News from Digg / Space

• First Ever Multi-Person Space Station Vacations In 2011
• Pluto Not a Planet, but Now Called a ... Plutoid
• McCain would like to see a man on Mars
• NASA Image of the Day Gallery: Astronaut Ron Garan Working
• APOD: Dextre Robot at Work on the Space Station

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Example screenshot of Cartes du Ciel v3.0 beta displaying the PGC galaxies in the region of M84.

I am pleased to announce that the 10th revision of the PGC/LEDA galaxy catalog is now available for download. This is the ninth year—two revisions were released in 2001—that the PGC/LEDA catalog has been revised for Cartes du Ciel.

The PGC/LEDA 2008 Galaxy Catalog includes entries for 1,664,557 galaxies contained in the HyperLEDA database as of June 25, 2008. Additionally, I have released the smaller PGC/LEDA 2008 Visual Galaxy Catalog containing 124,403 galaxies with a mean B magnitude of 16.5 or greater and a major axis of 3 arcsec or greater. This catalog is intended for those users who wish to have a catalog of galaxies that are visually within the range of most amateur instruments.

In the past, some of you have inquired if there was any way to support the development and hosting of this catalog. If you like this catalog and would like to contribute to its continued revision and release, please send a donation to the local astronomy club of your choice or volunteer your time to an astronomy outreach program in your area. Sending me money would be a waste as I would just spend it on more expensive eyepieces!

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The Dwarf Planets. (Credit: @2006 C .J. Hamilton)

It seems that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided the controversy surrounding the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet has become too quiescent. What better way to keep astronomy in the mainstream news than to—you guessed it—create another controversy. In a recent press release, the IAU Committee on Small Body Nomenclature has recommended that Pluto and Eris are now to be known as "Plutoids". What is a plutoid? Here is the official definition.

"Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit."

The IAU committee subsequently accepted the recommendation at its meeting in Olso and has succeeded in removing the word planet completely from Pluto’s designation. (At least Pluto was a little planet before the latest name changing gymnastics.) Ceres gets to keep the designation of "dwarf planet" since its orbit does not lie outside the orbit of Neptune.

Perhaps the Plutonians should hire the PR firm that the Cerians are using. After all Ceres got an upgrade and Pluto has been demoted twice!

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On the night of May 28, 2008 during my 128th recorded observing session, I logged an observation of my 1,000th unique deep sky object. The 1,000th deep sky object observation was an observation of NGC 4290, a faint galaxy in the constellation of Ursa Major. Maybe my next 1,000 objects will not take me seven years!

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Christian Legrand and Patrick Chevalley have released a new Virtual Moon Atlas "Pro" Version 4.0 update to their venerable lunar atlas software. For me, VMA is the de facto standard for planning any lunar observing sessions. It is still hard to believe this is free software! The new features in VMA Pro 4.0 seem to revolve around new images and scientific resources. I did enjoy perusing through the new photos provided by Paolo Lazzarotti and Wes Higgins and experimenting with the new photo manager. The software installed with no problem on my three year old Dell (Windows XP) laptop. Downloader’s be aware that the file size is 422MB, which may take a while on a slow connection. In my opinion, every selenographer should have this software on their hard drive.

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Jupiter and its new spot. (Credit: NASA, ESA, UC Berkeley)

Jupiter is growing yet another red spot as evident in the latest Hubble images of the giant planet. This new spot is much smaller than its neighbors The Great Red Spot, which has been visible for centuries, and Red Spot Jr., which gained notoriety in 2006. The change of the spot color from white to red indicates the storm is strengthening and its clouds are rising higher in the atmosphere. The formation of this new spot may support the idea that Jupiter is in the midst of global climate change.

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Microsoft released the first beta of their World Wide Telescope software to the public today. As you have probably read in this blog before, I am not very enthusiastic when it comes to the virtual telescope. While it may be a wonderful source of enjoyment for some, I still prefer the view through an eyepiece under a star filled sky. That being said, there are those cloudy nights when a virtual telescope might be worthwhile.

The software installed reasonably easily on my three year old Dell Inspiron laptop (I did have to go to the Microsoft download site to get the DirectX 9 runtime installer). The user interface is rather straight forward and after a few minutes of left and right clicking on everything that looks "clickable" anyone should be able to navigate around the application. There are a lot of impressive features available—too numerous to list here—that will keep one busy for hours.

Keep in mind this is a beta version of the software and there may be a few kinks to work out. If your adventurous and do not mind the possibility of an "ut oh" then definitely give this application a try.

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