near an event horizon, with one partner falling in and the other free to escape. Unable to collide and evaporate, the escapee goes on its merry way as a normal non-virtual particle.

Voila: The black hole appears to glow, and in doing so — in doing the work to separate a virtual particle pair and promote one of them into normal status — the black hole gives up some of its own mass. Subtly, slowly, over the eons, black holes dissolve. Not so black anymore, huh?

Here's the thing: I don't find that answer especially satisfying, either. For one, it has absolutely nothing to do with Hawking's original 1974 paper, and for another, it's just a bunch of jargon words that fill up a couple of paragraphs but don't really go a long way to explaining this behavior. It's not necessarily wrong, just…incomplete.

Let's dig into it. It'll be fun.

The way of the field

First things first: "Virtual particles" are neither virtual nor particles. In quantum field theory — our modern conception of the way particles and forces work — every kind of particle is associated with a field that permeates all of space-time. These fields aren't just simple bookkeeping devices. They are active and alive. In fact, they're more important than particles themselves. You can think of particles as simply excitations — or "vibrations" or "pinched-off bits," depending on your mood — of the underlying field.

Sometimes the fields start wiggling, and those wiggles travel from one place to another. That’s what we call a "particle." When the electron field wiggles, we get an electron. When the electromagnetic field wiggles, we get a photon. You get the idea. [Twisted Physics: 7 Recent Mind-Blowing Findings]

Sometimes, however, those wiggles don't really go anywhere. They fizzle out before they get to do something interesting. Space-time is full of the constantly fizzling fields. 

What does this have to do with black holes? Well, when one forms, some of the fizzling quantum fields can get trapped — some permanently, appearing unfortunately within the newfound event horizon. Fields that fizzled near the event horizon end up surviving and escaping. But due to the intense gravitational time dilation near the black hole, thy appear to come out much, much later in the future.

In their complex interaction and partial entrapment with the newly forming black hole, the temporary fizzling fields get "promoted" to become normal everyday ripples — in other words, particles. 

So, Hawking Radiation isn't so much about particles opposing into existence near a present-day black hole, but the result of a complex interaction at thebirth of a black hole that persists until today.

Patience, child

One way or the other, as far as we can tell, black holes do dissolve. I emphasize the "as far as we can tell" bit because, like I said at the beginning, generality is all sorts of hard, and quantum field theory is a beast. Put the two together and there's bound to be some mathematical misunderstanding.

But with that caveat, we can still look at the numbers, and those numbers tell us we don't have to worry about black holes dying anytime soon. A black hole with the mass of the sun will last a wizened 10^67 years. Considering that the current age of our universe is a paltry 13.8 times 10^9 years, that's a good amount of time. But if you happened to turn the Eiffel Tower into a black hole, it would evaporate in only about a day. I don't know why you would, but there you go.

A Venus-Moon Pairing to Delight Skygazers Tonight

This evening (Oct. 3) as darkness is falling, be sure to look low toward the west-southwest part of the sky for a beautiful celestial tableau: a lovely crescent moon and the brilliant planet Venus.

The moon will appear to hover about 5 degrees above and to the right of Venus. Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures about 10 degrees, so the moon and Venus will appear about "half a fist" apart. 

These Venus-moon rendezvous occur on roughly a monthly schedule. In fact, if Venus were stationary and did not appear to move against the background of stars, then a Venus-moon encounter would occur every 27 days, 7 hours and 43 minutes. This is called a "sidereal month" — the length of time it takes the moon to circle the Earth once, using the background stars as a reference point. If we try to apply the sidereal-month rule to this schedule, then the next time Venus and the moon should appear to pair off would be Oct. 30. 

If you go out and face west-southwest soon after sundown on that day, however, you'll see Venus — but the moon will be nowhere to be found. What happened?

Venus on the move

The calculations break down, of course, because Venus is not stationary, but is moving in its own orbit around the sun. In fact, the next time the moon will pass Venus will come on the evening of Nov. 2. From our earthly viewpoint, Venus will appear to move considerably to the east against the starry background. Tonight, Venus will be in the constellation of Libra, the Scales. But by next month — Nov. 2 — it will appear to have moved about 38 degrees to the east, where it will reside in the non-zodiacal constellation of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder. 

So the moon has to travel that much more across the sky to catch up to Venus. Since the moon appears to move across the sky at about 13 degrees per day, it needs three more days (13 x 3 = 39) to catch up to Venus. 

Indeed, on Nov. 2, we will once again be treated to the eye-catching sight of the night sky's two brightest objects in our western twilight.

And we're moving, too!

We must also consider another factor: the Earth's movement around the sun. If, in fact, you do look for the crescent moon on Oct. 30 you won't see it because it will be at new phase and hence too near to the sun to be seen. That's because during the 27 days following Monday night's Venus-moon pairing, the Earth's movement around the sun will cause the sun's position in the sky to shift to the east as well. 

And so in this case, come Nov. 2, the sun will appear to have shifted right into the very same region that Venus and the moon occupied on Oct. 3. Of course, by Nov. 2, the moon will have moved well clear of the sun and once again will be readily visible in the west-southwest along with Venus. 

Lustrous evening star

Now gleaming at a very bright magnitude of minus 3.9, Venus in the coming weeks and months will ascend dramatically higher in the western sky and by New Year's Day it will be setting nearly 4 hours after the sun. And by February — incredibly — it will gleam twice as bright as now. No other star or planet can come close to matching Venus in brilliance, not even bright Jupiter, which currently is hidden in the glare of the sun. During World War II, aircraft spotters sometimes mistook Venus for an enemy airplane. There were even cases where Venus drew anti-aircraft fire. 

And from Thanksgiving through Presidents' Day, it will dominate our evening sky. 

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

Congressmen Seek Answers About Falcon 9 Accident

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Ten members of Congress sent a letter to several government agencies about the Sept. 1 explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9, raising questions about government use and oversight of the launch vehicle.

The four-page letter, whose lead author is Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), was sent Sept. 29 to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta and Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James. It comes four weeks after a Falcon 9 exploded on the pad during preparations for a static-fire test, destroying the rocket and its satellite payload.

The letter noted that this accident, and a June 2015 Falcon 9 launch failure on a NASA cargo resupply mission, both took place after the Air Force certified the Falcon 9 for national security missions. "The certification, designed to subject the Falcon 9's design and manufacturing processes to a review of their technical and manufacturing rigor, appears to have fallen short of ensuring reliable assured U.S. access to space for our most important payloads," the letter states.

It also questioned the decisions by NASA to let SpaceX lead the investigation into the earlier failure, and by FAA to allow SpaceX to lead the ongoing pad explosion investigation. "We feel strongly that the current investigation should be led by NASA and the Air Force to ensure that proper investigative engineering rigor is applied and that the outcomes are sufficient to prevent NASA and military launch mishaps in the future," it stated.

The bulk of the letter consisted of questions to the three agencies. For the Air Force, it asked about the status of its certification of the Falcon 9 and its role in the ongoing investigation. It also seeks information on the extent of damage to Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the accident took place, and about any changes to its procurement approach for future launches.

The letter asks NASA about any plans to reconsider use of the Falcon 9 for commercial cargo and crew missions, as well as specific technical and operational issues, such as whether crews will be allowed to enter the vehicle before fueling operations begin. The FAA questions cover its licensing of Falcon 9 launches and insurance requirements.

While the letter requests answers from the agencies by Oct. 31, some questions have already been answered in one form or another. One question in the letter asks the Air Force if it will "reconsider certification of the Falcon 9" given the two accidents.

However, in a media roundtable Sept. 13, Winston Beauchamp, deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space, said there were no plans to revoke the Falcon 9's certification. "The SpaceX Falcon 9 capability remains certified for national security launches," he said then. "We are, of course, going to follow very closely the investigation."

And while the letter raised questions about the insight the Air Force had into the company-led investigations, Beauchamp said he had no issues with the earlier investigation. "They were very open and transparent with us during the last mishap," he said. "We have no expectation for anything different."

Although the congressmen who signed this letter raised questions about SpaceX's ability to carry out government missions in light of the recent accident, other members have been more conciliatory. "While today's incident is unfortunate for the commercial spaceflight industry, I have no doubt they will quickly recover and America will continue as the world's space leader," said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), chairman of the House space subcommittee, in a Sept. 1 statement about the Falcon 9 pad explosion.

Parting Shots: The Rosetta Spacecraft's Last Photos of Comet 67P

DARMSTADT, Germany — Before ending operations, Rosetta stared down her final resting place.

The European Space Agency (ESA) released the last images that its Rosetta spacecraft captured before making a death dive into Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Friday (Sept. 30).

"That's the end of Rosetta," said Holger Sierks, the principal investigator for Rosetta's OSIRIS camera, as he showed reporters here at the European Space Operations Centre the final image snapped from an estimated altitude of about 65 feet (20 meters).

The view is slightly blurry — Sierks said his team still has to sharpen the images — but the gravelly surface of the comet is clearly visible.

The scale of the image is about 5 mm/pixel (0.2 inches/pixel), and it measures about 7.6 feet (2.4 m) across, according to ESA.

Rosetta, which had been orbiting Comet 67P for the last two years, was not designed to survive a landing. But when it came time for the 12-year mission to end, ESA officials decided to send the probe on a collision course with the comet so the spacecraft could collect some last-minute, up-close data on this icy cosmic body.

The landing site was a region called Ma'at on the smaller of the comet's two lobes, sometimes called the "head" because the comet is shaped like a rubber duck. This region was chosen because it has several active pits, some over 330 feet (100 m) wide, where the comet's jets of gas and dust emerge. Mission managers said they had been hoping Rosetta could peer inside one of the pits dubbed Deir el-Medina. The walls of these pits also have "goose bumps" that scientists said they wanted to study in greater detail, because these lumps could represent the comet's internal building blocks.

Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera captured this image of Comet 67P at 0818 GMT from an altitude of about 5.8 km during the spacecraft’s final descent on Sept. 30, 2016.
The image scale is about 11 cm/pixel and the image measures about 225 meters across.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

"They give us clues about the origin of cometary nuclei," said Sierks.

The images haven't been fully analyzed yet, but Sierks said already it seems like the views inside the pit show some of the details the scientists are after.