Comet Lovejoy from the space station

International Space Station Commander Dan Burbank captured spectacular imagery of Comet Lovejoy as seen from about 240 miles above the Earth’s horizon on Wednesday, Dec. 21. Burbank described seeing the comet as “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space,” in an interview with WDIV-TV in Detroit

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=125774121

IMAGE ADVISORY: December 22, 2011

CASSINI DELIVERS HOLIDAY TREATS FROM ACROSS THE SOLAR SYSTEM

No team of reindeer was necessary for these holiday treats from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. A beam of radio signals, from clear across the solar system, has delivered a Christmas package of glorious images of Saturn’s largest, most colorful ornament, Titan, and other icy baubles in orbit around this splendid planet. These treats are being featured today in a public release from the mission’s imaging team.

The release includes images of satellite conjunctions in which one moon passes in front of or behind another. Cassini scientists regularly make these observations to study the ever-changing orbits of the planet’s moons. But even in these routine images, the Saturnian system shines. A few of Saturn’s stark, airless, icy moons appear to dangle next to the orange orb of Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Titan’s atmosphere is of great interest because of its great similarities to the atmosphere believed to exist long ago on the early Earth.

The images can be found at
http://ciclops.org,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

While it may be Christmastime and wintry in Earth’s northern hemisphere, it is currently northern spring in the Saturnian system and will remain so for several Earth years. Current plans to extend the Cassini mission through 2017 will surely beget a continued bounty of scientifically rewarding and majestic views of Saturn and its moons and rings, as we spectators are treated to the passage of northern spring and the final arrival of summer in May 2017.

“As another year traveling this magnificent sector of our solar system draws to a close, all of us on Cassini wish all of you a very happy and peaceful holiday season,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo…

http://www.ciclops.org/view.php?id=7041

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/38/video/b/

–Ben

Hubble Serves Up a Holiday Snow Angel
December 15, 2011: The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, or S106 for short, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched “wings” of the nebula record the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star. This hot gas creates the “wings” of our angel. A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an “hourglass” shape.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/38/

Congrats to NASA, JPL and the ULA Atlas V / Centaur teams.

–Ben

A signal from NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, including the new Curiosity rover, has been received by officials on the ground. The spacecraft is flying free and headed for Mars after separation from the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that started the spacecraft on its journey to the Red Planet. Liftoff was on time at 10:02 a.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida…

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Ever since the birth of a colossal atmospheric disturbance that has ravaged the northern face of Saturn for nearly a year, the Cassini imaging team has been systematically recording the associated tumultuous changes in the planet’s appearance.

Today, I am enormously pleased to bring to your attention, for your sheer dazzlement, the public release of a large series of images, mosaics and movies that are the result of these methodical observations, and chronicle, month by month, and in kaleiodoscopic color, the development and evolution of this monster tempest, the longest lasting ever observed on Saturn.

You can begin your journey, down the rabbit hole and through the land of wonder, right here …

ciclops.org

… where you’ll discover an updated Captain’s Log and a link (at the top of the page) to this mind-bending and spectacular event.

In times as restless and troubled as ours, it is worth remembering that we humans are capable of extraordinary feats. And I think you will agree: Cassini’s exploration of Saturn has been one of them.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

–Ben

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS

http://vimeo.com/32001208

–Ben

Three years on Mars … in 3 minutes

By Alan Boyle

It’s been a long, lonely three years for NASA’s Opportunity rover, which has just finished a 13-mile (21-kilometer) trek from Victoria Crater across the Martian wasteland of Meridiani Planum to Endeavour Crater. A newly released time-lapse video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory condenses the odyssey down to just three minutes.

The video draws upon a series of 309 images, each taken when the rover stopped driving at the end of a Martian day. The pictures give you a sense of the loneliness that an astronaut might feel while following in Opportunity’s wheel tracks. Drifts of sand go on for miles and miles, interrupted only by craters or patches of bedrock.

The soundtrack for the video was created by taking low-frequency recordings from Opportunity’s accelerometers and speeding them up by a factor of 1,000. “The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars,” Paolo Bellutta, a roer planner at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA’s video advisory. “When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand.”

More at:

http://tinyurl.com/6dltlch

aka:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/11/8274228-three-years-on-mars-in-3-minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj4e2FyNFIE

Also interesting no US partners.

–Ben

What is GLORIA?

GLORIA stands for “GLObal Robotic-telescopes Intelligent Array”. GLORIA will be the first free and open- access network of robotic telescopes of the world. It will be a Web 2.0 environment where users can do research in astronomy by observing with robotic telescopes, and/or analyzing data that other users have acquired with GLORIA, or from other free access databases, like the European Virtual Observatory (http://www.euro-vo.org).

Who can access GLORIA?

The community is the most important part of GLORIA project. Access will be free to everybody who has an Internet connection and a web browser. Therefore it will be open not only to professional astronomers, but also to anyone with an interest in astronomy.

Which services will GLORIA offer?

Many Internet communities have already formed to speed-up scientific research, to collaborate in documenting something, or as social projects. Research in astronomy can only benefit from attracting many eyes to the sky – to detect something in the sky requires looking in the right place at the right moment. Our robotic telescopes can search the sky, but the vast quantities of data they produce are far greater than astronomers have time to analyze. GLORIA will provide a way of putting thousands of eyes and minds on the problem. GLORIA is intended to be a Web 2.0 structure, with the possibility of doing real experiments. The community will not only generate content, as in most Web 2.0, but will control telescopes around the world, both directly and via scheduled observations. The community will take decisions for the network and that will give “intelligence” to GLORIA, while the drudge work (such as drawing up telescope schedules that satisfy various constraints) will be done by algorithms that will be developed for the purpose.

How will GLORIA face its challenges?

GLORIA project will define free standards, protocols and methodology for:

1. Controlling Robotic Telescopes: and all related instrumentation i.e. cameras, filter-wheels, domes, etc.
2. Giving Web access to the Network: access to an arbitrary number of robotic telescopes via a web portal.
3. Conducting On-line experiments: It will be able to design specific web environments for controlling telescopes for research in some specific scientific issue.
4. Conducting Off-line experiments: It will be able to design specific web environments for analyzing Astronomical meta-data produced by GLORIA or other databases…

http://venus.datsi.fi.upm.es/gloria/index.php/en/

Aurora From Orbit Sept. 17, 2011

This gorgeous view of the aurora was taken from the International Space Station as it crossed over the southern Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011. The sped-up movie spans the time period from 12:22 to 12:45 PM ET.

While aurora are often seen near the poles, this aurora appeared at lower latitudes due to a geomagnetic storm – the insertion of energy into Earth’s magnetic environment called the magnetosphere – caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun…

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=112616781

New method detects emerging sunspots deep inside the sun, provides warning of dangerous solar flares, say Stanford researchers

Sunspots spawn solar flares that can cause billions of dollars in damage to satellites, communications networks and power grids. But Stanford researchers have developed a way to detect incipient sunspots as deep as 65,000 kilometers inside the sun, providing up to two days’ advance warning of a damaging solar flare…

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2011/pr-sunspot-prediction-081811.html

Photos and video at http://hmi.stanford.edu/Press/18Aug2011/">http://hmi.stanford.edu/Press/18Aug2011/

This is Not Computer fluid dynamics modeling but OBSERVED data.

So HST has done TWO movies??
This one and the Crab nebula, are there any others???

–Ben

Hubble Movies Provide Unprecedented View of Supersonic Jets from Young Stars

Stars aren’t shy about sending out birth announcements. They fire off energetic jets of glowing gas traveling at supersonic speeds in opposite directions through space.

Although astronomers for decades have looked at still pictures of stellar jets, they now can watch movies of them, thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

A diverse team of scientists led by astronomer Patrick Hartigan of Rice University in Houston, Texas, has collected enough high-resolution Hubble images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of young jets ejected from three stars…

…Hartigan and his colleagues used the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to study jets HH 1, HH 2, HH 34, HH 46, and HH 47. HH 1-HH 2 and HH 46-HH 47 are pairs of jets emanating in opposite directions from single stars. Hubble followed the jets over three epochs: HH 1 and HH 2 in 1994, 1997, and 2007; HH 34 in 1994, 1998, and 2007; and HH 46 and HH 47 in 1994, 1999, and 2008. The jets are roughly 10 times the width of our solar system and zip along at more than 440,000 miles an hour (700,000 kilometers an hour).

All of the outflows are roughly 1,350 light-years from Earth. HH 34, HH 1, and HH 2 reside near the Orion Nebula, in the northern sky. HH 46 and HH 47 are in the southern constellation Vela…

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/20/full/

August 26, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Yesterday, Cassini captured new images of Saturn’s moon Hyperion during
its 2nd closest encounter with this deeply cratered body. Closest approach registered at 15,000 miles.

Hyperion is a small moon … just 168 miles across … orbiting between Titan and Iapetus. It has an irregular shape and surface appearance, and it rotates chaotically as it tumbles along in orbit, making it impossible to say just exactly what terrain we would image during this flyby.

To see how it all turned out, go to

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/160/Hyperion_Rev_152_Raw_Preview

And the adventure continues. Cassini’s next flyby of Hyperion will be on September 16, 2011, when it passes the tumbling moon at a distance of about 36,000 miles.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

Wonder if we can ‘harvest’ them like this?

EXTRACTION OF ANTIPARTICLES
CONCENTRATED IN
PLANETARY MAGNETIC FIELDS

http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1071Bickford.pdf

Warp drive might be closer than you think.

–Ben

———–
DISCOVERY OF GEOMAGNETICALLY TRAPPED COSMIC-RAY ANTIPROTONS

The existence of a significant flux of antiprotons confined to Earth’s magnetosphere has been considered in several theoretical works. These antiparticles are produced in nuclear interactions of energetic cosmic rays with the terrestrial atmosphere and accumulate in the geomagnetic field at altitudes of several hundred kilometers. A contribution from the decay of albedo antineutrons has been hypothesized in analogy to proton production by neutron decay, which constitutes the main source of trapped protons at energies above some tens of MeV. This Letter reports the discovery of an antiproton radiation belt around the Earth. The trapped antiproton energy spectrum in the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region has been measured by the PAMELA experiment for the kinetic energy range 60-750 MeV. A measurement of the atmospheric sub-cutoff antiproton spectrum outside the radiation belts is also reported. PAMELA data show that the magnetospheric antiproton flux in the SAA exceeds the cosmic-ray antiproton flux by three orders of magnitude at the present solar minimum, and exceeds the sub-cutoff antiproton flux outside radiation belts by four orders of magnitude, constituting the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth.

http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/737/2/L29/

or

http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4882

================

See also :

Antimatter belt around Earth discovered by Pamela craft

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405122

===========================

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Launches to Jupiter

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 9:25 a.m. PDT (12:25 p.m. EDT) Friday to begin a five-year journey to Jupiter.

Juno’s detailed study of the largest planet in our solar system will help reveal Jupiter’s origin and evolution. As the archetype of giant gas planets, Jupiter can help scientists understand the origin of our solar system and learn more about planetary systems around other stars…

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/news/juno20110805.html

–Ben

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/JunoLaunch.pdf

– Ben

NASA’s Next Mars Rover to Land at Gale Crater
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s next Mars rover will land at the foot of a layered mountain inside the planet’s Gale crater.

The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is scheduled to launch late this year and land in August 2012. The target crater spans 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter and holds a mountain rising higher from the crater floor than Mount Rainier rises above Seattle. Gale is about the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Layering in the mound suggests it is the surviving remnant of an extensive sequence of deposits. The crater is named for Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale.

“Mars is firmly in our sights,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Curiosity not only will return a wealth of important science data, but it will serve as a precursor mission for human exploration to the Red Planet.”

During a prime mission lasting one Martian year — nearly two Earth years — researchers will use the rover’s tools to study whether the landing region had favorable environmental conditions for supporting microbial life and for preserving clues about whether life ever existed.

“Scientists identified Gale as their top choice to pursue the ambitious goals of this new rover mission,” said Jim Green, director for the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The site offers a visually dramatic landscape and also great potential for significant science findings.” …

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20110722.html

To view the landing site and for more information about the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

–Ben

============================

ISS028-E-018214 (21 July 2011) — This unprecedented view of the space shuttle Atlantis, appearing like a bean sprout against clouds and city lights, on its way home, was photographed by the Expedition 28 crew of the International Space Station. Airglow over Earth can be seen in the background.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-28/html/iss028e018217.html

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-28/html/iss028e018218.html

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-28/html/iss028e018221.html

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-28/html/iss028e018177.html

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-28/html/iss028e018188.html

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-28/html/iss028e018199.html

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-28/hires/iss028e018200.jpg

I like this comparison one.

–Ben

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/pia14316b.html

more at :

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/index.html

=================

Neptune Completes Its First Circuit Around The Sun Since Its Discovery

July 12, 2011: These four images of Neptune were taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope during the planet’s 16-hour rotation. The snapshots were taken at roughly four-hour intervals, offering a full view of the blue-green planet. Today marks Neptune’s first orbit around the Sun since it was discovered nearly 165 years ago. These images were taken to commemorate the event.

The Hubble images, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on June 25-26, reveal high-altitude clouds in the northern and southern hemispheres. The clouds are composed of methane ice crystals. In the Hubble images, absorption of red light by methane in Neptune’s atmosphere gives the planet its distinctive aqua color. The clouds look pink because they are reflecting near-infrared light. A faint, dark band near the bottom of the southern hemisphere is probably caused by a decrease in the hazes in the atmosphere that scatter blue light. The band was imaged by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, and may be tied to circumpolar circulation created by high-velocity winds in that region. Neptune is the most distant major planet in our solar system. German astronomer Johann Galle discovered the planet on September 23, 1846. At the time, the discovery doubled the size of the known solar system. The planet is 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) from the Sun, 30 times farther than Earth. Under the Sun’s weak pull at that distance, Neptune plods along in its huge orbit, slowly completing one revolution approximately every 165 years…

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/19

–Ben

NASA Spacecraft to Enter Asteroid’s Orbit on July 15

July 14, 2011 – PASADENA, Calif. — On July 15, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will begin a prolonged encounter with the asteroid Vesta, making the mission the first to enter orbit around a main-belt asteroid.

As the spacecraft approaches Vesta, surface details are coming into focus, as seen in a recent image taken from a distance of about 26,000 miles (41,000 kilometers). The image is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/dawn-image-070911.html.

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_stories/spacecraft_to_enter_asteroid_orbit.asp

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Last December, a remarkable thing happened at Saturn. A massive, hissing, lightning-producing storm violently erupted in the northern mid-latitudes of Saturn’s atmosphere and grew to gargantuan proportions. By the end of January, it had wrapped itself entirely around the planet, developing an enormous degree of wavy, even sensuous, details, reminiscent of the clouds on Jupiter.

Today, a group of Cassini scientists has published its findings in the scientific journal, /Nature/, deduced from an examination of information gathered by several instruments on Cassini. Prior to the planet’s August 2009 northern vernal equinox, when the sun was shining in the southern hemisphere, the location of all observed storm activity on Saturn was a band encircling the planet at 35 degrees south latitude that imaging scientists had dubbed `Storm Alley’. Well, to our great puzzlement, this new storm — now 500 times larger than any previously seen by Cassini at Saturn and 8 times the surface area of Earth — has erupted at 35 degrees /north/ latitude. The shadow cast by Saturn’s rings has a strong seasonal effect, and it is possible that the switch to powerful storms now being located in the northern hemisphere is related to the change of seasons and the changing position of Saturn’s ring shadow. But why the obvious hemispheric symmetry in storm eruption exists is not yet known.

The storm is also a prodigious source of radio noise, which comes from lightning deep in the planet’s atmosphere. As on Earth, the lightning is produced in the water clouds, where falling rain and hail generate electricity. The mystery is why Saturn stores energy for decades and releases it all at once. This behavior is unlike that at Jupiter and Earth, which have numerous storms occurring at any one time.

Go go …

http://ciclops.org

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/159/Saturns_Giant_Northern_Storm?js=1

… to learn more about this fascinating and spectacular meteorological phenomenon, to listen to the storm’s electrostatic discharges, and to read an updated Captain’s Log.

(Attached to this email is a press release that was issued a moment ago announcing these results.)

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
CASSINI IMAGING CENTRAL LABORATORY FOR OPERATIONS (CICLOPS)
SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, BOULDER, COLORADO

http://ciclops.org

media@ciclops.org

Joe Mason (720)974-5859
CICLOPS/Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Jia-Rui C. Cook (818)354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Dwayne C. Brown (202)358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington

For Immediate Release: July 6, 2011

CASSINI SPACECRAFT CAPTURES IMAGES AND SOUNDS OF BIG SATURN STORM

PASADENA, Calif. – Scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft now have the first-ever, up-close details of a Saturn storm that is eight times the surface area of Earth.

On Dec. 5, 2010, Cassini first detected the storm that has been raging ever since. It appears at approximately 35 degrees north latitude on Saturn. Pictures from Cassini’s imaging cameras show the storm wrapping around the entire planet covering approximately 1.5 billion square miles (4 billion square kilometers).

The storm is about 500 times larger than the biggest storm previously seen by Cassini during several months from 2009 to 2010. Scientists studied the sounds of the new storm’s lightning strikes and analyzed images taken between December 2010 and February 2011. Data from Cassini’s radio and plasma wave science instrument showed the lightning flash rate as much as 10 times more frequent than during other storms monitored since Cassini’s arrival to Saturn in 2004. The data appear in a paper published this week in the journal Nature.

“Cassini shows us that Saturn is bipolar,” said Andrew Ingersoll, an author of the study and a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. “Saturn is not like Earth and Jupiter, where storms are fairly frequent. Weather on Saturn appears to hum along placidly for years and then erupt violently. I’m excited we saw weather so spectacular on our watch.”

At its most intense, the storm generated more than 10 lightning flashes per second. Even with millisecond resolution, the spacecraft’s radio and plasma wave instrument had difficulty separating individual signals during the most intense period. Scientists created a sound file from data obtained on March 15 at a slightly lower intensity period.

Cassini has detected 10 lightning storms on Saturn since the spacecraft entered the planet’s orbit and its southern hemisphere was experiencing summer, with full solar illumination not shadowed by the rings. Those storms rolled through an area in the southern hemisphere dubbed “Storm Alley.” But the sun’s illumination on the hemispheres flipped around August 2009, when the northern hemisphere began experiencing spring.

“This storm is thrilling because it shows how shifting seasons and solar illumination can dramatically stir up the weather on Saturn,” said Georg Fischer, the paper’s lead author and a radio and plasma wave science team member at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz. “We have been observing storms on Saturn for almost seven years, so tracking a storm so different from the others has put us at the edge of our seats.”

The storm’s results are the first activities of a new “Saturn Storm Watch” campaign. During this effort, Cassini looks at likely storm locations on Saturn in between its scheduled observations. On the same day that the radio and plasma wave instrument detected the first lightning, Cassini’s cameras happened to be pointed at the right location as part of the campaign and captured an image of a small, bright cloud. Because analysis on that image was not completed immediately, Fischer sent out a notice to the worldwide amateur astronomy community to collect more images. A flood of amateur images helped scientists track the storm as it grew rapidly, wrapping around the planet by late January 2011.

The new details about this storm complement atmospheric disturbances described recently by scientists using Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The storm is the biggest observed by spacecraft orbiting or flying by Saturn. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured images in 1990 of an equally large storm.

For images and an audio file of the storm, visit: http://ciclops.org, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the U.S., England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team leader (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where the instrument was built.

-end-

Dawn Captures Video on Approach to Asteroid Vesta

…The video loops 20 images obtained for navigation purposes on June 1. The images show a dark feature near Vesta’s equator moving from left to right across the field of view as Vesta rotates. Images also show Vesta’s jagged, irregular shape, hinting at the enormous crater known to exist at Vesta’s south pole…

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/news/dawn20110613.html

Have a safe memorial day.

–Ben

This Time Lapse Video of the Very Large Telescope At Work is the Coolest
Thing You’ll See Today

Time Lapse Video of the Very Large Telescope At Work
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/time-lapse-video-very-large-telescope-work-coolest-thing-youll-see-today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ

“We’re mostly concerned with science and the facts, but astrology is just a mess, and this might help with astrologers predictions”, says Dr. George VanDelay, author of the proposal, with more than a hint of sarcasm.

What precipitated this controversial shift in policy is the fact that the Sun actually travels through thirteen constellations as seen from the Earth on its annual trip around our nearest star. These are the twelve traditional zodiac constellations and Ophiuchus. “We tried to get the thirteenth sign, Ophiuchus, officially recognized as a zodiacal sign a few years ago, but the traditionalists insisted on keeping a dozen only”, VanDelay explained. “The problem is the Sun is in the constellation Scorpio for less than a week, while it resides in Ophiuchus for almost three weeks out of the year.”

In a surprise move, VanDelay announced a new, more radical proposal to take to the International Astronomical Union, the official body who names celestial objects and determines the boundaries of constellations. His solution is to adjust the constellation boundary between Scorpio and Ophiuchus to re-assign the section of Scorpio that the Sun travels through for 6 days each year into the constellation of Ophiuchus.

The crowd of astronomers in the main Westin Hotel conference room reacted angrily at first. “Most astronomers prefer the solution we came up with before; adding Ophiuchus to the Zodiac. That represents the more scientific approach to this ages old problem. There are already millions of people who have adopted Ophiuchus as their Sun sign”, said Dr. Ken Marvelous of the AAS. “But, VanDelay makes a lot of sense. We just have to make sure the IAU doesn’t try to demote Scorpius to ‘dwarf constellation’ status with this redrawing of the boundaries.”

“We tried to reason with astrologers on this Ophiuchus issue before”, said VanDelay. “Now it seems the best way to resolve the whole thing forever, is to just eliminate Scorpio from the equation.” By the time VanDelay was done laying out his plan to take a constellation reorganization plan to the IAU, the crowd was energized and gave him a standing ovation. It seems almost certain the AAS will endorse this restructuring of the zodiac. This kind of proposal usually takes a couple years to make it through the IAU submissions process, but VanDelay has already quietly submitted a written proposal, so this will be on the agenda at the next IAU General Assembly in Beijing, August 20-31, 2012.

“This is a brilliant plan”, said Dr. Wilson Hale of UC Berkeley, “They already cut off the Scorpion’s claws ages ago to create the constellation Libra. That just shows how arbitrary this whole thing is.”

Angelica Spock from University of Missouri added, “It’s no secret that astrological predictions have never been less reliable that they are today. My horoscope is almost never right any more. Maybe this will help astrologers get their act together.”

But I got the PC Wallpaper for FREE!

Thx to MPS for the heads up.

–Ben

=====================
The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself…

http://skysurvey.org/

Two views of a lopsided galaxy [heic1108]

The Meathook Galaxy, or NGC 2442, has a dramatically lopsided shape. One spiral arm is tightly folded in on itself and host to a recent supernova, while the other, dotted with recent star formation, extends far out from the nucleus. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope have captured two contrasting views of this asymmetric spiral galaxy…

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=48686

–Ben

McDonald Observatory Dodges Wildfire

…for the past two weeks, McDonald Observatory’s mountaintop perch has
been under siege, as a catastrophic inferno dubbed the Rock House Fire has
decimated more than 300 square miles of the surrounding countryside. Dozens
of homes and businesses have been destroyed in Fort Davis, which is about
10 miles to the observatory’s southeast.

Last week, when the fire had crept to within about a mile of Mount Locke,
firefighters used a control burn on a nearby peak to consume tinder-dry
vegetation that would otherwise have provided the raging flames with a
pathway to the observatory. Most of McDonald’s 80-person staff and their
families evacuated. One of the few who stayed was senior program
coordinator Frank Cianciolo, who took the dramatic image seen here and
several others.

The National Forest Service reports that the fire is now 75% contained and,
fortunately, the observatory is out of danger…

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/120445424.html

–Ben
===================================================
March 17, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today, members of the Cassini Imaging Team are releasing new discoveries, published earlier in the journal /Geophysical Research Letters/ and today in the journal /Science/, showing surface changes in the equatorial regions of Titan attributed to methane rainstorms. The occurrence of these rainstorms now, a year and a half after northern spring arrived at Saturn and on Titan, shows that the weather on Titan and the changes wrought on its surface are affected by the changing seasons.

These dramatic findings suggest that weather in the `tropical’ regions on Titan is similar to that seen in the Earth’s tropics, with the outbreak of storms being the Titan equivalent of the processes that create Earth’s tropical rain forest climates. They also give good reason to believe that the river channels carved in Titan’s arid desert regions, such as those sighted in the images returned by the Huygens probe during its descent near the equator in January 2005, are in fact carved by seasonal rains.

Visit …

http://ciclops.org/view_event/155/Methane_Rain_on_Titans_Deserts

… and see the evidence for yourself: Beautiful images of recent giant weather systems developing around the equator and brief video clips of moving methane clouds.

And Happy St. Paddy’s Day to all!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

Put on your Nomex jacket and stay awhile.

–Ben

MESSENGER successfully entered orbit at Mercury!

Mar. 17, 2011 | 18:16 PDT | Mar. 18 01:16 UTC

Just a brief post to announce that at 01:00 UTC MESSENGER completed a 15-minute burn of its main engines to enter orbit at Mercury! According to mission controllers, all indications from the low-rate telemetry received through the spacecraft’s low-gain antenna are that the burn proceeded perfectly, just as expected; they are now waiting for the craft to turn to Earth to relay the high-rate telemetry to confirm the details. Regardless of those details, though, MESSENGER is now in Mercury orbit, alive, and communicating with Earth!

We of Earth have now successfully orbited every classical planet — every body known to move across the heavens and visible to the naked eye.

We first orbited Earth in 1957;
the Moon in 1966;
Mars in 1971;
Venus in 1975;
Jupiter in 1995;
Saturn in 2004;
and now, finally, Mercury, in 2011.

Hooray!

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002966/

The Drama of Starbirth

A new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of the dramatic effects new-born stars have on the gas and dust from which they formed. Although the stars themselves are not visible, material they have ejected is colliding with the surrounding gas and dust clouds and creating a surreal landscape of glowing arcs, blobs and streaks.

The star-forming region NGC 6729 is part of one of the closest stellar nurseries to the Earth and hence one of the best studied. This new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of a section of this strange and fascinating region (a wide-field view is available here: eso1027). The data were selected from the ESO archive by Sergey Stepanenko as part of the Hidden Treasures competition [1]. Sergey’s picture of NGC 6729 was ranked third in the competition…

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1109/

Janna Levin: The sound the universe makes

We think of space as a silent place. But physicist Janna Levin says the universe has a soundtrack — a sonic composition that records some of the most dramatic events in outer space. (Black holes, for instance, bang on spacetime like a drum.) An accessible and mind-expanding soundwalk through the universe.

http://www.ted.com/talks/janna_levin_the_sound_the_universe_makes.html

Discovery spacewalk seen from the ground

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/09/discovery-spacewalk-seen-from-the-ground/

Orion’s Lesser-known Nebula Takes Centre Stage

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a close-up view of an outer part of the Orion Nebula’s little brother, Messier 43. This nebula, which is sometimes referred to as De Mairan’s Nebula after its discoverer, is separated from the famous Orion Nebula (Messier 42) by only a dark lane of dust. Both nebulae are part of the massive stellar nursery called the Orion molecular cloud complex, which includes several other nebulae, such as the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) and the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024).

The Orion molecular cloud complex is about 1400 light-years away, making it one of the closest massive star formation regions to Earth. Hubble has therefore studied this extraordinary region extensively over the past two decades, monitoring how stellar winds sculpt the clouds of gas, studying young stars and their surroundings and discovering many elusive objects, such as brown dwarf stars.

This view shows several of the brilliant hot young stars in this less-studied region and it also reveals many of the curious features around even younger stars that are still cocooned by dust.

This picture was created from images taken using the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Images through yellow (F555W, coloured blue) and near-infrared (F814W, coloured red) filters were combined. The exposure times were 1000 s per filter and the field of view is about 3.3 arcminutes across.

http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1109a/

–Ben

20-MILLION MILESTONE FOR 100-YEAR CITIZEN SCIENCE PROJECT

A citizen science project running for over 100 years reached a key milestone this month when an amateur astronomer contributed the 20 millionth observation of a variable star on February 19, 2011.

A variable star changes in brightness over time. Records of these changes can be used to uncover the astrophysical processes within evolving star systems. With a database going back over a century, variable star astronomers have access to a data source unparalleled in astronomy…

http://www.aavso.org/20-million-milestone-100-year-citizen-science-project

Voyager I took a mosaic looking the other way, now thanks to Messenger we have this.

–Ben

A Solar System Family Portrait, from the Inside Out

Instrument: Wide Angle Camera (WAC) and Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)

Of Interest: In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft captured the first portrait of our Solar System as seen from the outside looking in. As a complement to this view, which contained the iconic “pale blue dot” image of Earth, the MESSENGER spacecraft collected this series of images to complete a “family portrait” of our Solar System as seen from the inside looking out. Comprised of 34 WAC image positions with NAC insets, the majority of this mosaic was obtained on 3 November 2010. However, due to pointing constraints on the spacecraft, the portion of the mosaic near and covering Neptune was acquired a few weeks later on 16 November 2010. All of the planets are visible except for Uranus and Neptune, which at distances of 3.0 and 4.4 billion kilometers were too faint to detect with even the longest camera exposure time of 10 seconds, though their positions are indicated. (The dwarf-planet Pluto, smaller and farther away, would have been even more difficult to observe). Earth’s Moon and Jupiter’s Galilean satellites (Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io) can be seen in the NAC image insets. Our Solar System’s perch on a spiral arm also afforded a beautiful view of a portion of the Milky Way galaxy in the bottom center. .

The curved shape of the mosaic is due to the inclination of MESSENGER’s orbit from the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth and the other planets orbit, which means that the cameras must point up to see some planets and down to see others. The images are stretched to make it easier to detect the planets, though this stretch also highlights light scattered off of the planet limbs, and in some cases creates artifacts such as the non-spherical shape of some planets. Around Venus and to some degree Earth, a diffraction pattern that results from light reflecting within the WAC is visible. Each image is a merged product of three calibrated 10-second exposures to reduce scene noise…

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/image.php?image_id=399

Hubble Shows New Image of Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841

Hubble Space Telescope reveals a majestic disk of stars and dust lanes in this view of the spiral galaxy NGC 2841, which lies 46 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). This image was taken in 2010 through four different filters on Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Wavelengths range from ultraviolet light through visible light to near-infrared light…

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/06/

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1104/

http://heritage.stsci.edu/2011/06/

–Ben

http://freemars.org/mnfan/MNSFS/2011-02-Tempel1-stuff/Tempel-1_4-64.gif 931K animated GIF

–Ben

Broad-line active galactic nuclei rotate faster than narrow-line ones

…we can derive the central black-hole masses more accurately; they are two to ten times smaller than has been estimated previously…

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/full/nature09761.html

Supermassive black holes not so big after all

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/4060/supermassive-black-holes-not-so-massive

This amazing video brings together all 1,236 exoplanet candidates that the Kepler telescope has spotted, and it imagines how they would look all together in a single solar system. All the planets are to scale and in the correct relative positions to their star. Prepare to be blown away by just how crowded our galaxy has gotten.

The video is the work of Vancouver-based artist and educator Jer Thorp. The configuration is of course just meant as a hypothetical – gravitational forces would rip apart such a crowded solar system – but it provides an ingenious way of visualizing how all the newly discovered planet candidates fit together…

All 1,200 newly discovered exoplanets orbiting in one gigantic solar system

http://io9.com/#!5755102/all-1200-newly-discovered-exoplanets-orbiting-in-one-gigantic-solar-system

—————-
Cosmos At Least 250x Bigger Than Visible Universe, Say Cosmologists

When we look out into the Universe, the stuff we can see must be close enough for light to have reached us since the Universe began. The universe is about 14 billion years old, so at first glance it’s easy to think that we cannot see things more than 14 billion light years away.

That’s not quite right, however. Because the Universe is expanding, the most distant visible things are much further away than that. In fact, the photons in the cosmic microwave background have travelled a cool 45 billion light years to get here. That makes the visible universe some 90 billion light years across…

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26333/

==============

What Would Neptune Look Like if it Orbited Earth?

Here’s an animation I did to make you feel small.

While watching the video of the lunar eclipse I posted the other day I was looking at the curvature of the earth’s shadow on the moon. It made me think about how large the earth might look if an exact copy of it was up there instead of the moon. Soon curiosity got the better of me, and I was animating!

So the basic idea is, each planet you see is the size it would appear in the sky if it shared an orbit with the moon, 380,000 kms from earth. I created this video in After Effects, and because of certain technical considerations had to keep the field of view at 62 degrees. That means the foreground element is not precisely to scale. I realized this after the fact and may update the video at some point in the future. All planets are to correct scale with one another in any case…

http://bradblogspeed.com/what-would-neptune-look-like-if-it-orbited-ea

http://vimeo.com/19231255

–Ben
===============
December 27, 2010

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Just down on the ground today … our cameras on Cassini have captured sight of a gigantic storm recently erupted in the northern hemisphere of Saturn. This storm had been sighted by the amateurs in recent weeks, but Cassini was finally in a position to take a splendid series of pictures of it. And what a storm it is!

Visit …

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/152/Saturn_Storm_Rev_142_Raw_Preview?js=1

… and see two raw (unprocessed) images taken in visible (blue) light and in the near-infrared.

It only goes to show: It pays to have a sophisticated observatory in orbit around Saturn.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

Construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory was completed at the the South Pole in Antarctica on December 18, 2010 New Zealand time. This scientific milestone marks completion of the world’s largest neutrino detector and a powerful tool for exploring the Universe…

http://icecube.wisc.edu/complete.php

In celebration of the holidays, and to mark the end of another fabulous year in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini imaging team is releasing today some very high resolution views of Saturn’s moon Rhea, including a 3D look at a tectonically fractured region showing cracks as deep as 2.5 miles. Get your red/blue glasses out for this one!

Go to …

ciclops.org

… to check it all out.

Also images acquired during today’s very close flyby of the northern hemisphere of Enceladus will be posted on the CICLOPS website today or tomorrow. Among other images, we expect some interesting views of the jets that erupt from Enceladus’ south polar fractures, so be on the lookout for those.

Finally, we here at CICLOPS, and the members of the Cassini imaging team, wish you and yours a very happy and healthy holiday season and a spectacular New Year!

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

Citizen Scientists Join Search for Earth-like Planets

Web users around the globe will be able to help professional astronomers in their search for Earth-like planets thanks to a new online citizen science project called Planet Hunters that launches December 16 at

http://www.planethunters.org

Planet Hunters, which is the latest in the Zooniverse citizen science project collection, will ask users to help analyze data taken by NASA’s Kepler mission. The space telescope has been searching for planets beyond our own solar system — called exoplanets — since its launch in March 2009…

http://www.onorbit.com/node/2728

Eventually I voted for ‘Enceladus and its Plumes’
Cause I hadn’t seen anything quite like it in previous years.

So what is your favorite and why?

–Ben
==========
Vote for the Most Inspiring Astronomical Photo of the Year
16 December, 2010

The time has come to vote! Thank you for all your suggestions; many have made it onto the shortlist. If looking at these images teaches me anything, it is that the study of the heavens enriches us culturally as well as scientifically. Each one of these images is a work of art. You do not need to understand what you are looking at, to be moved by it…

…You’ll have until Friday 31st to vote. Please encourage your Twitter followers, Facebook fans and blog readers to vote as well! Also, feel free to post in the comments why you voted as you did; I’d love to hear your reactions. Let’s have some fun with it and if it works well, we can do it all again next year! Season’s greetings to you all.

These images have all been released for the first time during 2010 from publicly funded observatories, space agencies and organizations…

http://www.stuartclark.com/astronomy/1-latest-news/437-vote-for-the-most-inspiring-astronomical-photo-of-the-year

Happy Thanksgiving, America. I am thankful for the entire solar system
behind me, and the cosmos ahead of me.

I am currently 13 hrs 05 mins 21 secs of light-travel time from Earth

http://twitter.com/Voyager2

It has just been announced in a Central Bureau Electronic Telegram that Brian Marsden died this morning after contracting pneumonia on top of the leukemia he had been fighting this past year.

From Central Bureau Electronic Telegrams #2554:

“He will be remembered as contributing much to celestial mechanics and the dynamics and orbits of minor bodies of the solar system and as having an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of astronomy. He was a dedicated servant to the astronomical community for many decades, serving as Director of the
Central Bureau from 1968 to 2000 (and as Director Emeritus since then) and as Director of the Minor Planet Center from 1978 to 2006 (and as Director Emeritus since then). He also served extensively within Commissions 6 and 20 of the IAU over the years, being past President of both Commissions. And he was one of the most visible astronomers in the world over the years in terms of his generous availability to the news media on behalf of the astronomical community.”

Asteroid 1877 Marsden is named in his honor.

http://simostronomy.blogspot.com/2010/11/brian-g-marsden-1937-2010.html

For an excellent biography see the Minor Planet Center announcement .
http://www.minorplanetcenter.org/mpec/K10/K10W10.html

If you miss the live broadcast don’t worry, the program re-airs every four hours at 06:00, 10:00, 14:00, 18:00 and 22:00UT on Saturday. Who knows, we might even have Simochick stop by for a visit!

===================
Sunset on Mars

I know, it may not look like much, but think about what you’re seeing: a
sunset on another world. And those images were taken by a robotic probe
that took years to design and build, months to travel the hundreds of
millions of kilometers to get to Mars, a harrowing few minutes to descend
on a breath of fire through the thin air to land on the surface, and then
nearly seven years to travel the landscape long, long past its design
specifications.

All that, plus all the amazing science, exploration, and discovery done by
Opportunity and its sister rover Spirit… and yet, it’s sometimes the stark
beauty of simple things like this that remind us that we have, at least by
proxy, placed our feet on other worlds.

I know there are worries here on Earth. But when I see something like this,
I remember that the good we do, the awe we feel, and the inspiration we can
generate are mighty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQVMWqN-JlE

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/15/sunset-on-mars/

I like “Husband Hill Summit”

The Bounce marks on “Mars Opportunity, Eagle Crater” are cool too.

–Ben

Mars rovers fans: have a look at these panoramas on Arounder:

The fullscreen views are epic!

http://mars.arounder.com/

–Ben
=======================================
Welcome to the new site!

Over the last few months NASA has been releasing extremely high resolution
elevation and image data for Mars collected by the HiRISE instrument. I
have modified the software that I wrote ten years ago to visualise the MOLA
data to use the new HiRISE data. The new data has allowed me to create
animations of Mars with incredible detail. You can see the results on my
youtube channel…

…There is no music in these videos so as to avoid copyright infringement.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MARS3DdotCOM

http://mars3d.com/

An awesome animation of Jupiter’s clouds

Ready to see something beautiful? Here’s a team effort by Björn Jónsson (who did the image processing) and Ian Regan (who tweened the animation) to create a really mesmerizing view of the motions of Jupiter’s clouds. Through the magic of image reprojection, Björn has held Jupiter and its Great Red Spot still for 16 Jupiter days while the planet’s belts, zones, and smaller storms swirl past…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHwkdcppsuo

http://planetary.org/blog/article/00002768/

–Ben

EPOXI Mission
http://epoxi.umd.edu/3gallery/vid_20101104_approach.shtml

I like the Tallest peaks pic.
…Cassini’s narrow angle camera captured a 1,200-kilometer-long (750-mile-long) section arcing along the outer edge of the B ring. Here, vertical structures tower as high as 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) above the plane of the rings — a significant deviation from the vertical thickness of the main A, B and C rings, which is generally only about 10 meters (about 30 feet)…

http://www.ciclops.org/view/6480/The_Tallest_Peaks

The rings are NOT totally flat.

=====================
Also be sure to vote today.

–Ben

November 1, 2010

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Some very good news….

Today, the Cassini Imaging Team is delighted to announce the publication of a study of Cassini images that finally offers answers to two long-standing questions in the study of Saturn’s rings … questions that were cardinal scientific goals for the Cassini mission.

We have found the cause of the strange behavior of one of the most dynamic regions in Saturn’s rings … the outer edge of Saturn’s most massive ring, the B ring. And the answer (hint: it’s acting like a spiral galaxy!) can apparently also explain the bewildering, chaotic and heretofore unexplained structures, from the very smallest to the very largest scale, throughout the densest portions of the rings. That’s no small feat.

And there is more!

To get the full scoop of results published today in the Astronomical Journal, go to …

http://ciclops.org

(Attached to this email is a press release that was issued earlier today announcing these results.)

Also, today, after more than a year’s hiatus, the Captain’s Log has been updated and is now a feature of the CICLOPS website that Alliance members can comment on if they wish.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

I’ve met Br Guy Consolmagno.

http://freemars.org/mnfan/MarsSociety/2008/Mars-Soc-Conf-2008/2008-08-16-149.jpg

He’s ok.

–Ben

Pope’s Astronomer Would Baptize Aliens

Published September 21, 2010 | FoxNews.com

One of the pope’s astronomers would happily baptize an alien if asked — “no matter how many tentacles it has.”

Guy Consolmagno, a trained astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican’s observatory, discussed a slew of topics at the British Science Festival in Birmingham last weekend, noting that the Vatican was more up to date with the latest scientific developments than most realized.

“You’d be surprised,” he told the Guardian. An avid science-fiction reader, Consolmagno reproached the historical treatment of Galileo, the man who discovered that the Earth indeed travels around the sun.

He even complimented Stephen Hawking — despite Hawking’s recent comments asserting that physics effectively replaced the need for God. Consolmagno called Hawking a “brilliant physicist.”…

…Though he concedes the odds of finding and communicating with other intelligent life is essentially zero, Consolmagno would welcome the event. “Any entity — no matter how many tentacles it has — has a soul,” he said. Asked whether or not he’d baptize an alien, Consolmagno replied: “Only if they asked.”…

More at:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/09/21/popes-astronomer-baptize-aliens/

Seasonal Geology and/or Biology.
I’m hoping it’s biology.

Lets go to Tharsis, Elysium and Arabia Terrae and find out.

–Ben

=====================================

Seasonal changes in Mars’ methane

DR EMILY BALDWIN
ASTRONOMY NOW
Posted: 21 September 2010

Using three martian years worth of Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) data, scientists presenting their results at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome this week find that methane in the red planet’s atmosphere follows an annual cycle.

Mars’ atmosphere is predominantly carbon dioxide, with small amounts of nitrogen and argon, and trace amounts of oxygen, water and methane. But methane is of particular interest since, on Earth, it is produced by geological or biological activity.

“Only small amounts of methane are present in the martian atmosphere, coming from very localised sources,” says Sergio Fonti of the Università del Salento. “We’ve looked at changes in concentrations of the gas and found that there are seasonal and also annual variations. The source of the methane could be geological activity or it could be biological – we can’t tell at this point. However, it appears that the upper limit for methane lifetime is less than a year in the martian atmosphere.”

Fonti and colleague Giuseppe Marzo of NASA Ames analysed data from the MGS Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) collected between July 1999 and October 2004, which equates to three martian years, pulling out methane spectra from some three million observations.

More at:

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1009/21mars/

An Extraordinary Celestial Spiral

This remarkable picture from the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the
NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows one of the most perfect geometrical
forms created in space. It captures the formation of an unusual
pre-planetary nebula, known as IRAS 23166+1655, around the star LL Pegasi
(also known as AFGL 3068) in the constellation of Pegasus (the Winged
Horse).

The striking picture shows what appears to be a thin spiral pattern of
astonishingly regularity winding around the star, which is itself hidden
behind thick dust. The spiral pattern suggests a regular periodic origin
for the nebula’s shape. The material forming the spiral is moving outwards
a speed of about 50 000 km/hour and, by combining this speed with the
distance between layers, astronomers calculate that the shells are each
separated by about 800 years.

The spiral is thought to arise because LL Pegasi is a binary system, with
the star that is losing material and a companion star orbiting each other.
The spacing between layers in the spiral is expected to directly reflect
the orbital period of the binary, which is indeed estimated to be also
about 800 years…

http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1020a/

The McNeil Medal is awarded to a candidate who has demonstrated outstanding ability to promote and communicate science to students and the public within Canada. Previous winners include David Suzuki, Jay Ingram, and Bob McDonald.

Congrats Doug!

Doug gave a couple of great talks as well and we’ll post those as well.

Enjoy!

Is there anything more lost than a star in a catalogue which can no longer be found? Such errant entries have been grist for the mills of all sorts of astronomical detective stories. The missing or mis-recorded entries span the range from the sublime to the ridiculous. For instance a whole cottage industry of speculation was introduced by Sirius being described as one of the “reddish” stars by Ptolemy in 150 AD, despite other earlier and contemporaneous records describing it as its more expected, and current, color white! The Flamsteed catalogue’s “missing in action” entries involved a record of the planet Uranus – pre-discovery. Amusingly, even Galileo recorded the planet Neptune as it passed close to the line of sight of his target-of-interest, Jupiter, on both Dec 28, 1612 and Jan 27, 1613 – more than two centuries earlier than its official discovery by Galle and d’Arrest on Sep 23, 1846.

But my story is much less impressive. It begins with the publication by Jacques Feige of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories (as they were then known) of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, California Institute of Technology. At about the time the manuscript for this paper was being completed, I was being conceived – but that is another story!

Jacques Feige’s 1958 paper was entitled “A Search for Underluminous Hot Stars” and was published in the Astrophysical Journal, volume 128, pages 267 to 271. Faint blue stars might seem to be a fairly useless sub-group of observable objects, but it turns out that the inexorable influences of astrophysics conspire to make them a cornucopia of both astrophysical and practical interest.

On the astrophysical side, these objects end up being peculiar for a variety of reasons, including binary evolution, being examples of almost naked star cores left over from a stellar evolutionary event known as the Helium flash, being white dwarfs, being distant versions of main sequence stars which have no excuse for being as far away from the galactic disk as they are, or being members of a class of star known as sub-dwarfs. In a very real sense, every find is a winner!

What about the practical side? Certainly young, distant, blue stars could be found in or near the disk of the galaxy. But such stars were unusual at large angles to the Milky Way. In fact, a color image of stars in the direction perpendicular to the Milky Way would show that the overwhelming majority are yellow, orange, or reddish. Still, the few bluish objects (like QSOs) found in directions away from the plane of our galaxy were incredibly interesting. What’s more, when their colors were measured, they would need the instrument-to-instrument variations in sensitivity calibrated out. To do so, requires the measurement of “blue” objects, and this is where Feige’s catalog became so valuable. It was a list of the few relatively bright objects in those directions which were blue and had fairly featureless spectra. Hence, they became a set of very frequently used standard stars for both measurement of brightnesses and calibration of brightness versus wavelength.

Except that one of the 115 had gone “walkabout”. Feige 85 was listed as being at position 13 hours, 34.7 minutes of right ascension and +8 degrees, 35 arcminutes of declination for the 1950.0 coordinate frame. The brightness listed was 15.0 which was at the faint end of the stars listed in this catalog. And more importantly, it wasn’t there! Fortunately for our story, Jacques Feige published one other paper called “An Atlas of Identification Charts for 113 Blue Stars” in 1959 in the Astrophysical Journal, volume 129, page 600 which included 39!) “plates” – specially reproduced photographic images in the journal containing what we now refer to as “postage stamp” finder charts for the 113 stars (down from the originally-claimed 114 due to the Feige 33 apparently being identical to Feige 34, once a +1 degree error in declination was corrected!)

As Brian Skiff described it in an e-mail of Mar 20, 2010 to the aavso-discussion list “… Feige 85 is shown with approximate coordinates because the original position is greatly in error, and it is lost for now.”

Normally, that would be the end of the story since the sky is vast. But in the last few years an amazing project has emerged called astrometry.net. It has the simple goal of being able to take an image of a star field and give you back its location in the sky, image scale, rotation, and image flip, if any – *without any additional information*. Sounds hard and it is! Why bother? The answer is simple – the rate at which images come off survey telescopes is so high that it is impossible to give each one the TLC and human attention necessary to put each image on the proper “world coordinate system”. The solution *must* be automated. Enter astrometry.net whose folks have produced the indices and code to make this happen. All you need is an image to feed to the routine.

That is where the story of Feige 85 is somewhat unusual. Normally, lost stars in catalogues just have incorrectly-typeset coordinates and no finder chart. Feige 85 *had* a published image. In fact, sitting at my home computer on a weekend, I could download the published “plate” from the Astrophysical Journal almost instantly from the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System. The Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin in my browser displayed it, and I did a screen capture and saved the image. Then I used the image processing software GIMP to crop the image to hold only the field of Feige 85 and get rid of the corners outside the circular field. The scan of the finder chart was still pretty noisy, so I smoothed the image to make the stars more centrally-peaked and to sand the background into greater uniformity. A final inversion to the image was made to make the stars white and the sky dark.

The image was fed to the solve-field routine of astrometry.net. After a few CPU seconds, the image was “solved”. Feige 85 was at the position 13:36:21.2 +08:22:34 for equinox J2000.0. It had not been found in any other “hot star” list but was catalogued as 2MASS J13362125+0822335.

Thankfully, online versions of catalogues can be updated on the fly and Brian Skiff of Lowell Observatory saw to it that this was done in Simbad. He also noted that it appears that Feige’s error was 1 arcminute in RA (right ascension).

So, at last, the Feige catalogue can sleep the sleep of the scientifically just. In truth, it was a minor mystery, but it was fun! And it opened my eyes to the possibilities of working with older (and newer!) images in a different way.

The astrometry.net folks have suggested that star field images from plates and film might be precisely dated by identifying the brightnesses of known, regular variable stars. Then, these in turn could be used to fill in the historical lightcurves of any other variable stars in those images – whether or not they were known at the time. And of course, there are lots of other possibilities. The important thing is to recognize the power of new tools and to look at problems from new perspectives!

Links:
“Astrometry.net” http://www.astrometry.net/

“Astrometry.net: Blind astrometric calibration of arbitrary astronomical images” by Lang, D. et al.
The Astronomical Journal, Volume 139, Issue 5, pp. 1782-1800 (2010)
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2233
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AJ….139.1782L

“A Search for Underluminous Hot Stars” by Feige, J.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1958ApJ…128..267F

“An Atlas of Indentification Charts for 113 Blue Stars” by Feige, J.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1959ApJ…129..600F

“The field horizontal-branch B-type star Feige 86″
by Bonifacio, P., Castelli, F., and Hack, M.
Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement, v.110, p.441
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1995A%26AS..110..441B

–Ben

Cassini Images from this Weekend’s Enceladus, Tethys and Dione Flybys!

August 14, 2010

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Just down on the ground today … images from Cassini’s close flybys of Tethys, Dione and Enceladus this weekend.

Go to …

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/140/Enceladus_Tethys_and_Dione_Rev_136_Raw_Preview

… and see some gorgeous raw images of these very different Saturnian moons.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco

The problem is not the formation of life, it’s the unfathomable distances and spans of time between these formations. Science fiction has given us dreams of communicating and traveling over galactic distances. In reality, that is completely impossible given what we know about physics today. Utterly inconceivable. It’s a sad thought for the imaginative. If other life does exist in the Universe, we’d surely like to meet it. Dangers be damned, the thrill of finding other life is an undeniable quest and communicating with citizens of another an world would be an Earth- and life- changing event. But sadly, it will never happen. We are doomed to be alone.

While I’m not really that pessimistic it is a valid answer to the Fermi paradox. The reason we haven’t heard from any other of the vast numbers of alien civilizations out there is: it’s not possible. The laws of physics prevent it. Certainly some worlds are created within “view” of others and they enjoy (or suffer) the wonders of that interaction. But we were born alone and will die alone because we are too far away from our nearest galactic citizens. They’ll send messages and we’ll listen, and vice versa, but never at the same time or the same way.

I hope I’m wrong!

An “Island Universe” in the Coma Cluster

A long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image shows a majestic face-on
spiral galaxy located deep within the Coma Cluster of galaxies, which lies
320 million light-years away in the northern constellation Coma Berenices.
The galaxy, known as NGC 4911, contains rich lanes of dust and gas near its
center. These are silhouetted against glowing newborn star clusters and
iridescent pink clouds of hydrogen, the existence of which indicates
ongoing star formation. Hubble has also captured the outer spiral arms of
NGC 4911, along with thousands of other galaxies of varying sizes. The high
resolution of Hubble’s cameras, paired with considerably long exposures,
made it possible to observe these faint details.

This natural-color Hubble image, which combines data obtained in 2006,
2007, and 2009 from the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced
Camera for Surveys, required 28 hours of exposure time.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/24/

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today, the Cassini Imaging Team is proud to release some outstanding new image mosaics and computer simulations of everyone’s favorite ring, Saturn’s F ring: the narrow, dynamic, and extraordinarily complex set of strands of ring material caught between the orbits of its shepherd moons, Prometheus and Pandora, a few thousand kilometers beyond the outer edge of Saturn’s main rings.

These new results, published last week in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirm what some of us veteran imaging scientists from the days of the Voyager mission long suspected: The F ring is the site of continual moonlet formation and, in most cases, eventual disruption. But what we didn’t know then was the exact mechanism by which this could happen.

Now we do, and the culprit is Prometheus and the particular sequence of steps that transpire in its repetitive disturbance of the F ring that creates clumps of ring debris.

And like so many of our most interesting results on Saturn’s rings, the tell-tale clues came in the form of shadows cast by these small, newly formed objects onto the faint, diffuse component of the F ring.

Go to …

http://www.ciclops.org/view/6367/Fan_in_the_F_Ring

… and see for yourself what Prometheus inflicts on the F ring. And be amazed at the complexity that is made possible by the simple force of gravity.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carolyn-Porco/116163229386

================================
from : Jim Cuca wglogowski@gmail.com

Dear astronomy enthusiast:

The Chicago Astronomical Society invites you to attend our annual star party, Astrofest, which will be held September 10-11, 2010 at Vana’s near Kankakee, Illinois. Registration forms and related information are available at

http://www.chicagoastro.org/index_files/Page345.htm

The theme for this year’s event is “The Link Between Astronomy and Particle Physics.” In addition to our usual line-up of astronomers, Astrofest 2010 will include presentations by scientists involved in research into such contemporary topics as dark matter and dark energy. Our star party will be held on Vana’s 20+ acre field, with plenty of room for camping and telescopes; each attendee will be invited to use our 14-inch observatory telescope. Other activities include: astrophotography contest; telescope contest; door prize raffle.

We hope to see you at Astrofest 2010.

If there are any questions, please contact

Jim Cuca at jamescuca@comcast.net.

WOW!

–Ben

OSTP to Co-Host “Astronomy Night on the National Mall”

OSTP, in conjunction with Hofstra University, will co-sponsor a free, open to the public star party July 15 on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

If you are near the DC area in come enjoy close-up views of the crescent Moon, Venus, Mars, Saturn, star clusters, and nebulae. You can even gaze at our own Sun early in the evening with the help of specially filtered telescopes. “Astronomy Night on the National Mall” will go from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Thursday, July 15 (with a July 16 rain date). Telescopes, posters, and video equipment will be set up just northeast of the Washington Monument, between 14th and 15th Streets NW, and Madison Drive and Constitution Ave. View a map of where Astronomy Night on the Mall will be held…

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/03/ostp-co-host-astronomy-night-national-mall

“…the giant propeller “Earhart” named after another aviator, Amelia Earhart….”

–Ben
——————–

July 8, 2010

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today, a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by members of the Cassini Imaging Team reports the discovery of dozens of kilometer-sized moonlets in Saturn’s outer A ring, eleven of which have been carefully tracked over the last few years.

Embedded in the rings, these objects might normally be difficult to find. However, their presence is betrayed by the large tell-tale `propeller’ structures they generate in the ring material on either side of them. Such features had been found in a different ring locale earlier in the mission but those were much smaller, harder to see, and so numerous that there was no hope of following any one of them. The new propellers, and the moonlets that create them, are some ten times larger and much easier to identify and follow from image to image and year to year.

What is outstanding about these new findings is the insight they ultimately will provide into the early stages of solar system formation, when growing planets become large enough to open gaps in the ring material around them and ultimately truncate their own growth.

To learn more, go to …

http://ciclops.org

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/137/Propellers_Tracked_for_Years?js=1

… and read all about it.

You may find it amusing that these large propellers have unoffically been named after famous aviators. Those flight enthusiasts among you will recognize Bleriot, Earhart, Santos-Dumont, and others.

(A press release on the new results can be found below. For those of you who would like to read the paper, here is the link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1008 )

Enjoy,

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carolyn-Porco/116163229386

Journey into the Sun
http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/journey-into-the-sun

Scientists at Stanford University and Lockheed Martin are playing pivotal roles in a nearly billion-dollar NASA mission to explore the sun. A spacecraft launched in early 2010 is obtaining IMAX-like images of the sun every second of the day, generating more data than any NASA mission in history. The data will allow researchers to learn about solar storms and other phenomena that can cause blackouts and harm astronauts.

We also have a Sun Quiz: Test your knowledge about this mysterious, awesome and most vital of stars.

This video and quiz are from QUEST, a science show at KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco. You can embed the video and quiz on your site. You’ll find the code to embed the video on the videos’ web site to the right of the video player under “embed this video”.

Thanks for your time.

Sevda
Sevda Eris
KQED Public Media – QUEST Science Series
2601 Mariposa Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Tel: 415-553-2835
Email:seris@kqed.org
www.kqed.org/quest

Nice astro eye-candy site.

–Ben

starrycritters.com

The ancient peo­ples saw pic­tures in the sky. From those pat­terns in the heav­ens, ancient sto­ry­tellers cre­ated sto­ries about heroes, maid­ens, drag­ons, bears, cen­taurs, dogs and myth­i­cal crea­tures. What kid doesn’t see drag­ons and angels in the clouds while lying in warm grass on a sum­mer after­noon? What grown-up doesn’t wish upon a shoot­ing star? So lie back and imag­ine the ani­mals, insects and pat­terns swirling in these Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, Spitzer Space Tele­scope and other obser­va­tory images. We believe the expla­na­tions are best suited for par­ents, edu­ca­tors and upper-grade stu­dents. Par­ents of younger chil­dren may find it help­ful to explore the uni­verse together with their child. Par­ents can use the explana­tory text as a guide. Inter­act with the images and find your own pat­terns in the stars. Con­jure your own sto­ries and set­tings and share them. Leave a com­ment on the site about what you see in the images. We love to share your stories

http://www.starrycritters.com

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

Witness one out-of-this-world vista…from Cassini at Saturn. So glad I’ve lived to see such sights! http://bit.ly/bZI0vP

http://www.ciclops.org/view/6300/Cut_by_Saturns_Shadow?js=1

NASA Science News Conference on the Solar Dynamics Observatory
12:15 PM – 1:15 PM CDT

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/docs/SDOfirstlight.pdf

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Ever since the beginning of the Cassini mission, a major goal of the Imaging Team has been the detection of Saturnian lightning. The process of electrostatic discharge and lightning production is tied to the motions of electrically charged particles and molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the same is believed to be true for the atmospheres of the giant planets. Measuring the power of lightning strikes in a planetary atmosphere can tell of the energy contained in the thunderstorms that spawn them and of the vigor of the atmospheric motions.

Now, for the first time, and as a direct result of the dimming of the ringshine on the night side of the planet during last year’s Saturn equinox, the Cassini Imaging Team has detected flashes of lightning in the atmosphere of Saturn. And these flashes have been shown to be coincident in time with the emission of powerful electrostatic discharges intercepted by the Cassini Radio and Plasa Wave experiment.

For more on this fantastic result, go to …

http://ciclops.org
http://www.ciclops.org/view/6064/Lightning_Flashing_on_Saturn

… and see for yourself our images and movies of Saturnian lightning. And make sure the sound is up on your computer!

(A news release on these findings that went out a moment ago is attached below.)

Enjoy,

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

After spending some quality time poring over the images and data Cassini collected
last month during its closest flyby yet of Saturn’s ‘Death Star’ moon, Mimas, we are
finally ready to release the goods. And they are outta sight!

After much deliberation, we have concluded: Mimas is NOT boring. Who knew?!

To see all our spectacular images, mosaics, thermal results and more, go to …

http://ciclops.org

… and check it out. You’ll see details in the moon’s craters that reminded us
imaging folks of features we’d seen on Phoebe and Hyperion. You’ll discover that
Mimas has a very peculiar thermal signature that we can’t yet explain. And best of
all … be sure you have a pair of red/green glasses handy ’cause you won’t want to
miss peering into gigantic Herschel crater in 3D!

Enjoy,

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carolyn-Porco/116163229386

St. Patrick's Day prominence. Image credit: Glen Ward

This is a solar image from St. Patrick’s Day sent in by one of our Slacker friends, Glen Ward. You can clearly see a solar prominence in profile here. A prominence is usually in the form of a large, bright loop extending outward from the Sun’s surface into the corona. A prominence forms in about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months. A typical prominence extends over many thousands of kilometers; the largest ever observed by SOHO was in 1997. It was an awesome 350,000 km long.

There is a lot we don’t know about the Sun. Scientists are currently researching how and why prominences are formed. NASA recently launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the Sun in more detail than ever before. You can read more about the Sun and SDO in this Simostronomy blog.

The episodes will air on April 6 and 13. I recommend you watch them or set your DVR accordingly.

I especially appreciated they way the series presents the material chronologically, which shows how each successive genertion built on the discoveries of the telescopes of the previous generation. The production quality, narration and interviews were put together in a logical, seamless fashion. I particularly like when they say ‘novae’ and ‘supernovae’ instead of the dumbed down incorrect novas and supernovas that some documentaries resort to these days.

In a word it is first rate. It is mostly scientifically accurate and well presented. My only minor distraction was when they occasionally used planetary nebulae pictures to represent stellar explosions like supernovae. At least the narrator says nebulae, not nebulas, which isn’t even a word.

The synopsis from NOVA adequately describes the two episodes without my intervention, so here they are.

Hunting the Edge of Space: The Mystery of the Milky Way – April 6
Three centuries of engineering have produced telescopes far beyond Galileo’s simple spyglass. Perched on mountaintops, orbiting the Earth, and even circling other planets, these telescopes are revealing the solar system in detail Galileo could only dream of. The Milky Way brings viewers up close with today’s most powerful telescopes and embarks on a stunning journey to the planets and moons now being imaged as never before.

Hunting the Edge of Space: The Ever Expanding Universe – April 13
From the discovery that the Milky Way is just one galaxy among billions, to the stunning revelation that these galaxies are speeding away from each other faster every second, The Ever Expanding Universe investigates the universe’s distant past—and its future. Now, modern telescopes have added a mysterious new twist to the plot: The vast majority of the stuff of the universe is invisible, tied up in dark matter and dark energy. But what are these mysterious dark forces? A new generation of telescopes is embarking on a mission impossible to see the unseeable, and answer one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the cosmos.

I give it two thumbs up, even if my wife says I spoiled it all because I knew what was coming next and said it out loud before it happened. She doesn’t go to planetarium shows with me any more for the same reason. Don’t worry; I won’t be in your living room. Watch this…you’ll be glad you did.

Fill in your information below and your name will be included with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!

More at:
http://marsparticipate.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/

Amateur astronomers to shed light on solar storms

“…Becoming a solar storm tracker involves setting up a ‘Zooniverse account,’ logging into the Solar Stormwatch site at http://solarstormwatch.com and completing a short interactive training programme. Almost anyone can help the project says Dr Davis. “Many motivated individuals will always be able to scrutinise the data far more carefully than small dedicated science teams ever could. Contributing will enable more information to be gleaned from the data than would otherwise be possible.”

The site requires members to study video footage and photographs to identify past solar storms, described as big lightbulb-shaped explosions. Then they may be asked to look at data of real-time space-weather conditions. Dr Davis says, “the real-time data is less detailed but potentially provides a means of making true predictions about any solar storms heading towards Earth.” …

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1003/02solar/

wonder how long till the podcast is posted?

http://www.amnh.org/podcast/index.html

–Ben

AMNHlogo

Media Inquiries: Department of Communications

212-769-5800 communications@amnh.org

www.amnh.org

_____________________________________________________________________________

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY’S

TENTH ANNUAL ISAAC ASIMOV MEMORIAL DEBATE

ASKS “Where Next for the Manned Space Program?”

WHAT Tenth Annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate Moon, Mars and Beyond: Where next for the manned space program?

What is the future direction for manned space flight? Should we proceed straight to Mars? Should we return to the Moon, or should multiple destinations be the goal?

Where to go next is one of the hottest topics for NASA’s manned program. Central to the subject are thorny issues that relate to science, launch hardware, international competition, national security, shrinking budgets, and political will. The Obama administration’s recent decision to delay indefinitely of our next voyage to Moon while simultaneously planning a new launch vehicle to take us out of low earth orbit makes this Asimov Debate particularly topical and newsworthy.

Moderator

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astronomer and Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium

Panelists

Kenneth Ford, Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, is Chairman of the

NASA Advisory Council.

Lester Lyles, United States Air Force (Ret), is a member of NASA’s Human

Space Flight Plans Committee.

Paul Spudis, Lunar and Planetary Institute, has experiments on lunar orbiting

missions to map permanently dark regions poles and search for water ice

deposits.

Steven Squyres, Cornell University, is the principal investigator for the Mars

Exploration Rover Project, among others.

Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, with a focus on exploration and

settlement of that planet, is also the President of Pioneer Astronautics, an

aerospace research and development company.

WHEN Monday March 15, 7:30 p.m.

WHERE LeFrak Theater, first floor – Enter at 77th Street

American Museum of Natural History

ADMISSION $15 adults $13.50 members, students, seniors

# # #

No. 25a

===========================================
http://www.amnh.org/programs/programs.php?src=p_h&date=2010-03-15&event_id=1633

More images from Enceladus flyby last Nov. 21 2009.

–Ben

Forest of Jets
Cassini’s close flyby of Enceladus last Nov. 21 revealed a forest of new jets spraying from the prominent fractures crossing the south polar region and yielded the most detailed temperature map to date…

http://ciclops.org/view_event/129/Forest_of_Jets

–Ben

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-130/html/iss022e062674.html

lots of other STS-130 pics here.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-130/ndxpage1.html

Geostationary Orbits are over five times the radius of the Earth, approximately 36000 km above sea level. Objects in such orbits have orbital period equal to the Earth’s rotation and would remain stationary over the same point on the Earth’s equator. Geostationary objects appear motionless in the sky, making extremely useful for communications (including TV broadcast) and weather satellites. While in 1945 Arthur C. Clark was the first to suggest the usefulness of such an orbit, there are now over 370 satellites in Geostationary orbits. But while they are motionless relative to the Earth surface, they are moving objects against the background sky as they are rotating around our planet in this space high way with speed ten times faster than an airliner. Although they are some of the furthest satellites, but surprisingly, given dark enough skies, it is possible, armed with a telescope or a pair of binocular to spot some of the them in the geostationary ring. Typically these satellites are at magnitude. +11 or fainter (over 100 times fainter than naked-eye visibility), but as recorded in this video they are brightening by several magnitudes when the geometry is favorable. Most satellites in the video are at 7th to 9th magnitudes but there are few of them at about magnitude 5, visible to the naked-eye under dark skies! The time-lapse video is made using an 85mm lens on a modified DSLR camera under an ideal dark sky. It is a sequence of 12 shots each 45s exposure on a tracking mount. Majority of GeoSats are visible at 5 degrees below the equator on the Orion Nebula declination. Mintaka , the western most star of the Orion Belt, is the closest to the equator. All of the satellites in this highway has moved about 2.5 degrees during the 10 minute shooting period, equal to 360 degrees for a complete 24 hours. Babak Tafreshi

http://twanight.org/newTWAN/case.asp

As always, be sure to zoom in to the FULL frame (2758 X 2567)
6.8MB JPEG

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2010-08-a-full_jpg.jpg

to see all the ‘tiny’ galaxies.

I like pair in the bottom left.

–Ben
==================================
Jurassic Space: Ancient Galaxies Come Together After Billions of Years

February 18, 2010: Imagine finding a living dinosaur in your backyard. Astronomers have found the astronomical equivalent of prehistoric life in our intergalactic backyard: a group of small, ancient galaxies that has waited 10 billion years to come together. These “late bloomers” are on their way to building a large elliptical galaxy. Such encounters between dwarf galaxies are normally seen billions of light-years away and therefore occurred billions of years ago. But these galaxies, members of Hickson Compact Group 31, are relatively nearby, only 166 million light-years away. New images of these galaxies by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope offer a window into what commonly happened in the universe’s formative years when large galaxies were created from smaller building blocks. The Hubble observations have added important clues to the story of this interacting foursome, allowing astronomers to determine when the encounter began and to predict a future merger. Astronomers know the system has been around for a while, because the oldest stars in a few of its ancient globular clusters are about 10 billion years old. The encounter, though, has been going on for about a few hundred million years, the blink of an eye in cosmic history. Everywhere the astronomers looked in this compact group they found batches of infant star clusters and regions brimming with star birth. Hubble reveals that the brightest clusters, hefty groups each holding at least 100,000 stars, are less than 10 million years old. The entire system is rich in hydrogen gas, the stuff of which stars are made. Astronomers used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to resolve the youngest and brightest of those clusters, which allowed them to calculate the clusters’ ages, trace the star-formation history, and determine that the galaxies are undergoing the final stages of galaxy assembly.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/08/

19 February 1473

the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe

–Ben

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Copernicus

This 3-D view is a color composite picture made from two different black and white images that were taken from slightly different viewing angles. The images are combined so that the viewer’s left and right eye, respectively and separately, see a left and right image of the black and white stereo pair when viewed through red-blue glasses…

http://ciclops.org/view/6133/Prometheus_Popping_in_3-D?js=1

I’m not sure I like the gov. defining my science.

Although they do define the weights and measures.

I heard Indiana tried declaring pi = 3.0000 awhile back (1897). Well at least they tried to.

–Ben

===================
2010 Regular Session

HM 17

“PLUTO IS A PLANET IN NEW MEXICO DAY”

Sponsor: Joni Marie Gutierrez

Current Location: Passed

http://legis.state.nm.us/lcs/_session.aspx?Chamber=H&LegType=M&LegNo=17&year=10

“…WHEREAS, thanks to Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto will always
be considered a planet in New Mexico;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO that February 18,
2010 be proclaimed “Pluto is a Planet in New Mexico Day” at the
house of representatives in honor of the eightieth anniversary
of the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh…”

http://legis.state.nm.us/Sessions/10%20Regular/memorials/house/HM017.pdf

Move over Dr Who scarves… There is a NEW geek scarf in town.

–Ben

from @starstryder & @Moonrangerlaura
I found a reason to go by more yarn & study emission line lamps http://bit.ly/dbvTHf aka:

http://sternlab.org/2010/02/emission-spectra-scarves/

That’s no small moon, That’s a Space Station!
oh wait, yes it is just a small moon.

–Ben
=====================================
****** Forwarded Message Follows *******
February 15, 2010
Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Latest images from Cassini’s flybys of Saturn’s `Death Star’ moon, Mimas, and one of its small moons, Calypso, are now down on the ground.

If you love surfaces covered with craters and coated with icy debris, check them out at http://ciclops.org .

http://ciclops.org/view_event/128/Mimas_and_Calypso_Rev_126_Flyby_Raw_Preview

Enjoy,
Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carolyn-Porco/116163229386

Hearts in Space- Sixty Symbols

and a special alert to be on the lookout for northern lights tonight.

Mars Rover Spirit picture compilation in HD

Pictures compiled from Mars Rover Spirit using the front HAZCAM left side lens from martian days (sols) 1 through 1724. That’s nearly five earth years shrunk into a 7 minute video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vQQKQhX–M

===================

Mars Rover Opportunity picture compilation in HD

Pictures compiled from Mars Rover Opportunity using the front HAZCAM right side lens from martian days (sols) 1 through 1751. That is five earth years shrunk into a 8 minute video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWI2WuqhQ2A

But do not “despair”. We have several new podcasts coming up in the next few days.

Twitter.com/Exoplanetology

Hey, exoplanets.org just launched their new exoplanets data http://exoplanets.org/exotable/exoTable.html includes plots! Nice!

He’ll take you to the Moon, you’ll fly through the stars, you’ll go visit a friend on the surface of Mars.
So scroll down the page, see what there is to see, the tickets are priced just right..they’re FREE!

see it at :

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1946595_2010965,00.html

You can get the the Full size 7227 samples x 3847 lines image, or smaller sizes too,
here: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11667

or
http://ciclops.org/view/5773/The_Rite_of_Spring

It make’s a great desktop image.

Thanks Cassini and Carolyn Porco

–Ben

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=28&month=11&year=2009

and scroll down to the ‘SPACESHIP SIGHTINGS:’

then to ‘more images:’ paragraph then in mid paragraph…

ta-da…

If you want to see an animated GIF of the event check out :

http://freemars.org/mnfan/MNSFS/2009-11-26-ISS-STS-129-Pass/ISS-STS-129-pass-2009-11-26.gif

6Mb file.

other info here:

http://freemars.org/mnfan/MNSFS/2009-11-26-ISS-STS-129-Pass/

–Ben
still trying to get my 15 min of fame.

This year, say it in stars! Send your friends and relatives best wishes for the season with our printable holiday cards. Messages of joy and peace are illuminated by the natural splendor of the universe. The cards are designed to be printed out at photo stores or online photo labs, though you can also use a home printer.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/holiday/