Know the Constellation - Orion

Orion, often referred to as The Hunter, is a prominent constellation located on the celestial equator and visible throughout the world. Orion got its name from Greek Mythology. The story says, Orion was a giant hunter whom Zeus Placed among the stars as the Orion Constellation.

The brightest stars in Orion are Rigel and Betelgeuse. 

Located in the constellation Orion, Rigel is a Pulsating Variable Star. It is the brightest object in Orion,Rigel is approximately 863 light-years from earth. The sky location for Rigel is : RA 05h 14m 32s, Dec -09°47' 54"

Know the basics of sky gazing, Sky Gazing for Beginners - Part I

Betelgeuse is a Semi-regular Pulsating Star with distinctly reddish-tint. It is the second brightest star in Orion. It is also known by Betelgeuse's Bayer designation Alpha Orionis and is the ninth brightest star in the night sky. It is approximately 498 light-years from earth. Betelgeuse marks the upper right vertex of the Winter Triangle and center of the Winter Hexagon. Betelgeuse is expected to explode as a type II supernova. The sky location for Betelgeuse is : RA 05h 55m 10s, Dec +07°24' 26"

Credits : astrobob.areavoices.com

You can locate Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, by using the belt of Orion. The belt points South East directly toward Sirius. Sirius is in the constellation of Canis Major and it is the fifth-nearest known star with a distance of just 8.7 light-years from earth.

What is Evolution?

Stated Clearly

Transcript

What is Evolution?

In Biology, the theory of Evolution doesn’t tell us exactly how life began on earth, but it helps us understand how life, once it came into existence, diversified into the many incredible forms we see now and in the fossil record. It also helps us make sense of the way in which modern creatures continue to adapt and change today. In biology, evolution can be defined as any change in the heritable traits (those are physical traits like fur color in mice, spots on the wings of butterflies, or instinctive traits like the way in which dogs greet their friends with a sniff) within a population, across generations . This definition can be a bit confusing so let’s see how it works.

All healthy living things, from single celled amoebas, to flowers, to dolphins: are capable of reproduction. We have children, we make copies of ourselves. We do this by duplicating our DNA and passing that DNA on to future generations. DNA is a chain like chemical stored inside each one of your cells, which tells them how to grow and function. Your DNA contains coded information on how to build you. The information in your DNA is different than that of, say, a daffodil’s DNA which is why you look and function differently than a daffodil. The information in your DNA is slightly different than that of Elvis Presley, which is one of many reasons you don’t look or act quite like he did.

Single celled amoebas (and other simple creatures) reproduce by copying their DNA inside their guts, moving both copies to either side of their body, splitting in two right down the middle, and then growing back to full size. If all goes well, the two new amoebas will be exact copies of each other, but in nature, things aren’t always perfect. When DNA is being copied, errors can occur which modify the DNA code. This is what we call a DNA mutation. These mutations (which happen completely on accident and randomly to any part of a DNA strand) can produce variation in the body shape and function of the creature who inherits the modified DNA.

In this case, our new little friend has an arm that stretches extra long. If he survives to grow and reproduce, that extra stretchy arm (which is now coded for in his DNA) will be passed on to his children. Evolution, any change in the heritable traits within a population, across generations, has officially occurred. As you know, reproduction for Dolphins and badgers and people, is a little more complicated. We have to find ourselves a partner. When two badgers get together and... ya know, fall in love, a sperm cell from the father (which contains a copy of half of his DNA - ONLY half), combines with the egg cell of the Mother (which contains half a copy of her DNA). The result is a new cell with a complete set of DNA instructions, all the information needed to divide and grow up into a brand new badger.

The new child matures to be similar to her parents but also unique because she developed some traits from her mother’s DNA and some from her father. Her new combination of traits can be passed to her children and again, evolution, any change in the heritable traits, within a population, across generations, has officially occurred.

Besides the unique recombination of her parents traits, she might also have developed some completely new traits due to DNA mutations. Maybe extra hairy ears for example. If she survives long enough to have kids of her own, her DNA will combine with the DNA of her partner, and she’ll pass on those extra hairy ears to at least some of her children. This of course, is also evolution. So there you have it, evolution is really pretty simple. Scientists and normal folks everywhere, witness evolution happening all around them  

Small changes like the ones we’ve seen here can add up over multiple generations to create dramatic changes.

If you were to go back in time just a few thousand years, you’d find that all dogs for example, originally evolved from an ancestral group of gray wolves. The evolution of those wolves, from generation to generation, was guided by humans. People were selecting wolves with traits they liked, letting them breed, and then only keeping the puppies with the most desirable traits. As time went on, different breeders preferred dogs with different features, some selected for large size, some for small size, some for brains, others for braun. Today, wolves have branched out into hundreds of dog breeds, very few of which look and behave much like their ancestors.

A massive amount of observable evidence from many of different fields such as Genetics, Chemistry, Paleontology and Mathematics, overwhelmingly suggest that just like all dogs share a common ancestor, all living things; me; you; puffer fish; banana trees; if you go back far enough, also share a common ancestor. We are literally related.

We don’t know what the first life form was or exactly how it came to be, but the simple process of reproduction with variation over billions of years looks to be responsible for all the diversity in of life we see today. Now you might be saying: “Wait a minute! Hold on here. Isn’t evolution random? To do something functional like turn a wolf into an adorable mini poodle, random evolution had to be guided by a dog breeder. Researchers say all mammals evolved from an ancient shrew like creature but the difference between a shrew and an elephant is far greater than that of a wolf and a poodle. Who guided that process? Who was the breeder?”

In the mid 1800s two men, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently discovered, that a breeder is not necessarily needed. There is another force capable of guiding random evolution to produce order and complex function. They called it Natural Selection which happens to be the entire topic of our next video, but before you move on let’s recap what we have learned so far.

Biological evolution is any change in the heritable traits within a population across generations. All healthy living things can make copies of themselves, but they do so imperfectly. Small variations can add up over time to create dramatic differences in body form and function. Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that all living things are related.

So remember, next time you invite family and friends over for a holiday feast, you’re actually just inviting family. That includes the turkey and the pumpkin in the pumpkin pie.

Star Gazing for Beginners - Part I

Eyes on the Sky

Transcript:

Hi I’m David Fuller from the “Eyes on the Sky” video series. Let’s look at Stargazing Basics, starting with understanding directions in the sky. Most of us are already familiar with the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west.

Those can be further split into 16 sub-directions, like southwest or south-southwest and south-southeast. But all that really tells us is what direction we are looking from our location; and at best, really only in areas close to the horizon. 

Not only that, just as the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the stars in the night sky also rise in the east and set in the west over the course of the night. So how do we discuss other aspects of the sky? Let’s start with those cardinal directions again. If we split the sky exactly in half, from north to south, we would have a line bisecting those halves. That line is called “The meridian.” This line never moves, because it always divides the sky from north to south. Now if we locate the exact halfway point of the meridian, we are looking directly overhead, and that point in the sky is known as the zenith. So what other “locating features” in the sky are there? 

Although we don’t see stars during daytime, the imaginary line in the sky that the Sun traces as Earth revolves around the Sun is called the ecliptic. Since the planets in our solar system orbit our star largely on the same plane as each other, the path of the planets in the sky closely follows this line of the Sun. This line appears lower in the sky during the summer, and higher during the winter months. So close to – or sometimes right on – the ecliptic is where we will always find naked eye and telescopic planets in our solar system. Now keep in mind that the Sun doesn’t actually rise or set; what is actually happening is the Earth is rotating – we just don’t feel that rotation, because we humans are just along for the ride. So as Earth spins, imagine if you were standing at the North Pole, and looked straight overhead (when it was dark). The stars would appear to spin around a circle, with the axis of that circle at the zenith – the point overhead we talked about earlier. That point in the sky around which the stars rotate is the celestial pole. Of course, you likely won’t ever see it like that, because no one lives at the North Pole. So as we move downwards in latitude in the northern hemisphere, that point in the sky around which the stars rotates will move down towards the northern horizon. If you’re in the upper latitudes, it will appear higher; the nearer you are to the equator, the closer that point is to the northern horizon. If you’ve every looked at a globe with latitude and longitude lines on it, then you can probably imagine pretty easily our next set of markings in the sky: The celestial sphere.

The celestial pole is like a spot on a basketball where the lines meet, and where a good basketball player can make it spin. To locate objects in the sky, we use coordinates like on Earth, but instead of latitude and longitude, we projects those lines out into space as if they were on a transparent sphere surrounding Earth, and these are called Right Ascension and Declination. Right ascension is easy to remember: Face north for a moment. If the Sun rises in the east, which side of your body is that? The right side. So the sun, “ascends” from your right – or Right Ascension. These are like the longitude lines on Earth, that start at one pole and run to the other in equal spacings. These are listed in “hours” and “minutes”, and the Zero “Hour” for Right Ascension begins in Aries the Ram That’s easy enough, yes? And declination is simply the number of degrees away from the celestial poles – so the degrees from the celestial pole to the celestial equator is 90 degrees, just like the degrees from our North Pole to the equator. With me so far? Great! 

Lets review these: quickly: North, East, South, West never change. The meridian splits the sky into two half from north to south The Zenith is directly overhead The ecliptic is the path the Sun takes in the sky, along which the planets large follow. The celestial pole is the spot in the sky around which the stars appear to rotate as Earth spins. The celestial sphere uses similar coordinates as longitude and latitude, but are called Right Ascension and Declination Not hard at all, right? Okay, right ascension and declination may take a bit to get used to, but the rest should be pretty straightforward. In the next, I’ll explain how to understand the difference in brightness between objects in the sky. Thanks for watching; I’m David Fuller. Keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down by using dark sky friendly lighting fixtures, so we can all see, what’s up.

Star Gazing for Beginners - Part II

Famous Quotes of Richard Dawkins

Pic courtesy : Al Jazeera

Richard Dawkins is a Biologist, writer and University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science. He is a noted atheist and is famous for popular books on Evolution and Atheism. He is the founder of Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science to promote teaching of evolution. Here's is some of his thought provoking quotes,

"One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all"

"Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things."

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

"Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility."

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."