The Stars Indoors The Sky at Night

Good evening from the South Downs Planetarium outside Chichester.

You probably know what a planetarium is,

it's an artificial sky under a dome with a special projector.

And it'll show you things

the real sky doesn't often do.

We can see the sky now...

..and in the future.

Earlier on this evening, Dr Chris North was here with a school party.

Year three from St John's Catholic Primary School

are taking a trip into space.

Fortunately, they can do it all from the comfort of the South Downs Planetarium in Chichester.

Over the past ten years,

it has entertained several hundred schools and 120,000 visitors.

At the heart of the planetarium is this magnificent beast,

the star projector. Its odd shape

allows it to project 4,500 stars onto the surface of the dome

as well as the sun, moon and planets. The source of the light

is dozens of tiny bulbs at the centre of each globe

and behind each lens is a star plate,

a piece of metal with holes in exactly the right place

to put the stars in just the right position on the sky.

The planetarium is run entirely by volunteers,

and Dr John Mason is the resident lecturer.

Who wants to go on a journey into space today? Yes!

The 34-year-old projector requires constant loving attention

to keep going. But it still has a magical quality

which entrances audiences old and new.

Time to switch off the lights.

ALL: Ooh!

Some of the projector's stars are coloured

and they also try to match the relative brilliance of the real stars.

As a blanket of darkness enfolds us, John takes us on a journey

to the planets and stars.

Now, I want you to look straight up. What do you think that is?

You have to call out, I can't see you now.

What is it?

ALL: The moon!

-Pardon?

-Moon!

That better, the moon, yes.

Now, tonight, by about ten o'clock,

that is what the moon will look like.

But earlier on, before that,

you may not see the moon at all.

It's there, it's just it's going to be rather dark

because tonight, there is going to be an eclipse of the moon.

I have really enjoyed the show, but what did the kids think of it?

So what was it like being in a planetarium?

-It's really good.

-Really cool.

-Have you been in a planetarium before?

-No.

-No.

-It was very dark, wasn't it?

-Yes.

-Yes.

-Which one is your favourite planet?

-My favourite's Pluto.

-Why's that?

-Erm, because I like blue

and I like getting quite cold.

It's very cold out near Pluto.

Erm, Mars.

Why Mars?

Because...

it's got, like, lots of rocks and stuff.

-After seeing the wonderful show, do you think you'll go out and see the stars more now?

-Yes.

-Looking forward to learning about them?

-Yes.

Back in the darkened dome, Patrick is joined by Paul Abel

The arrow in the dome points to the north celestial pole

around which our sky rotates as the earth spins on its axis.

Currently, the star Polaris is very close to this point,

but over thousands of years, the celestial pole moves

as the Earth's axis wobbles.

Time for a bit of time travel.

So, let's start our journey.

So you can see now how the star Polaris has now shifted

a long, way away from the tip of the white arrow,

coming up 5,000 years in the future,

7,000 AD.

This is the bright star Deneb, it's the pattern of Cygnus the Swan.

They go past Deneb here

in about 8,000 years, so we're about 10,000 AD.

So we've now gone forwards in time...

..13,000 years.

And the bright star Vega

in Lyra the Lyre

is now our nearest, bright North Pole star,

and our winter night sky

for 15,000 AD

contains quite a few surprises.

First of all, the so-called Summer Triangle

of today is going to be the Winter Triangle

because with Vega being the North Pole star,

these familiar three stars of Deneb, Vega and Altair

are now circumpolar.

They are there all the time.

But a big surprise

is the magnificent pattern of the Scorpion.

Just gives you a feel of how

we don't have ownership of the skies for ever.

We know all these wonderful constellations in south will come

north and the people of that time are going to really have a splendid night sky.

Unfortunately, we may have gained in our view of the Scorpion,

and the Sagittarius and the star clouds at the centre of galaxy,

and parts of the Southern Cross, and Alpha and Beta Centauri,

but we have lost the most famous winter constellation

of the present time, Orion the Hunter.

-That's not a fair swap, John.

-You don't think it's a fair swap?

-No.

-I don't really mind.

I mean, Orion is wonderful, we love it to bits...

-Can we go even further into the future?

-Yes, we can.

We can go forward another 13,000 years.

Because it takes nearly 26,000 years for the North Celestial Pole

to complete a circuit of the sky,

if we go forward from 15,000 AD to 28,000 AD,

we'll return the North Celestial Pole

to the star Polaris once again,

and how the world will have changed by then.

Hopefully there will be people out there amongst some of these stars,

in which case,

what will the constellations and stars look like on other planets?

Well, I'd love to be able to show you that,

but sadly, that is beyond the scope of our rather elderly Planetarium projector.

When we first came in I was struck by,

it does look rather like Sputnik to me!

It is a very impressive piece of kit,

how common is that type of projector in the Planetarium today?

It's one of a diminishing number of its kind in the world.

I think there are only eight of this particular model left.

-Where are they?

-Seven of them are in the United States,

this is the only one that isn't!

What do you think their secret is?

The secret is that you are immersed inside what looks like

the real night sky.

Now I would hate it to be that in the future that was the only night sky people could see.

Well, John, we're looking at the sky in 28,000 AD.

But last month, there was something really special -

a total eclipse of the moon,

and The Sky At Night team went down to the beach.

I think I drew the short straw with our inflatable Solar System, guys!

You chose it!

We brought our inflatable Solar System down to the beach because we've got a lunar eclipse tonight.

It's a few hours yet till sunset, which is when it occurs in the UK,

but we've come to the ideal location.

We've got a nice, clear eastern and south-eastern horizon,

which this time is all-important.

It is indeed, Chris.

The moon will be totally eclipsed when it rises above

the south-eastern point on the horizon,

but as it comes up and the sky's getting darker,

if we're lucky and the clouds stay away, it should be a fantastic sight.

So here we are. Chris is the sun,

I shall be the Earth and you can be the moon.

So we have the light from the sun hits the Earth,

and casts quite a long shadow into space -

-it's a cone, isn't it?

-It's a cone of shadow,

which is about almost 900,000 miles long.

So let's get the shadow on to Pete's manly chest,

there we are.

Now when the moon lines up with the sun, roughly once a month,

we actually get a full moon,

the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth to the sun.

But for the most part, the moon passes above or below that shadow.

But tonight that's not going to happen,

it's actually going to pass into the shadow -

there's a nice demonstration of it there.

So the Earth actually has two components to its shadow.

It's got a lighter outer part, which is called the penumbra,

and a darker inner part called the umbra, and it's the umbra we're really interested in.

As the moon moves towards the umbra,

the umbral shadow will actually pass across the moon's disc,

so what we'll end up with to begin with is a partial eclipse of the moon.

The moon will move further and further into the umbra -

in fact the umbra will completely cover the moon,

-and that gives us a total eclipse of the moon.

-Right.

And it's at this point that the moon will rise, isn't it?

-It will be in complete eclipse.

-Just after the mid-point in the eclipse,

that's when the moon should pop up above the horizon.

Now if we have atmospheric effects coming into play,

the moon should be a nice, dark coppery colour, shouldn't it?

It should. The Earth has got an atmosphere,

and that atmosphere looks like a thin ring, as seen from the moon.

It does. If you were standing on the lunar surface you would see the Earth

and a ring of fire surrounding it.

That's right, there are two effects happening.

First of all the light from the sun is bent as it passes through the atmosphere,

and that tends to infill the umbral shadow,

but also, the bluish part of the light gets scattered away,

so what you're left with is the reddish bit,

so if you like it's like a ring of sunsets and sunrises -

-that's a nice way to think of it.

-It is, it's quite poetic, Pete!

And that colour infills as well,

so you end up with a reddish colour to the surface of the moon

when it's totally in shadow.

We've got a couple of hours left yet until the sun sets

and the moon rises over the nice horizon,

so while we wait for that we can talk about a few of the astronomical

news stories from the last couple of months, starting with the sun.

Well, there's been an amazing event observed on the surface of the sun

by the SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Looking at the sun, as it does all the time,

a flare went off, an M-class flare,

a medium-power flare.

Now that flare threw off a vast amount of material

away from the sun's surface.

What's amazing about this is that this material

seemed to flow away from the sun

with the force of the release of energy,

and then it stopped and lots of it

actually fell back down to the surface of the sun.

They pose a real danger, do they?

They do to the Earth, because what will happen is,

if one happens to be pointing in our way you get material thrown away from the sun,

and it can impinge on the Earth's magnetic field

and cause all sorts of disruption to a lot of our electro-magnetic systems.

So leaving our Solar System behind,

we had a supernova in that lovely spiral galaxy M51.

Yes, a supernova was discovered in the Whirlpool Galaxy

and it's quite a brightish star,

it's in one of the spiral arms,

it's called SN 2011dh.

-It trips of the tongue!

-It trips off the tongue.

It's quite easy to pick this up with amateur kit,

-if you go out and have a look.

-I did manage to catch it,

but I have to confess it took me over half an hour to find M51 -

-that's a tragic confession!

-But what's amazing about it

is that this is the third supernova

to have occurred in M51 over the last 17 years.

Yeah, it's quite an active galaxy.

Finally, coming back into the Solar System and onto Mars,

and a slightly sadder story - the death of Spirit,

the plucky Mars rover that's been travelling around the surface since 2004.

We've put together a little obituary from our journey with Spirit over the past seven years.

When the NASA Mars rover Spirit landed in 2004, its mission was just three months long.

But Spirit exceeded that timetable, and much more.

The mobile geologist kept going for six years,

and travelled nearly eight kilometres, outlasting many of the NASA team who managed the rovers

day in, day out. Professor Steve Squyres has been its constant companion,

watching its every move from hundreds of millions of kilometres away.

In 2005, he told Chris Lintott why they thought Spirit would only last 90 days.

The thing we thought was going to kill them

was dust on the solar arrays.

Mars is a very dusty place, dust is in the atmosphere,

it settles out of the atmosphere and coats everything.

And as the dust built up, it went down and down and down and down.

So it really was getting close to the end.

And then one glorious day, we got hit by this gust of wind,

it was just a blast of wind, nothing more than that,

cleaned off the solar arrays, Spirit was producing more solar power

than the day we landed.

The dust devils whipping along the desert were to become a regular feature,

and a lucky bonus. But Spirit's real adventure did not begin

until it had trekked from its landing place in Gusev crater

to the far away Columbia Hills.

On arrival, it found evidence of water, and went on to make the first ascent of an alien hill.

The view from the top was spectacular.

Times got tough, and one of its wheels broke,

and Spirit had to drag it through the Martian dust.

But that misfortune had an upside for scientists.

The churned-up soil revealed white deposits of pure silica.

Evidence that Mars once had hot springs or steam vents,

possibly creating conditions favourable for life.

But Spirit's days were numbered.

It was further disabled by another wheel loss,

and the team were unable to get Spirit into the ideal position

for winter hibernation.

In 2010, we caught up with Professor Steve Squyres,

who told us his feelings about the rover that just wouldn't give up.

I think the day when it suddenly hits us we've gotten our last transmission

from the vehicle, that's going to be pretty hard.

It's had a good, long, productive life,

and it's achieved so much more than any of us could ever have anticipated or hoped for

that, if this is the end, it is clearly an honourable death.

Spirit never did awaken from a long, Martian winter,

and last month, NASA finally closed the chapter on this epic tale.

But the exploration of Mars still goes on.

Spirit's sister rover, Opportunity, is going strong on the other side of the planet,

nearing its destination of Endeavour Crater.

And later this year, NASA sends its latest Mars rover, Curiosity,

to the red planet, in search for signs of life.

The rover is dead, but its spirit lives on.

The time for the lunar eclipse is fast approaching,

and astronomers from all over the UK have gathered on Selsey beach,

including Pete, Paul and Patrick.

Well, here we are, at Selsey,

and the eclipse has just started.

Unfortunately, we are totally clouded out,

from horizon to horizon.

Earlier, there was a little break in the cloud, and we were all hopeful,

but, as you say, thick, wall-to-wall cloud now.

Well, the moon should be well above the horizon now,

and there's nothing there, the clouds have got in the way and we can't see anything.

There are some gaps, so fingers still crossed.

The gaps in the cloud are stubbornly refusing to arrive.

But astronomers elsewhere are having better luck.

The first images look like we may have a rather dark eclipse.

You know, Pete, I was expecting it to be a rather dark eclipse,

because of all the organic activity,

and with those, sometimes you get really lovely colours.

Well, it is reported from other locations where it has been clear

that it is a really deep red.

In Europe, they're actually getting

quite a good view of it at the moment.

The moon rose earlier for them,

and there's breaks in the cloud,

and they've got a beautiful, blood-red moon

hanging in the night sky.

A blood-red lunar eclipse really is a wonderful sight,

one we are just not going to get tonight,

much to our frustration.

'We were just about to give up hope

'when a tantalising gap appeared in the clouds.

'Tom, Pete and I got a view of the last stages of the lunar eclipse.'

It's red, it's got a reddish hint to it.

Could be a bit of reddish cloud, sunset-lit cloud.

But the other issue is the moon will be bright,

the bit which is being uncovered would be really bright,

so that light could be reflected off some of the cloud down there.

We'll have to be vigilant, keep watching that area,

and see if we can see it, OK?

Here we go. There, that's nice and prominent now.

Can you see it?

-Do you want the laser again?

-Yeah.

No, no, no, there's definitely something there.

I definitely agree there's something there.

-We're seeing the eastern limb.

-On that photo, that's so sharp.

-Yeah, photo is almost in focus as well.

-Not a bit of cloud.

We're actually getting the benefit now of the fact it's in the partial phase,

because when it was totally eclipsed,

cos there's so much cloud down there it was too dim to be seen through.

Well, chaps, we did manage to catch a fleeting glimpse

just as we thought it was over.

We'd all but given up hope!

We've had some pictures from the rest of the country.

It is quite a dark red one, isn't it?

Possibly the volcanic ash and so on has made it dark red.

It's a lovely colour, from what we've seen.

-It's not helping though.

-No?

-No!

Our Flickr site has many more lunar eclipse images

for you to look at. You can find it by going to our website.

This was taken by Amirreza Kamkar from Iran,

with the lunar eclipse moon nestled in the Milky Way.

Or this one, by Frank Ryan,

showing the lunar eclipse over Barcelona.

It's also newsletter time.

You can download our latest newsletter from our webpage,

or write to us.

Well, sadly we didn't see it, but you can't win 'em all,

better luck next time.

When I come back next month, we'll be looking into the asteroid belt,

and talking about Dawn on Vesta.

We've got very good pictures already, and more to come.

So until then, from a totally cloudy Selsey,

it's good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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