dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (01/26/85)
This is the anniversary of the first picture taken with the Palomar 200-inch telescope. More on what it photographed -- after this. January 26 Hubble's Variable Nebula On this date in the year 1949, the Palomar 200-inch telescope took its first picture -- of a strange object called Hubble's Variable Nebula. This object is a cloud in space -- discovered in the year 1783 by Sir William Herschel. It now bears Edwin Hubble's name -- not Herschel's -- because Hubble found out in 1916 that the cloud changes from month to month. The changes aren't just in size and brightness -- they're also in the actual appearance of the nebula itself. It's thought that changing light conditions and moving shadows cast on the cloud are due to some dark masses drifting in the space nearby. There's also a variable "star" associated with this cloud in space -- which still is being intensely studied by astronomers today. The object R -- that's the letter R in the constellation Monoceros -- was discussed at a conference held in Tucson about a year ago -- a conference on protostars and protoplanets -- or stars and planets in the process of being born. R Mon, like some other stars now known, appears to have solid material near it -- maybe a disk, although that's not yet known. At any rate, although this material doesn't extend as great a distance as some other similar disks found in the past year or so, there's enough mass near R Mon to equal about the combined masses of the giant planets in our solar system -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. We don't know yet -- but this material may someday become planets for the faraway star, R Mon. Script by Deborah Byrd. (c) Copyright 1984, 1985 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin