Percival Lowell Biography

Percival Lowell was born on March 13, 1855 into a wealthy, successful, aristocratic family in Boston.  He attended Harvard University and graduated in 1876 with a B.A. and mainly focused on mathematics.  Lowell spent a year in Europe travelling after graduation and subsequently became involved with his grandfather's cotton business, eventually travelling to Japan in 1883 to study the culture and customs.  While staying in Japan, Lowell was invited to serve as the foreign secretary and general counsellor to the first diplomatic mission from Korea to the United States and accepted.  Lowell remained in Korea for a few months after his mission as a guest of the Korean government and also published several books detailing his experiences in Korea, such as Chosön—the Land of the Morning Calm—A Sketch of Korea (1885). 

However, Lowell became increasingly more interested in Astronomy as he travelled through Asia and he took a telescope with him to Japan on his final trip there to make observations.  Due to a particularly convenient orientation of an opposition to the planet Mars in 1894, Lowell decided to focus his studies on Mars.  Lowell had extensive new research that was readily accessible to him since Giovanni Sehiaparelli had extensively studied the planet Mars at another opposition in 1877, during which Sehiaparelli  had discovered canals on the surface of Mars and opened up new opportunities for research.  As Giovanni Sehiaparelli started to lose his eyesight, Percival Lowell decided he must continue his work and expand upon it.  In 1894 after testing several potential observation sites, he settled on Flagstaff, Arizona after a suggestion by W. H. Pickering  that the air there is the steadiest in the United States, as the location for his new observatory that included a 18 inch and a 12 inch telescope.  Lowell had developed a theory that Martians were using the canals to channel water to one another as a artificial irrigation system. 

Lowell became involved in finding a ninth planet, labelled "Planet X".  He predicted its existence mathematically by calculating Uranus' eccentricities that Neptune did not account for.  Lowell kept his research secret for a while in order to ensure that no one would steal his information and claim the credit, but by 1908 his project became public.  With the help of Elizabeth Williams, Lowell increased his efforts and made numerous calculations as well as upgrading to a 40 inch reflecting telescope.  Lowell became very disappointed as no planet was officially discovered and the Academy of Arts and Sciences refused to publish his findings and theories on the existence of "Planet X".  Interestingly, this ninth planet (or Pluto) which coincidentally is no longer considered a planet, did show up on Lowell's plate findings but was fainter than expected and therefore was not noticed.  Lowell died in 1916 of a stroke in his observatory in bitter agitation at not finding this planet X.  Lowell's will included a million dollars to be used in the discovery of the ninth planet, which Clyde Tombaugh succesfully found in 1930.        

APOD 3.6

This image of the night time sky taken in Switzerland depicts a stunning view of the Milky Way and the constellations that mark this season's sky.  Other galaxies that can be spotted (and labeled by scrolling over the image with the cursor) are the Andromeda (m31) which has a double peaked center and is very comparable in composition to our own Milky Way galaxy, and Triangulum (m33) which is the largest of the local galaxies (Andromeda and the Milky Way are both members) and is one of the furthest objects in the sky that can be seen with the naked eye alone on a clear night.  Also several nebulae can be seen, such as the Rosette nebula that was the topic of my last APOD post, the California nebula that closely resembles the silhouette of the state of California and is located in Orion's arm, as well as the Heart and Soul nebulae named for a striking resemblance of the heart symbol and are located in the constellation Cassiopeia.  

Pervical Lowell Biography Sources

"Lowell, Percival." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 8. Detroit: Charles     Scribner's Sons, 2008. 520-523. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 18 Feb. 2011.

 

"Percival Lowell."  Lowell Observatory Archives.  Web.  18 Feb. 2011.  <http://www.lowell.edu/Research/library/paper/lowell.html>

 

Mager, Brad.  "The Discovery of Pluto: Percival Lowell's Quest."  Web.  18 Feb 2011.  <http://www.discoveryofpluto.com/pluto04.html>

 

 

APOD 3.5

The rosette nebula that is pictured above and appeared as a miscellaneous item on the constellation quiz this week (located in the constellation Monoceros), seemed to be the perfect topic for this week's APOD post.  The rosette nebula is a vast cloud of dust and gas that spans about five times the area of the full Moon.  Inside the nebula there are four NGC numbers that have been assigned to several clusters of stars, which are 2237, 2238, 2239, and 2246.  One of the most fascinating clusters is NGC 2244, which is considered to be a relatively young group of bright stars that were formed about 4 million years ago and is able to be seen with a pair of binoculars.  These bright stars each emit high energy light that ionizes the surrounding hydrogen gas clouds creating the striking reddish hues in the nebula.  The hot wind that is also emitted by the stars in NGC 2244 helps disperse the gas clouds' particles which adds even further to the awe-inspiring image as the reddish filaments are formed into sweeping, curvy patterns and a hole is formed at the center, revealing the sky behind these clouds.   

APOD 3.4

 

This photo of the constellation Orion, captures the differing colors of its stars by using the step-focus on each star's trail.  This technique is created by varying the focus of the camera ens during each star's exposure, which dilutes the light and makes each star look larger and brighter as well as effectively illustrating the subtle color differences between the stars.  For this particular photograph, the lens focus was moved from infinity to about 1 meter in a series of 10 steps about three minutes apart and a total of 35 exposures were combined to produce one picture.  Betelgeuse, a cool red sugergiant star, clearly stands out here as the red blur towards the top left corner.  Although Betelgeuse has a surface temperature of about 3600 K, which is significantly cooler than our Sun's surface temperature of 5800 K, it appears very bright because it has a very large mass and is actually about 20 times as massive as the Sun.  The pinkish blur towards the center of the picture is the Great Nebula of Orion, which is basically a giant molecular cloud complex that is 1500 light years away, and scientists have discovered numerous infant solar systems in the nebula.  Finally, the star W Orionis, which appears towards the bottom, is a Carbon star that has a magnitude of about 5.8 and is one of the few faint class C stars that can occasionally be seen by the naked eye.  W Orionis is slowly becoming brighter and as it loses mass at the rate of a tenth of a millionth of a solar mass per year, it will shed its outer layers and become a white dwarf star.         

APOD 3.3

As we are studying stars and specifically the interstellar medium at the moment, I chose this image of the runaway star Alpha Cam that is apart of the constellation Camelopardalis (the giraffe) that appears in fall skies and has appeared on our constellation quizzes often while accidentally following several APOD links.  The term runaway as applied to stars refers to those that are traveling at an extremely high speed through space and therefore the interstellar material between celestial objects, which is actually not completely devoid of matter as many people assume, but rather is made up of a low density composition of 99% gas to 1% dust.  Alpha Cam has been classified as a bright white-blue type O star, but has a relatively dim apparent magnitude of about 5 because it is far away from Earth and is blocked by this interstellar dust that surrounds it.  In comparison to our Sun, Alpha Cam is extremely bright and has the luminosity of 530,000 Suns and a mass 25 to 30 times greater than the Sun.  Scientists have hypothesized that this star will explode relatively soon, since it is a massive super giant, and is quickly losing a significant amount of mass (at a rate of six millionths of a solar mass per year).  Alpha Cam moves at the unfathomable speed of 60 kilometers a second and as it moves it compresses the interstellar material that it passes, which means it was likely originally apart of a binary system and was propelled by the force of a super nova explosion of the other star.