Sky and Telescope - May 2015 - 10

Letters
stopping! But we couldn't enjoy it for
long. This would place Jupiter's surface
only about 115,000 kilometers away from
us, and we'd be immersed in its lethal
radiation belts. And although we would
be a little beyond Jupiter's Roche limit for
pulling Earth apart completely, our tides
would be out of this world!
Joe Prusa
Boca Raton, Florida

musical accompaniment of nearby coyotes,
when I was surprised to see the familiar North America shape right where it
should be. The other two agreed that they
too could make out the nebula's "Gulf of
Mexico." I am curious to learn how many
others have seen NGC 7000 this way.
Roger Grossenbacher
Lancaster, Ohio

For the Record
Flying High and Gazing Higher

Editor's Note: Maybe that was a Freudian
slip for wanting to see Jupiter 3,600 times
closer up!

In Search of North America
Reading Gary Seronik's Binocular Highlight about NGC 7000 (S&T: Oct. 2014, p.
45) inspired me to dig into my observing
diary. It shows that on September 12,
2009, I made a naked-eye observation of
elusive NGC 7000. The site was a small
cemetery in the southern part of Adams
County, Ohio. It was about 11 p.m. Three
of us, all members of the Ohio Lepidopterists, were scanning the Milky Way to the

75, 50 & 25 Years Ago
May 1940
Eclipse on TV "The
[April 7th] eclipse was
successfully televised by
the RCA-NBC studios,
assisted by the Optical
Division of the Amateur
Astronomers Association. Excellent reception
was reported throughout the New York area.
This was the ﬁrst time in history that an eclipse
of the sun had been broadcast by television to
the public. From 4:30 p.m. to 5:15 p.m., a 4-inch
reﬂecting telescope and eyepiece projected
an enlarged image of the phenomenon on the
photosensitive surface of the television camera, from which it was transmitted over the air.
The resulting image almost ﬁlled the screens
of the receiving sets, according to reports
received from persons viewing the broadcast."
Operating the telescope was Robert Cox, who
in future decades would orchestrate S&T's Gleanings for ATMs department. The eclipse was a
deep partial event in New York but annular along
a path that stretched from northwestern Mexico
through Texas to northern Florida.

May 2015 sky & telescope

ing a golden-gilded gibbous, and then
shifting spectacularly to its silver beauty.
How sad that no one else seemed to
notice this precious moment of space and
time. This celestial gift made me glad
that I never stop looking up!
Kevin Russo
St. Marys, Georgia

I saw the most amazing moonrise while
ﬂying from Bahrain to Diego Garcia.
I had been admiring the night sky for
some time, amazed by the stars visible
at 35,000 feet over the Indian Ocean.
Suddenly, a magniﬁcent glow loomed
on the horizon. At ﬁrst I thought it was
a massive ﬁre on some distant shore.
Then I assumed it marked the coming
sunrise, an intensely red ball that contrasted starkly with the hours of darkness
I'd seen. Finally, despite my jet lag, it
"dawned" on me that this was the Moon,
just below the horizon! I watched as the
crimson red semi-orb rose, ﬁrst becom-

✹R Monocerotis (S&T: Jan. 2015, p. 38) is
not an old, evolved star but rather a T Tauri
variable - a pre-main-sequence star still
partially enshrouded in its molecular cloud.
✹In the ﬁnder chart for the Pleiades (S&T:
Feb. 2015, p. 45), the star labeled "Alcyone"
is actually Atlas. Alcyone, the cluster's
brightest star, is nearer to the center.
✹The illustration (S&T: Mar. 2015, p. 30)
is of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.
✹The computer simulation of the PSR
1257+12 system (S&T: Mar. 2015, p. 33)
found that, after the progenitor star's death,
roughly 0.001 solar mass of material (not
1,000 solar masses) could remain bound to
the pulsar.

Roger W. Sinnott
May 1965
Spacewalk "The ﬁrst
man to face the rigors of
space without the protection of a rigid spacecraft
climbed cautiously out
of his airlock at 3:30 a.m.
Eastern standard time
on March 18th. Soviet
cosmonaut Alexey Leonov then removed the
protective cover from the lens of a television
camera, revealing his space gymnastics to the
whole world.
"Inside Voskhod 2, Pavel Belyayev supervised the operation, communicating with Lt.
Col. Leonov via a connecting cable. Leonov
spent 20 minutes in space, 10 of them ﬂoating
free from the capsule except for a slim 16-foot
tether connecting him to the spacecraft's lifesupport system. . . ."
Only decades later did the world learn that
the spacewalk nearly killed Leonov. The vacuum
of space caused his suit to expand so much that
he could not reenter the capsule. Desperate, he
reduced the suit's pressure using a small valve and
ﬁnally squeezed himself back inside.

May 1990
Really Big Eye "At the
January meeting of the
American Astronomical Society in Arlington,
Virginia, Debra Meloy
Elmegreen (Vassar College) and colleagues . . .
described their study of
'ocular' galaxies, those that resemble human
eyes. Such systems turn up in supercomputer
simulations when a disk (spiral) galaxy is perturbed by a companion passing at a distance
of a few galaxy diameters. Tidal forces from
the companion disrupt the circular orbits of
the disk galaxy's stars, drawing out elongated
stellar streams that form two spiral arms. One
arm is always double, made up of both rapidly
moving stars and a slower 'tidal tail'. . . .
"Combing through hundreds of photographs of real galaxies, the researchers found
two dozen oculars, most of which do indeed
have apparent companions . . . ."
Good examples are IC 2163 in Canis Major
and NGC 2535 in Cancer, each hauntingly
shaped like an eye with oval lids.

Sky and Telescope - May 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - May 2015