Answers to Quiz 1:
The Winners
1. The Asteroid was named Ramanujam after S.Ramanujam of the Indian Institute of Asrophysics(IIA). Some of you said it was Vainu Bappu.True..it's an asteroid.But then it was not discovered by Indians
2.The moon is slowly drifting away from the earth due to tidal interactions with the earth.The effect is also accompanied by a slowing down of the earth's rotation( conservation of angular momentum) So after a few million years, the moon's Angular diameter will be smaller than the Sun and hence it can not fully cover the disc of the Sun ,leading to an Annular eclipse.
3.Rahu and Ketu are the Two Nodes of the intersection of the ecliptic with the orbital plane of the earth.
4.(c) The biggest advantage of having Hubble in Space is that it is free from Atmospheric distortions which otherwise limit the resolution in Ground based Telescopes. This is the reason why inspite of being some 15 times SMALLER than the BIGGEST Earth based telescopes, Hubble can resolve details 100 times FINER !
5.Hans Lippershey was the Dutch spectacle maker who realised that using a combination of lenses one could see distant objects.
6.(b) Because he was the first person to calculate it's orbit and predicted it's return accurately.
7. The Sun's path in the sky is called the Ecliptic and this is the projection of the earth's orbit around the sun, onto the Celestial Sphere. The projection of the earth's equator (which is perpendicular to the rotation axis) onto the celestial sphere is the Celestial Equator (CE). Because of precession, the earth's rotn axis wobbles in space with a period of 26,000 years. The effect is to make the CE and the ecliptic slide along each other (maintaining the constant 23.5 degrees, of course). This causes the sun's position at a particular day of the year to move in the sky with a period of 26000 years along the ecliptic. Since western astrology was laid down a couple of thousands of years ago and since it does not take precession into account in its calculations, the sun is no longer is aries between March 15 and April 15, but in Pisces. All it takes to verify this is to look at photographs taken during a total solar eclipse which show the background stars. But the predictions for Aries used now are the same as that used a few centuries ago.
8. Carl Sagan ,Astronomer,author of the book "Cosmos" and pioneer of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
9.A Solar Flare. as seen by the Transition Region And Corona Explorer (TRACE)
10. The dot beside the moon in the image is the Hubble Space Telescope as seen by the space Shuttle Discovery during it's retrieval mission.