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Here are the answers to the Astronomy Quiz 4.Also try Quizzes 1 , 2, and 3.
1.The Constellation is the Southern Cross ,which is a significant navigational feature in the southern hemisphere.It has been used as a navigational aid for millennia.It was in 1679 that the constellation was described by the French Astonomer as Crux Australis ( Southern Cross) a name which has been shortened to Crux.The constellation is now part of the Flags of Australia,Newzealand,Samoa and Papua New Guinea.
2.The Persian astronomer who documented the Andromeda was Abd Al-Raahman Al-Sufi.His book on stars was translated into many languages and had a significant influence on European astronomy.In fact many of the names of stars at present are derived from their Arabic names.
3. The Earth's axis of rotation wobbles in a circle with a period of 26,000.This means that the star nearest to direction of the north pole will not be always the same.At present it is Polaris ,but at the timeof the pyramids,it was Thuban and in about 2000 years it'll be Alderamin in the constellation Cepheus.
4.The carpenter who founf the solution to the longitude problem was John Harrison and hsi invention was the Chronometer.Although it was easy to find out the latitude at a place , determining the longitude required the precise determination of time ,by which the local time could be compared to a reference time like Greenwich Mean time.Where learning and Science failed, natural genius triumphed.Read all about John Harrison here.
The importance of this work has been summed up in the words of Simon Newcomb(1835-1909) ,the american astronomer
"Place an astronomer, on board a ship; blindfold him; carry him by any route to any ocean on the globe, whether under the tropics or in one of the frigid zones; land him on the wildest rock that can be found; remove his bandage, and give him a chronometer regulated to Greenwich or Washington time, a transit instrument with the proper appliances, and the necessary books and tables, and in a single clear night he can tell his position within a hundred yards by observations of the stars. This, from a utilitarian point of view, is one of the most important operations of Practical Astronomy."
5.Cassini was the French Astronomer eclipse tables were used by Roemer in his observations that led to the estimation of the speed of light.A jesuit trained Cassini started his career with Astrology which he discarded later as folly.He went on to discover 4 satellites of Saturn and also that there were 2 prominent rings in Saturn separated by a narrow gap which is now called as the "Cassini Division" in his honour.
6.The connection is that the Moon's tidal interaction causes deformation of about a millimter in the 27 Km circumference Ring of the LEP , the particle accelerator shown in the picture.This deformation caused an error in the estimates of the Mass of the Z Boson( a fundamental particle which was being investigated at CERN) by about 0.02%.See the CERN bulletin which tells all about this and other wierd effects like how the level of water in the nearby lake Geneva affected the results !
7.The whitish glow is the Aurora photographed over Antarctica by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Platform( DMSP).Aurora are caused by charged particles ejected by the Sun which crash into the Earth's atmosphere and interact with the Oxygen and Nitrogen Molecules to give trise to spectacular display of colours.Directed by the Earth's magnetic field , the charged particles converge towards the pole giving rise to arcs and circles as shown in the picture in the question.
8.The picture is of that of the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1997 imaged by the MSX satellite.Notice that the streaks are parallel to each other which indicates that they are all part of the same meteor stream ie Leonids.
9.This one is a high resolution close-up of Saturn's Rings( They look like spectral lines except that some of the dark lines are broad while others are narrow .If they were Spectral lines ,one would see lines of equal width...)
10.Galileo Galilei ,with the help of telescopes found that Venus has phases similar to that of our Moon.See this page to see how YOU too can come to the same conclusion as Galileo,from observations that you can make !