BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Astronomical Doodles

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Google doodles are little drawings and animations that incorporate the Google name into a presentation of a person or event of note. Here are five doodles with an astronomy theme, including asteroids, a lunar eclipse and how the speed of light was calculated by observing Jupiter and Io.

Astronomical Doodles

Some while after putting this article up, Bellaonline's processing apparatus has introduced some punctuation errors. So far it has refused to let me correct them.

So please note that:
1. The Danish astronomer who first determined the speed of light was Ole Rømer, not Ole Rømer'.
2. The TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) project is located at the University of Liège [not Liège] in Belgium.
3. In the heading that that has mysteriously come to say Asteroid 2012 DA14 ¬â€œ a miss, the ¬â€œ simply began life as a dash (-)
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The Science Museum in London is one of many centers worldwide to have a Foucault Pendulum. The scale on the floor was devised to show the time of day at London's latitude.

I used to take students to the museum. One of their activities was to check out the pendulum early in a visit and again before returning to school. They could then show the change in the plane of the pendulum's swing on their visit sheets.

Today we give Ole Rømer credit for being smart, and a patient and careful observer. He got a figure for the speed of light that was in the same ballpark as what we know today. And he did it by timing the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io - with a pendulum clock, not the electronic marvels we have today for timing.

But not all of his contemporaries were convinced. Rømer did his work at the Paris Observatory. Its director Giovanni Domenico Cassini was unconvinced by it. (This was the Cassini for whom the Cassini mission to the Saturnian system was named.)

On the other hand, Christiaan Huygens supported Rømer conclusions. Huygens was the discoverer of Saturn's moon Titan - the lander that the Cassini spacecraft carried to land on Titan was named for Huygens.

It's unusual for an asteroid to be better known by its provisional designation than by it's final name, but 2012 DA14 - discovered in 2012 - is officially 3667943 Duende. The number is given by the Minor Planet Center and the name by the discovery team, the Observatorio Astronómico de la Sagra in Spain. A duende is a fairy-like creature in the folklore of Iberia, Latin America and the Philippines.

Duende's size is estimated at thirty meters across. When it approached Earth on February 15, 2013, it came closer than any other known object of this size.

Here is more about Naming Asteroids.

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Some while after putting this article up, Bellaonline's processing apparatus has introduced some punctuation errors. So far it has refused to let me correct them.

So please note that:
1. The Danish astronomer who first determined the speed of light was Ole Rømer, not Ole Rømer'.
2. The TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) project is located at the University of Liège [not Liège] in Belgium.
3. In the heading that that has mysteriously come to say Asteroid 2012 DA14 ¬â€œ a miss, the ¬â€œ simply began life as a dash (-)
.

LOL, technology is great.