Latest Update: May 17, 1992 RAMBLING THOUGHTS by a cosmogonist, Number 34 ========================================================================== FROM : DONALD ROSENFIELD RECEIVED : NO TO : DAVID BUSH PRIVATE : NO SUBJECT: UFOs at Anza? THREAD : YES David, Most amateur astronomers who spend a lot of time looking up at the sky have seen hundreds if not thousands of objects that if an unsophis- ticated person saw them they would call the police, the newspapers, the President. They are oval-shape, faint glowing objects that appear to move in a straight line at high speed and then move off at an angle from the previous trajectory with a suddenness that would squash any living thing we know about. A curious part of this is that they appear to have faint red and blue lights flashing from them. This essay is from "Astronomy For The Love Of It." All Rights Reserved. "Yeahbut, Don . . . What *are* the suckers?" Headlights. "Headlights?" Yup. Maybe 75 miles away, a car or a motorcycle is going up a hill. The round light from the headlight goes up into our atmosphere and bounces off a layer of clouds in the upper atmosphere that is so tenuous that we can see stars 'n' stuff right through them. We aren't even aware the clouds are there. What we see is the oval reflection of the light on the cloud. Zam! Blooey! Wow! Didja see that? That UFO took almost a 45ø turn at, what, 20,000 miles an hour! Anything in it woulda been smashed flat! You see where this is going, don't you? The car or cycle hit a bump and, you betcha, that UFO zigged. Before it zags off into the eternal night, refraction in the atmosphere give us the red and blue "lights" on either end. I have seen thousands of them. I don't want to see any more of them. They ruin your concentration, zipping and zagging around like that. It's hard to keep your mind on your variable estimation or waiting for the one or two seconds out of each minute that a planet clears so you can see detail for your drawing. That latter, by the way, is why amateurs with maybe 4"-12" telescopes (finely made, as per the directions in MFT2-4 and RT1-4 located in File Area [U]) can make drawings of the planets that are better than the photographs or CCD images professional astronomers use with far larger telescopes. The professional takes exposures of both clear and muddy images. The amateur draws but the clear ones. Hmm. This long a response to your message, David, belongs in a RT. I'll put it in as part of maybe RT34. The following is in response to one of our BBS users who asked about Halley's comet. It also is a direct quote from "Astronomy For The Love Of It." LONG PERIOD COMETS. Long period comets are those that have reappeared over long periods throughout human history. Edmund Halley, the great English astronomer, predicted the return of the comet, which subsequently was named after him. That comet was seen many times by people in many cultures for the last 2,000 years. Its orbit takes it out to the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. Ground based telescopic observations of Halley's comet found jets of cyanogen, an organic compound. That discovery has led to speculation that comets seeded Earth with life. Several spacecraft visited Halley's comet during its 1986 flyby--space talk for a comet passing Earth's orbit. The European Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft passed within 603 kilometers of Halley's nucleus on March 13, surviving a barrage of dust particles. The potato-shaped nucleus proved to be about 14.48 kilometers long and 4 to 8 kilometers wide. Impact craters were detected on the comet's surface, which is poetic justice, as comets have bombarded the other objects in our solar system since its formation. The Soviet Union's Vega 1 spacecraft passed within 8,851 kilometers of Halley's comet. The spacecraft's instruments showed that water was pouring from the comet's surface at the rate of 54,432 kilograms a second and that the comet's temperature was 54.44øC. The Vega 2 spacecraft flew within 8,046 kilometers of the comet, suffering less damage from the dust than had Vega 1. That implied that the dust was coming from the comet in the narrow beams that constitute the tail. The Japanese spaceships Suisei and Sakigake, contributed long distance data, with Suisei getting hit by dust particles 144,837 kilometers from the comet. Suisei found that Halley's comet spins around once in 53 hours. The American craft, Pioneer Venus and Pioneer 7, and several satellites in Earth orbit also observed the comet. This section was written in May of 1986.* The comet was still easily visible in 6 x 25 binoculars and was a glorious sight in an 89 millimeter diameter 1/8 wave system accuracy telescope.** Various news media reports suggest that 99.9 percent of Earth's population didn't see Halley's comet this time. __________________________ *Even as late as March 1991 Halley's comet was detected at magnitude 22.3 by the 1.54 meter Danish telescope at La Silla. Not only was it was flaring with a cloud of dust, but it was six magnitudes brighter than expected. __________________________ **System accuracy as differentiated from surface accuracy is discussed in MFT2-4 and RT1-4, located in File Area [U] of this BBS. Those who had access to a pair of binoculars or a small telescope and one of the well publicized comet location charts could have seen the comet. Those who lived in a well-lit metropolitan area and had a car or bus to take them to a rural area, could have seen the comet. I lived in the Detroit metropolitan area. Photographs of that area taken from our orbiting spacecraft show it brilliantly lit at night by artificial lights. Yet I showed Halley's comet to many visitors. Some of my neighbors could have come across the street or down the block and seen the comet and yet they turned down my offer to show it to them. "Probably after their bedtime." At 6:30 PM? I guess they don't share my love for astronomy. Or, worse, they might think all that extraterrestrial stuff is hooey and that there aren't really any such things as comets and the like. But there are. It is possible that Halley's comet wasn't formed in our solar system. The evidence for that assumption is the relationship between the carbon 12 and carbon 13 found on the comet. Solar system bodies, such as Earth, Moon, and meteorites have one part carbon 13 to 89 parts of carbon 12. The comet, however, has one part of carbon 13 to 65 parts of carbon 12. Workers in the field of comet origins are anxiously awaiting Halley's next apparition in 2061. --don rosenfield, asst. general sysop/cosmogonist/ufo debugger All Rights Reserved