2009 IYA

The International Year of Astronomy 2009

(celebrating the 400th anniversary of humanity turning a telescope to the sky)

Calendar and Resource Guide

by Andrew Fraknoi (Foothill College & ASP)

with contributions by Denise Smith, Richard Fienberg, and Andrea Schweitzer

Produced for the upcoming PBS television special “400 Years of the Telescope”

This calendar also available as PDF file or MS Word file.

January 2009

NASA Theme: Telescopes and Space Probes

Featured object in the sky: Venus (brilliant in the west after sunset)

February 2009

NASA Theme: Our Solar System

Featured object in the sky: The Moon and its craters

March 2009

NASA Theme: Observing at Night (and during the day)

Featured object in the sky: Saturn and its (hard-to-see) rings

April 2009

NASA Theme: Galaxies and the Distant Universe

Featured object in the sky: The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) in the constellation of Canes Venatici

May 2009

NASA Theme: Our Sun (this month Galileo first wrote up his observations on sunspots in 1612)

Featured object in the sky: The Sun and sunspots

June 2009

NASA Theme: Clusters of Stars

Featured object in the sky: The globular cluster of stars in the constellation of Hercules (M13), a round group of several hundred thousand stars

Sat

Summer solstice: when day is the longest and night is the shortest in Northern Hemisphere

The Moon and Saturn are close in the sky in the early evening in the west.

July 2009

NASA Theme: Black Holes (regions where so much material has collapsed that nothing, not even light, can emerge from them)

Featured object in the sky: The Milky Way (the faint band of stars across the sky which is the disk of the galaxy in which we live)

Fri

Wed

The Earth is farthest from the Sun in its yearly orbit; a good day to point out that the seasons are NOT caused by our distance from the Sun.

Total eclipse of the Sun (visible from Asia, not from North America; but likely to be broadcast on the Web)

August 2009

NASA Theme: Rocks and ice in the solar system (asteroids and comets)

Featured object in the sky: The Perseid meteor shower (shooting stars)

September 2009

NASA Theme: Planets and Moons

Featured object in the sky: Jupiter (see August 14th, above) and its moons (Galileo’s discovery of the four large moons of Jupiter showed that not everything had to revolve around the Earth)

October 2009

NASA Theme: What will be the fate of the universe?

Featured object in the sky: The Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way and the only galaxy (barely) visible to the naked eye from the Northern Hemisphere

November 2009

NASA Theme: The lives of stars (stars are born, go through life stages, and die, just as people do, but they take million or billions of years to do so)

Featured object in the sky: The Crab Nebula (M1), the remnant of a supernova -- a star that exploded in our sky (and was visible in the daytime) in 1054 AD

December 2009

NASA Theme: Discovering New Worlds

Featured object in the sky: The Orion Nebula (M42), a region of cosmic “raw material” (gas and dust), where we can see new stars in the process of forming. In star lore, the nebula was seen as a spot of blood on the sword of Orion, the hunter

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IYA Resources:

In addition to the web sites included in the table above, you can find more information at:

U.S. IYA Web Site: http://astronomy2009.us/
International IYA Web Site: http://www.astronomy2009.org/
NASA IYA Web Site: http://astronomy2009.nasa.gov/
Astronomical Society of the Pacific/NASA IYA Activity Guides: http://www.astrosociety.org/iya/guides.html
400 Years of the Telescope PBS television show: http://400years.org/
Resource guide to the life and work of Galileo