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| Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | | 11:44 pm |
Another opportunity missed
Michigan weather. It's clear, but by the time i get outside, it's totally cloudy again. | | Friday, May 16th, 2008 | | 2:34 pm |
Astro News The Universe Is Twice As Bright as we thought it was. Balancing the energy budget of the Universe differs from balancing your checkbook. In both cases you must get a clean reconciliation to have understanding of what's going on. Pulsar Orbits Sun Like Star The interesting thing about this article is how it simply isn't known exactly what's going on. Physicists show how information escapes from black holes using quantum gravity. Note, Quatum Gravity isn't yet a fully mature theory. Youngest Supernova from the Earth's perspective. The interesting news is that, otherwise, there hasn't been a supernova in the Milky Way in 400 years, which is well below the estimated rate. At 280 years ago, this starts to fill that gap. The rate comes from the number of novae remnants along with their expected lifetimes in the Milky Way. Sounds pretty solid. MS World Wide Telescope which supports Windows & Mac, but leaves my Linux box with Google Sky. I'm cool with that. Iron Snow on Mercury explains magnetic field. The 'snow' is inside Mercury's core. So, we've got data on the interior of how a planet works, without having seen the full surface. White Rock on Mars Emily continues to explain... What's Left To Build on the ISS? Emily shows all, i mean with pictures, i mean of the ISS. Moon Shadows on Saturn! Upper Tangent Arc ... in case you've never seen one before. Show of hands: who has heard of this before? I didn't think so. Missing Matter Found It wasn't dust swept under the rug, and it wasn't dark - just dim. Pole shift on Europa to go with the wandering detected on Titan. To Infinity And Beyond!Mars is cold so any life would be found much deeper than we thought. Huge hole in the Universe disappears into a cloud of doubt. Phoenix to land on Mars on May 25. Will Phoenix find life? (maybe) Will Phoenix rise from the ashes once the mission is over? (no) GLAST to launch on June 3rd. Good news for Gamma Ray enthusiasts. Baby Universe's Temperature Taken using a really big thermometer, measuring released CO gas. At 9.15 K, it clearly doesn't have a fever. Hot climate could shut down plate tectonics Hot like Venus, not Houston. Vatican astronomer: E.T. could be our ‘extraterrestrial brother' with a translation from the original italian by Father Roderick. Thanks Dad! Oh, not that kind of father. | | Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | | 10:53 am |
Astrophysics joke (Astrophysics, not Astralphysics). From the Jodcast: A particle is driving down the road, looks at it's speedometer and exclaims: "OMG, I'm totally lost!" Apparently, the longer it takes me to get a joke, the better i like it. As long as i eventually get it. I might not have gotten this one at all if it hadn't been introduced as a joke. | | Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | | 10:19 am |
Astro News  Hard disk dropped from space survived and solves some fundamental physics problems. This isn't what happens when i've dropped them from several feet. End of Cosmology up at Scientific American. I like the view of the Universe as an inverted black hole. As the Universe expands, things can leave the observable Universe, but never return. That this cosmic event horizon emits energy, just like Hawking radiation, is news to me. electromagnetic formation flight (EMFF) might be used for Terrestial Planet Finder (TPF) or a space based gravity detector. Advantage: it doesn't use reaction mass for positioning. Water Can Form In Space Simulations of space conditions in the lab show water can form. Implications for where we got our water. Earth may have had multiple Moons Calculations show that they'd last millions of years at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points. It seems likely that stuff would get there when the Mars sized impactor hit the Earth, forming the Moon. | | Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | | 2:05 pm |
Astro News Sorry guys. Not much news this week. Green and Blue flash, and Gegenschein imaged at VTL The Chilean Atacama Desert is a good place to observe these phenomenon. An 8+ meter telescope is not required. NASA is going to the Sun in 2015 They're going at night? (No.) Solar system bounce did in the Dinosaurs The idea that the Sun bobs up and down through the galactic plain is not news, nor is the coincidence with various extinction events. But we now know which piece of rock did in the Dinosaurs, and it wasn't a comet. Are "the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society" peer reviewed? My club's newsletter isn't. Variable White Dwarf Found Called a "pulsating carbon white dwarf," this is the first new class of variable white dwarf star discovered in more than 25 years. Its light intensity varies regularly by nearly two percent about every eight minutes. "This will allow us to probe the white dwarf's interior, which in turn should help us solve the riddle of where the carbon white dwarfs come from and what happens to their hydrogen and helium." White dwarf stars can be variable? New hypothesis regarding Earth's formation Has to do with the details, not something silly like "God did it". This is science, dammit. The question is how, not who. You have to get the letters in the right order. Stellar Ticking Time Bomb Explodes on Cue This is big! Data from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), shows that where a neutron star pulls mass from a stellar companion, there is a ticking signal that slows down to nova detonation of the infalling material. It is possible that the data may be used to get the mass of the neutron star. Very cool if true. Jupiter's rings shaped by shadow. As they orbit about the planet, dust grains in the rings alternately discharge and charge when they pass through the planet's shadow. These systematic variations in dust particle electric charges interact with the planet's powerful magnetic field. As a result small dust particles are pushed beyond the expected ring outer boundary, and very small grains even change their inclination, or orbital orientation, to the planet."Artificial intelligence boosts science from Mars in scheduling data transmission from probes to Earth. This runs in computers on the ground. I helped write a scheduler in 1980. We didn't call it AI, but it did learn by doing, so maybe... Viscosity Experiment data recovered from Columbia Shuttle Disaster on a hard drive, dropped from orbit! NASA delays HST servicing mission several weeks Atlantis external tank needs work. I've met Andrew Feustel, one of the astronauts slated for this trip. "We're smart enough to do the mission, but dumb enough to go.", he said. But I call it courage. What Mars Microfossils Might Look Like This isn't new news. The Rio Tinto stuff is interesting though. The article has pictures. Though small. ESA May Face British Astronaut Quandary Britain policy has been against sending humans up. But the US has offered to get a Britain to the moon. If ESA has trouble getting someone to go to the ISS, they can send me. I can just see it. The first Finnish astronaut. | | Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 | | 3:33 pm |
Feature Names in the Solar System Over at the Planetary Society Blog, Emily has a great write up on Mercury doesn't have more women's names. And i agree with it, and have little or nothing to add to it. Except that i'm glad she wrote it, and not me. If i'd written it, i'd likely be blasted as sexist. I'm not as quick to absolve the IAU for foresight failure. It's their job. Instead of using the best ideas available, it's clearly politics as usual. Feh. If, for example, the IAU had really thought about it, we'd have a reasonable definition for the word 'planet', and it would work for planets outside our solar system, and we'd also have a definition for the word 'moon', and also have a formula for when it's a double planet or a planet with a really large moon. Instead we got this last minute garbage where Pluto is a Dwarf Planet (it's still a 'Planet', right?), except that it now has a minor planet number. Hey, wake up! The Earth needs a minor planet number. By the current definition, we only have one planet - Jupiter. And we wouldn't be honoring women with features on Venus that are so hard to see, requiring RADAR or narrow band IR. The phrase 'Separate but Equal' comes to mind. Is there a crater on the Moon, visible in backyard telescopes that we can name after Emily? | | Friday, April 25th, 2008 | | 3:50 pm |
| | Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | | 2:26 pm |
| | Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | | 2:13 pm |
Easy Daytime Planet to Spot
Pluto is a really faint dot in my 10 inch scope. Not far from the southern horizon at the best of times (July). Neptune and Uranus (i don't have to pronounce it in a blog) are small colored disks at high power. Jupiter is brighter, but i don't really feel like getting up at 3 am. Saturn is gorgeous, and with Mars is visible just after dark. But today, you should make an effort to see the easy daytime planet. Use really, really low power. Now, look down. Yup. It's the Earth. Happy Earth Day. | | Monday, April 21st, 2008 | | 1:09 pm |
| | Thursday, April 17th, 2008 | | 12:51 pm |
Astro News VISTA project recieves 4.1 meter mirror Infrared survey telescope uses very fast silver coated mirror, expected first light is next year. Prof Andrew Watson's math model suggests the odds of finding ETI are low about 1 in 10,000 for a 4 billion year old planet. That makes us really lucky. Ignoring the model, if we're here at 4 billion years out of 5 billion years possible, then 20% of the usable host star's lives is available for ETI. Crank up your Drake equation. There are more smaller stars than the Sun, so more stars have longer useful lives. I've not read the original Astrobiology article. | | Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | | 10:40 am |
| | Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 | | 12:23 pm |
Observations
It was a clear night last night. Though a school night, it still gets dark fairly early. Went all the way out to the driveway with the 10" Dob. Three minutes to set up and get aligned. Why not?
It was 4s degrees F. No dew or cool down period. Didn't bother with gloves. Was wearing headphones, so didn't bother with a hat. Apparently, it's just my ears that need warmth.
I used an mp3 player that has a microphone to record a log. Some 24 objects were found - though only 2 were new, and both were multiple star systems (a double and a triple). The rest were clusters and globluar clusters, like M3. Two galaxies: M81 and M82. I often can't see these from the MVO (Mercury Vapor Observatory AKA: my driveway). The Moon, Mars and Saturn also made the list. In any case, it turns out to be a pretty good list of things to see this time of year.
The mp3 player really worked. When i packed it in, about an hour later, i brought it up to my desktop computer. I played the entries without pause, and typed in the log. Overall, it seemed like less total time. And some of the entries were made without taking the eye away from the eyepiece. I usually see about 10-12 objects an hour, and 24 is alot. Sure, i didn't study the objects in much detail. The entry for Mars says something like: "Mars. Bright, disk shows, but no detail at 48x." I didn't bother to bring high power to bear. I noted where the moons of Saturn were, but didn't attempt to identify them. Looks like Titan and Dione. Other moons could have been seen if i'd spent longer at it. Anyway, the mp3 player wasn't without technical glitches. For example, it likes to turn off if you haven't been using recently enough. And, it kept saying "too many files", so i had to delete some stuff. Perhaps these things can be overcome. | | Friday, April 11th, 2008 | | 1:12 pm |
Pluto Debate Pluto Debate planned but my fans know where i stand. For everyone else: Pluto has an atmosphere - more than Mercury. Pluto has three moons - more than Venus and Mercury combined. Pluto orbits the Sun, not another planet. Pluto is round. The real debate should be if Pluto/Charon is a double planet. If so, then the Moon is a planet. The definition of the word 'Planet' is not for astronomers. It's for the public. The definition should be simple enough for the public to grok. Not some esoteric and ill-defined dynamics thing. The definition should work for other solar systems, for which we won't have esoteric information on for ages. IMHO, the public can cope with 40 planets. We also need a simple definition of a moon. What's a moon vs a double planet? Does Saturn have billions of moons? If not, what's the lower size limit for a moon? | | Thursday, April 10th, 2008 | | 11:50 am |
Astro News Coldest brown dwarf - kind of a 'missing link' object between planets and hotter brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are free ranging objects that don't have enough mass to fuse hydrogen. Eventually, they'll cool. At that point, would they be rogue planets? No idea if this means there's a new technique for finding or observing these things. Slow news day. | | Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 | | 11:12 am |
Take a picture of pluto Over at The Planetary Society, Emily's got an article on how to take a picture of Pluto. It's cheaper than buying an astro-camera, and more likely to be spectacular. I saw Pluto with my 10 inch (quarter meter) telescope. It was a dot. Not a very bright dot at that. If i'd taken a picture (and i don't have a camera that can do it), it'd be a dot, at best. The HST can get a circle 11 pixels across (WFPC2), but i haven't spent 2 billion dollars on my scope. But the New Horizons space craft is heading that way, and the science team is putting together the plan for what data to take during the flyby. This team solicited the public to help them plan great images during its Jupiter flyby, and a couple really cool shots resulted. They're asking again. You get to use a really cool web based tool to look for interesting stuff. And, it's possible you might learn something. Brown is wrong, of course. Pluto is a planet. A new smallest extrasolar planet has been found in OGLE archive data. OGLE uses the microlensing technique. 5x Earth mass. No idea how they compute a rotation rate for it. Only 30 light years away in LEO. LEO is currently visible at night. | | Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | | 11:27 am |
Astro News lsst mirror started That's the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Images of the whole sky every few days. See what's changed. Prediscovery super nova images. Etc. That's what terabytes of data are for. Athlete now with utube videos. Youngest planet spotted Somewhere between 100,000 and 1600 years old. A baby either way. LIGO upgrade $200,000,000 for an observatory with nothing observed. With luck, it will see something. Gravity waves can be hard to spot. black hole in omega centauri The Hubble Cast video show # 15 features it. smallest black hole found - 3.8 solar masses. Theory says the minimum size is somewhere between 1.7 and 2.7 solar masses. Ten plantets found via transits Their size, mass, density can be determined. | | Thursday, March 13th, 2008 | | 6:23 pm |
Astro News Life's Building Blocks From Space Because organic molecules from extra-terrestrial sources have ratios of carbon isotopes different from those of Earthly biological sources, the researchers were able to rule out contamination as a factor in their result. New Discovery At Jupiter - very low frequency radio wave is strong enough to accelerate electrons up to very high energies. Astronomers find grains of sand around distant stars evidence for how Earth-like planets might form. Grains of sand are being detected at about 2,400 light years from Earth(!). There's more, but New Scientist is hosting an advertisement that is crashing my browser. Don't they test these things? I consider it astronomically stupid. | | Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 | | 2:29 pm |
| | Monday, March 10th, 2008 | | 3:57 pm |
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