Well I think it official; I have finally flipped my lid. This has got to be the most fanboyish and geekish thing I have yet done. But to be honest it did give me a lot of pleasure and I hope it make some of you lot smile as well.
I went and registered a name for a star in one of those silly sites that offer such things. You know like you can “buy” an acre of the moon. So now we have an official Legion World Star in the sky its small but perfectly formed (just like me) but can be a bit difficult to see with the naked eye. In fact it’s a bit faraway (like me)
If I have done this right (and a big thanks to nightcrawler for helping out) this should be a picture of the certificate showing the name and location of the Legion World Star.
And for those with a technical bent or with a telescope this should be a description of the location and brightness etc
To find the legion world the best way is to find Ursa Major or the big dipper and then extend the SE-NW diagonal of the big dipper rectangle up and right. To be honest the so-called “star” is actually a galaxy, which is “really” called M81, and this is what it looks like close up.
Well I hope this gives you all a smile. At least we can now look up at the sky at night and know that whatever happens we now have a “home” out there in the universe which is called Legion World.
Ok I think I’ll go and lie down now and wait for my medication to kick in.
hope you like
[ October 13, 2003, 01:52 PM: Message edited by: Nightcrawler ]
Posted by Faraway Lad on :
Arrggggggggggh It didnt work proper.
GARYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Any chance you can help me get these bloody links to work properly.
After all I dont want to damage this wonderful site by mucking around Posted by Sanity or Madness? on :
Use [url= (no ") and [/url] for the links
Posted by Sanity or Madness? on :
Heck, here's the images in order, never mind the rest...
[ October 13, 2003, 01:57 PM: Message edited by: Nightcrawler ]
Posted by Almost New Kid on :
We now have an entire galaxy to play in? Oh my...
This could be fun.
Posted by icefire on :
Very Cool Idea!!!
Posted by Outdoor Miner on :
Oh, this just has to get incorporated into the fan-fic.
Thank you, Faraway.
Posted by Blockade Boy on :
Been there. A little humid in the off season but you can get some great discounts.
Posted by Shadow Kid on :
quote:But to be honest it did give me a lot of pleasure and I hope it make some of you lot smile as well.
Posted by Fat Cramer on :
Ha Ha! That's fantastic, lots of fun! What a great choice, too - very bright, always above the horizon (in northern hemisphere?) and in one of the most identifiable constellations! Thanks, Great Geeky One, from another geeky Legion fan!
Posted by Su on :
Oh wow! That is so cool! How much does it cost to pay to name a star? I wish Wil Wheaton had a membership at this board so he could see this. I bet he'd love it. Is there a listing of already named stars or a place where you can see if a name has already been taken for a star? luv, -Su
Posted by DrakeB3003 on :
Great idea! It's cool to know there's now an actual "Legion World" star (or galaxy) out there -- thanks for making it happen Posted by Varalent on :
That's awesome, Faraway! Thanks for doing that! Ang yes, I agree that it will have to be incorporated into the fanfic & tagteam threads!
Can't wait to go out and look for it! Posted by Suddenly Seymour on :
What a cool idea! Thanks for thinking of us.
Eric
Posted by Lightning Lad on :
Darden, you are just too cool! Thanks!
Posted by Sonnie Boy on :
This is amazing!!! What a COOL thing to do....
Posted by Fat Cramer on :
If its "former" name was "Bode's Nebula", we'll need a history of Bode, who he/she is and importance to Legion history. The fanficcers will be busy!
Posted by Nightcrawler on :
quote:Originally posted by Fat Cramer: If its "former" name was "Bode's Nebula", we'll need a history of Bode, who he/she is and importance to Legion history. The fanficcers will be busy!
That's your assignment! Get on it! Posted by Faraway Lad on :
quote:Originally posted by Su: Oh wow! That is so cool! How much does it cost to pay to name a star? I wish Wil Wheaton had a membership at this board so he could see this. I bet he'd love it. Is there a listing of already named stars or a place where you can see if a name has already been taken for a star? luv, -Su
Su
If you go to www.stargazerdirectory.com you can see where i got this. As i say, it is just a bit of fun. Scientists will continue to call it M81.
but we will know better Posted by Lightning Lad on :
Messier Object 81 (for the links that accompanied this text please visit this link)
Discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1774.
M81 is one of the easiest and most rewarding galaxies to observe for the amateur astronomer on the northern hemisphere, because with its total visual brightness of about 6.8 magnitudes it can be found with small instruments. Brian Skiff of Lowell Observatory reports that he could see M81 with the unaided naked eye under exceptionally good viewing conditions (i.e., clear dark skies), and is at least the fourth observer who reported to have done so !
The pronounced grand-design spiral galaxy M81 forms a most conspicuous physical pair with its neighbor, M82, and is the brightest and probably dominant galaxy of a nearby group called M81 group. A few tens of million years ago, which is semi-recently on the cosmic time scale, a close encounter occurred between the galaxies M81 and M82. During this event, larger and more massive M81 has dramatically deformed M82 by gravitational interaction. The encounter has also left traces in the spiral pattern of the brighter and larger galaxy M81, first making it overall more pronounced, and second in the form of the dark linear feature in the lower left of the nuclear region. The galaxies are still close together, their centers separated by a linear distance of only about 150,000 light years.
M81 is the first of the four objects originally discovered by Johann Elert Bode, who found it, together with its neighbor M82, on December 31, 1774. Bode described it as a "nebulous patch", about 0.75 deg away from M82, which "appears mostly round and has a dense nucleus in the middle," and included it as No. 17 in his list. Pierre Méchain independently rediscovered both galaxies as nebulous patches in August 1779 and reported them to Charles Messier, who added them to his catalog after his position measurement on February 9, 1781.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team under Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Institution of Washington has investigated 32 Cepheid variables in M81 and determined the distance to be 11.0 million light years, in 1993 well before the HST was refurbished. Together with the new distance scale correction implied by the results of ESA's Hipparcos satellite, the true distance of M81 is probably closer to 12.0 million light years. See the H0 Key Project Team's work on M81 (paper 1 and 2, 1994).
On Sunday, March 28, 1993, a type II supernova (1993J) occured in M81, which was discovered by the Spanish amateur astronomer Francisco Garcia Diaz from Lugo (Spain), and reached a brightness of about mag 10.5 in its maximum. The remnant of this supernova was imaged in the radio light at 3.6 cm wavelength from roughly six to 18 months after the explosion, with a global Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) array of radio telescopes in Europe and North America.
Investigations performed in 1994 have indicated that M81 has probably only little dark matter, as its rotation curve was found to fall off in the outer regions; this is in contrast to many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, for which the rotation curve increases outward. To explain the velocity of the stars in these regions, the galaxy must have a certain amount of mass. However, the total mass observed in luminous matter - stars and nebulae - is insufficient to explain this behaviour; thus it is assumed that there is a significant portion of mass in galaxies is non-luminous, dark matter (or at least low-luminosity matter).
In December 1990, the ASTRO-1 Space Shuttle mission (STS-35) transported telescopes into the Earth's orbit, including the UIT (Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) which obtained images of M81 (in the ultraviolet light; these were compared with the visible light image, and combined to an interesting and informative overlay; an animation [433 k MPG] showing a morphing from the UV to visual image of M81 is available). Previously, M81's UV radiation had been investigated by the Soviet Astron orbital observatory. Bill Keel has assembled a series of images of M81 in the different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum from the radio part to the X-rays region.
Posted by Lightning Lad on :
Johann Elert Bode (January 19, 1747 - November 23, 1826)
Born on January 19, 1747 in Hamburg, Germany. In 1768, Bode published his popular book, "Anleitung zur Kenntnis des gestirnten Himmels" [Instruction for the Knowledge of the Starry Heavens], which was printed in a number of editions. In this book, he stressed an empirical law on planetary distances, originally found by J.D. Titius (1729-96), now called "Bode's Law" or "Titius-Bode Law".
He became a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and director of the Berlin Observatory. Together with Johann Heinrich Lambert, he founded the German language ephemeris, the Astronomisches Jahrbuch oder Ephemeriden [Astronomical Yearbook and Ephemeris] in 1774, later called simply Astronomisches Jahrbuch and then Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch, which he continued to publish until his death in 1826.
In 1774, Bode started to look for nebulae and star clusters in the sky, and observed 20 of them in 1774-5. Among them are three original discoveries, M81 and M82 which he both discovered on December 31, 1774, and M53, discovered on February 3, 1775, as well as a newly cataloged asterism.
Bode merged his discoveries and other observed objects with those from other catalogs he had access, namely the existing objects and most of the asterisms and non-objects from Hevelius' catalog, the sufficiently northern objects from Lacaille's catalog, most of the 45 objects in the first 1771 edition of Messier's catalog, and some others, to a "Complete Catalog of hitherto observed Nebulous Stars and Star Clusters" of an overall 75 entries, which he published in 1777 in the "Astronomisches Jahrbuch" for 1779. Unfortunately, he added a large number of non-existing objects without verification, in particular from Hevelius, so that over 20 of his objects don't exist.
In the years following, he discovered two more objects: His original discovery of M92 occurred on December 31, 1777, and he found M64 on April 4, 1779, only 12 days after Edward Pigott had first discovered it. These two discoveries were announced along with the publication of Koehler's catalog in 1779 in the Astronomisches Jahrbuch for 1782. Consequently, he continued to compile catalogs and atlasses, and in his 1782 "Vorstellung der Gestirne," publishes own independent rediscoveries of open clusters M48 (NGC 2548) and IC 4665 in Ophiuchus.
On January 6, 1779, Johann Elert Bode discovered the comet of that year (C/1779 A1, 1779 Bode). It was on the occasion of observing this comet that astronomers Messier, Darquier, Koehler and Oriani discovered a number of "nebulae": M56, M57, M58, M59, M60, and M61. He also observed a number of other comets and calculated cometary orbits. In 1788 he and independently Capel Lofft predicted the return of the comet of 1661, C/1661, then observed by Hevelius, for 1789, but that comet was not found. It is now speculated that comet C/2002 C1 Ikeya-Zhang may be a reappearance of that comet.
Bode was greatly interested in the new planet discovered by William Herschel in March 1781. While Herschel always referred to this planet as "Georgium Sidus" to honor King George III of England, Bode proposed the name "Uranus" which was soon adopted by the rest of the world. Bode collected virtually all observations of this planet by various astronomers, published many of them in the Astronomisches Jahrbuch, and found that Uranus had been observed before its discovery on a number of occasions, among them an observation of Tobias Mayer from 1756 and earliest by Flamsteed, in December 1690, cataloged as "star" 34 Tauri.
In 1801 he published his famous and popular star atlas, Uranographia, where he reproduced or introduced a number of new and strange constellaitons, including "Officina Typographica," "Apparatus Chemica," "Globus Aerostaticus," "Honores Frederici," "Felis," and "Custos Messium," all of which have not survived and vanished from modern star charts. Only "Quadrans Muralis," the Mural Quadrant, has survived in the name of the Quadrantid meteor stream, which has its radiant in that former constellation, now part of Bootes.
In 1825, after almost 40 years, Bode retired from the post of a director of the Berlin Observatory, and was succeeded by J.F. Encke. Johann Elert Bode died on November 23, 1826 in Berlin, Germany.
Bode was honored by naming a Moon Crater after him (6.7N, 2.4W, 18.0 km diameter, in 1935). Asteroid (998) Bodea was named after him; it had been discovered on August 6, 1923 by K. Reinmuth in Heidelberg, provisionally desginated 1923 NU and on a later independent sighting, 1967 PA. Also, the galaxy M81 which he discovered is popularly known as "Bode's Nebula" or "Bode's Galaxy", and sometimes both M81 and M82 are referred to as "Bode's Nebulae" or "Bode's Galaxies".
Bode was the original discoverer of the deepsky objects M81, M82 (both December 31, 1774), M53 (February 3, 1775) and M92 (December 31, 1777), and independent rediscoverer of M64 (April 4, 1779), as well as M48 (NGC 2548) and IC 4665 (before 1782).
Posted by Fat Cramer on :
Thanks for all that extra info, LL. I must confess I'm disappointed that old Bode wasn't cavorting with Space Tarts or something worthy of Legion World. We'll just have to make the rest up....
Posted by Blockade Boy on :
It's be cool if old Bode got incorporated into the book. A time lost hermit downing jaegermeisters while sitting on an asteroid repeating over and over "look what I found."
Posted by saturnrings on :
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
Posted by STU on :
I don't know how I missed this the first time around, but wow...
Very, very cool. Thanks, Darden! Posted by Lightning Lad on :
for rickshaw.
Posted by rickshaw1 on :
I found this by accident, not knowing what it was, i tried to click on the large star on the clear board. Lightning Lad was cool enough to answer my question as to what this was.
And when the link didnt work for my crappy dell computer, he directed me here.
This is one of the coolest things i have ever seen. Faraway Lad, i nominate you for the Legion Medal of Honor for going above and beyond the call of duty.
Posted by Invisible Brainiac on :
Wow, this has inspired me to dig up my old telescope! Maybe there's a habitable planet somewhere around which we can turn into a Legion World?
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for rickshaw.