THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Dances With Wolves in space, it's been called. Or worse. Another waste of money from the PC crowd:

"Lacking the conflict and flaws that make the Indians so fascinating and tragic, the Na’vi are utterly boring...the childlike environmentalist daydream of a 'perfect' society, sustainably at peace with Mother Nature, is captured in the image of the Na’vi tribe snuggled in hammock-like leaves, embraced by the vast branches of their goddess tree. No ambitions, no failures, no questions, no achievement, no future. These giant blue aliens leave absolutely no carbon footprint."

Created by people who wouldn't live this way if they could. Doctor Zero: the ultimate suicide fantasy.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Voyager's famous golden disc with greetings in various formats to anyone or anything who finds it billions of years from now. Something digital might have been better, but at launch thirty-two years ago this phonograph record was it.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Voyager spacecraft, still traversing the outer limits of the giant gas bubble we live in, have measured the magnetism of a nearby interstellar cloud and its implications:

"The fact that the Fluff is strongly magnetized means that other clouds in the galactic neighborhood could be, too. Eventually, the solar system will run into some of them, and their strong magnetic fields could compress the heliosphere even more than it is compressed now. Additional compression could allow more cosmic rays to reach the inner solar system, possibly affecting terrestrial climate and the ability of astronauts to travel safely through space."

The researchers conclude: "There could be interesting times ahead!" That's a given.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Turns out that scientist at the Copenhagen meeting who suffered a heart attack was Henrik Svensmark, author of a plausible book and much research behind it as to what (besides carbon dioxide), might be causing the global warming that may or may not actually be occurring.

Svensmark seems to be recovering from what seems to have been a malfunctioning pacemaker, according to this hard-to-read Google translation of a Danish newspaper account, posted by Anthony Watts. Svensmark believes that a lack of cosmic rays to provide the seed nuclei for the formation of clouds to keep the temperature low is behind whatever warming there is. Sol's recent sleep apparently has upped the cosmic ray count, which Svensmark might say is bringing the recent early winters.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This Charles Sheffield novel isn't very satisfying at the end, but the journey is a lot of fun. Sheffield creates interesting characters, such as Milly Wu the SETI researcher, the Great Bat, the puzzle master, and Alex Ligon, the computer modeler. Then there's Sebastian Birch, who has something wrong with him that isn't ever quite explained. All set in the plausible (to me) world of the settled outer solar system, principally on the moons of Jupiter. I was sorry to learn that Sheffield, a theoretical physicist, died in 2002. This book, his last, is a sequel to Cold As Ice and the Ganymede Club. I'd happily read a dozen more set in this realm. Alas, it is not to be.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hope to be around to see the pictures when the New Horizons robot reaches Pluto in 2015. Course, some insist it should still be regarded as a planet.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On last weekend's close flyby of Saturn's moon, the Cassini robot photographed these giant plumes of ice venting on the sunlit edge. They suggest the existence of underground oceans on the ice world. Cassini also has a video of the auroras on Saturn's poles, similar to those of earth.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I enjoyed this 1992 scifi novel of physicist Charles Sheffield's, though it seemed unnecessarily complicated in the beginning. A little more action before establishing the seven main characters would have prevented me from putting it down so often. Sheffield died of brain cancer in 2002, which resonates because a good friend of Mrs. Charm's is struggling with it. Seems to have it licked for the moment, though the odds of that lasting are very low.

I bring up Sheffield to point out how easy it is to fall into these stories of ordinary life in the solar system, as if we had gotten off the engineering dime and were actually living in/on Luna, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. A lot of Cold As Ice occurs on (actually, under the surface of) Ganymede, which recalls Heinlein's impossible young adult novel, Farmer In The Sky, which Mr. B. and I started as a bedtime story but never finished.

We had the space probe pictures and details of Jupiter's radiation to consult, as Heinlein did not. Also life on (under, actually) Europa, which seems plausible, despite Sheffield's scientific realism of the dangers of Jovian radiation. I hope all this verisimilitude means humanity really will do these things and not just wallow forever in political corruption and the threat of war. But a posed result of the latter is limned chillingly in Cold As Ice as one of the spurs for continued colonization.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Also called the Silver Dollar and the Sculptor. A mere ten million light years away, and about seventy thousand light years in diameter. No weekend trip, alas.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Amazing what a high-resolution satellite camera can do. These are some details of the Abalos Undae sand dunes. Meanwhile, a permanent moon base gets another boost.

Via Simply Jews.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LaserMotive's laser-beaming powered robot climber ascends the 3,000-foot cable suspended from a helicopter at the Space Elevator Games. The real thing, big enough to carry passengers in their own cabins, might take a day or two to get into space. But with no gravity stresses to speak of.

UPDATE:  The games are over and LaserMotive won $900K. The big prize, however, is still out there.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is a very sad story but, nevertheless, one of the best novels I've read. Life, as the literature professors will tell you, is a tragedy. Yet there is often joy and humor along the way and so it is here. So I was sorry to see Thomas A. Day's tale end, especially the way it did. But I didn't feel tricked or surprised. At least the protagonist had one companion left, even if it was only a worry-wart robot with a Welsh accent.

I always assume space colonization stories will be hopeful, but the colonists often wind up losing much of their high technology as it wears out and they are unable to replace it. They often can't even go back into the black, let alone travel through space again. This one is a little different. But it's also a vindication of Murphy's Law. What they hope to escape, they wind up taking with them. The technology they create to help them turns on them. But the turning is to their ultimate benefit, once they figure it out. They succeed in spite of themselves, something you may only realize after you've thought about it a bit.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even at a significant fraction of light speed, it looks like getting through this mess would be a challenge: the tangled Web created by a supernova first seen in 1054 C.E.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The worst thing about meteor showers is the best time to see them often is right before dawn. So, unless you can afford to stay up all night, you need to get up early Wednesday to see the Orionids--a stream of debris from Halley's Comet falling through the atmosphere. Where to look? Overhead.

The next-to-worst thing about meteor showers is that the skies are often cloudy. So you go back to bed. Then, the astronomers who predict the next one will be the best in a long time are often wrong. They're predicting the Orionids this year will be the best in a while. Dozens an hour. But, once again, if they're wrong, you can always go back to bed. And, if they're not and the skies are clear, enjoy the show.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don't recall where I got this, but it's in honor of David Nelson, an old OCS classmate in MA, who awoke this morning to thirty-four degrees and heavy snow. As he says: "Good infantry weather!"

Via AlphaInventions.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Comparing the previous solar minimum (June '96 to Sept. '98) with the current one (June '07 to Sept '09) shows something strange is happening to Sol. (Scroll down at the link to the yellow-headlined comparison "latest trend charts" on the right side for the chart of the spotless days in each period). Not that solar science has enough observation history behind it to be sure of much of anything.

Meanwhile, the weather is confirming the old idea that Sol controls what happens down here. When you consider that 1998 was the warmest year recorded globally, and the planet has been cooling ever since, it's not hard to understand why winters are coming earlier and part of the country's northern tier already is covered with snow that is not melting but is increasing. Not that we mind the rain we're getting after our long drought, but you have to wonder. Whatever is going on it seems to have very little to do with the CO2 that has the Democrats hot to tax coal and oil out of existence.

Via the Seablogger. PLUS: Record October cold in Minnesota.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Science fiction writer Charles Stross ruined his Merchant Princes series for me with its explicit anti-Bush politics, but I agree with him about Star Trek. I liked it when it was new in the 60s, even retained some interest in it in the 80s. Now I see it's as bad as the old Edgar Rice Burroughs' tales of Mars.

That's because, as CS says, ST merely pastes the sci and tech on top of its storyline, whereas good scifi builds the storyline out of plausible sci and tech which informs the story's world. Now if he'd just forgone using his fiction for his personal political propaganda, I'd still be looking forward to his books.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The part of Orion the Hunter you can't see with the unaided eye or a cheap backyard telescope.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally got hold of this first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990s Mars triology. Now I understand what the fuss was about over this series of tales which still sell well on Amazon. As the cover blurb on the 1993 edition, by Arthur C. Clarke, has it: "It should be required reading for the colonists of the next century." Well here we are in that century and polls show and pols say there's not enough interest in going to Mars to bother.

The novel is still good. It's light on the tech and the sci but heavy on the human relationships among the First Hundred colonists of Americans and Russians. And their one-way vehicle to Mars in 2026 (still time for that) is nicely practical: a cluster of rotating toruses made of interconnected fuel tanks from shuttle stacks taken into orbit (rather than discarded over the ocean) by both the American shuttle (retiring next year) and the old Soviet one (which only flew a few times).

So that's impossible, but day-to-day life on Mars nevertheless is compelling. The tale makes me want to put on my "walker" and helmet and go for a lope in the low g, guided by a personal AI on my wrist, even if the Net is still confined to pre-Web bulletin boards. Among my favorite tech description is the building and subsequent use of a space elevator between Pavonis Mons and a captured asteroid. Thirty-story elevator cars make the journey up and down in five days.

Once out of the Mars gravity well, it's much simpler (and cheaper) to board a rocket for earth, or arrive on one and take an elevator down to the planet. Now I'll go back and reread the second book and finish the third one, with much more appreciation than I had trying to read them first.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sol's protracted solar minimum, which began about 2007, has opened the inner solar system to the highest concentration of cosmic rays yet measured during the space age (about fifty years old).

Which should provide a good test of Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark's theory that cosmic rays provide seed nuclei for the low-altitude clouds that keep Earth's temperature low. The theory is an alternative to the carbon dioxide argument, in that fewer cosmic rays hitting Earth would mean fewer low-level clouds and thus correspondingly higher temperatures. If Svensmark's theory--explained in his 2008 book The Chilling Stars--is correct, winters could become more severe. At least until Sol's minimum turns back to maximum.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This is actually an infrared partial image of Mars in 1999, so the green doesn't mean vegetation. But it fits one of the quartet of books I've been reading, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and subsequent The Martians. Relying on the local library meant I started with Green Mars, book two, then tried the concluding volume Blue Mars.

Got bogged down in the interminable geological descriptions of both and so went on to The Martians. Meanwhile, I've reserved  the first book, Red Mars, so maybe I can finally figure it out. So far I don't understand all the acclaim for this soap opera about the First Hundred settlers from Earth, and their children. But I'm interested enough to continue, which means something, I presume. It's only boring in parts. Some of it is quite interesting.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At least in ice at the poles. Now it appears it may also be available in ice at lower latitudes as well. Not that it matters to Obamalot. They ain't willing to go there either. Gotta fix earth first, apparently. If it takes a thousand years.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've heard several times that there may be water on Luna. In the form of ice on the surface, and, perhaps, some liquid underground. NASA is expected to unveil Thursday research showing "a lot of water" exists on the surface.

From the AAAS journal Science advancer to Science writers: "...three reports utilize data collected by three separate spacecrafts to provide evidence of hydroxyl (OH) or water - or both - on the surface of the Moon. These findings are forcing a reexamination of the notion that our Moon is completely dry."

If there is abundant water, it makes a colony more feasible, as well as the refueling of spacecraft for interplanetary travel. As it says here I'm ready to believe. Just show me the water.

UPDATE:  Here's the NASA version. Suspiciously timely, given recent cancellation of back-to-the-moon? Naw.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The sunspot drought hasn't ended entirely yet, but these new Earth-size ones are the first in more than a year on the Earth-facing side of Sol. They're a hopeful sign that we may not, afterall, be headed for more ice and cold than usual from the deepest solar minimum in almost a century.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Okay, Star Trek fans, here's one for ya. I don't know if this will ever make sense, but it's pretty to look at.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Presume this is a railgun or a mass driver for flinging spacecraft into orbit. Bet it would be awfully cold on your bottom sitting on luna's rock and dust like these folks are doing. They probably live underground to escape Sol's radiation. Still, it would be fun to go. It is, actually, in the imagination.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The rain cleared off long enough earlier this evening, at Caddo Mills northeast of Dallas, for Armadillo Aerospace to claim the X Prize Foundation's million dollar award for a private rocket capable of taking off, flying for a hundred eighty seconds and landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface. Two videos here show the vertical takeoff and vertical landing rocket doing the trick.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

No JFK moment this time. We're not going back to the moon. We're not going to Mars. In fact, we're not boldly (or even cautiously) going anywhere. The only good part is the idea of encouraging private space enterprises like the government pushed aviation in the 1920s by paying for air mail deliveries. Only something tells me that Barry won't be putting enough money into that to do much of anything with it, either. Hope and change! Only for earthworms.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This will give the global warmists something to chew on. The ones who are still scientists, at least, not anti-technology pilgrims to a holy environmentalist shrine. The latter will accuse the researchers at the link of trying to change the subject.

But the longer the face of the sun stays clear of magnetic sunspot blemishes, or no better than sunspecks, as it now has pretty much for more than two years, the more it looks like the return of the Maunder Minimum. That was a cooling time, from about the Seventeenth to the mid-Nineteenth centuries. For instance, New York harbor froze over in the winter of 1780.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's a been a topic of debate for many years and, so far, all we've done is talk about it. The Japanese appear to be ready to put $21 billion where their mouth is when it comes to collecting solar energy in space and beaming it down to the surface. They say they'll be able to power 249,000 homes. Makes a lot more sense than ruining a desert ecology with solar collectors. What do you want to bet the UN calls it too dangerous and tries to stop them?

Via Slashdot.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Get out your 3D glasses for a stirring, and a bit humbling, animation of about ten thousand of the other hundred billion galaxies out there in the black. More here.

Via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sunspots, or their lack, really do affect global weather, and probably the climate as well. The Old Farmer's Almanac has for many years been basing its annual forecasts on a formula involving Sol's outbreak cycle, though frequently pooh-poohed by meteorologists. Hah.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Old School. The classic shot. At one thousand five hundred light years, it won't be a weekend trip.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The latest global warming scare? The warming oceans (that aren't, actually, warming) could cause the Earth's normal tilt of 23.5 degrees from the vertical to increase. Then what? They don't say. But when it comes to Pap & Tax (otherwise known as Cap & Trade) the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is lobbying for a wait-a-minute debate on what could cause our drift into a Third World economy.

Via Watts Up With That.

UPDATE: Good analysis of the fraud by Norman Rogers, a former Zero Population Growth activist who remembers that exaggeration and scare stories produced membership in ZPG far better than facts.

MORE: Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee explain, in their 2002 book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, what an increased tilt might mean: "...if we tilted too much, or if the tilt shifted, our climate would become more extreme or be thrown into chaos. This may have happened to Mars, in fact, allowing that planet to lose its oceans."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

When all you've got on Mars is a six-wheeled rover, and no prospects of getting a person there in the next generation or two, there's no end of ingenuity you won't come up with to get the blessed thing out of the sandtrap it's driven into. Especially when you have no certain idea of what the sand is actually like.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An old story, panspermia. But always nice to have fresh evidence. This time, it's from a comet.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Six years ago Mrs. Charm, Mr. Boy and I bought the rancho from a couple who were moving away from Texas. She was a homemaker. He was an airline pilot who had flown U-2 spy planes before he retired from the Air Force. I won't mention names, they'd probably not like me to.

I've read about the U-2 so I have some idea of what it is like to work in full pressure suit at seventy thousand feet--more than twice as high as jetliners cruise. But, until now, I'd never seen the curvature of the earth from a U-2's cockpit, out there on the edge of the black. Magnificent view really.

Via Flightblogger.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Kepler, the robot spacecraft named for the sixteenth century astronomer who founded celestial mechanics (though today's astronomers like to forget he made his living casting horoscopes), has confirmed the previous discovery of a Jupiter-sized giant in its first workout in the black. Still to come: finding new planets, especially habitable Earth-size ones. None are imaged directly, but inferred by the dimming of their star/sun as they pass in front of it.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As usual, astronomers are predicting more Perseid meteors than usual. Unusually, for a change, they may be right. According to Spaceweather.com: "A filament of...dust [from Comet Swift-Tuttle] has drifted across Earth's path and when Earth passes through it, sometime between 0800 and 0900 UT (11 - 12 am CDT) on August 12th, the Perseid meteor rate could surge to twice its normal value...The [above] profile is based on...debris stream models..."

A useful reminder (for those of us who live under the urban halo) that we live on a planet, which is rotating about a thousand miles an hour (at the equator) while trucking five hundred forty million miles around Sol at about sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. And don't forget that Sol is moving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, while the galaxy itself is just one of many, widely-separated "islands" drifting through the black of intergalactic space.

Funny, I don't notice any unusual motion. Do you?

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The helicopter that was to hoist the one kilometer cable "beanstalk" for the entrant "crawlers" to climb has proved unable to hold the thing taut. So the games that were to have started today at Edwards AFB in California have been delayed "at least" a month. Pity. But it was an ambitious plan. It ain't rocket science. It might be harder.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the favorite games of Mr. Boy's cub scout den, especially in the woods on camping trips, is to each get a stick and go hunt for aliens. Not the illegal sort, but the outer-space variety.

Most of it, of course, is spurred by Star Wars and similar epics. But it's not as if scientists haven't given it some thought. In fact, a lot of thought. For instance, the SETI program.

Three good essays on the subject are here, here, and here. I think they're out there but, like most of the humans and the aliens in Poul Anderson's Starfarers, they may well have long since turned inward in favor of exploring themselves.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

McGregor, TX (July 29, 2009) – Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announces the successful completion of qualification testing for the Falcon 9 launch vehicle first stage tank and interstage. Testing took place at SpaceX's Texas Test Site, a 300 acre structural and propulsion testing facility, located just outside of Waco, Texas. [First stage is green; interstage is black; this is the bird that will service the International Space Station when the shuttles are retired.]

UPDATE: But I'm opposed to government handouts for these and other commercial ops. We can see how well that worked for NASA, whose proposed Ares 1--whose capsule spacecraft is a throwback to Apollo and doesn't even have an airlock--already is seeking more tax billions.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The first launch of SpaceX's heavy lift vehicle, Falcon 9, may be delayed until fall, but its Falcon 1's orbiting of a Malaysian sat ten days ago was a plus. Fun to have their Merlin engine test facilities just up the road in McGregor, southwest of Waco.

Might not be if they were rattling our windows, but they don't do tests very often. Since their founder Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal, I hope my use of that service helps SpaceX, too. Falcon 9 was designed from the start to fly a four-man crew and service the International Space Station once the shuttles are retired.

Good luck, guys. It might not be in your plans but I hope you can beat the Indians and Chinese to the moon.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Interesting that this configuration has been out there since the late Nineteenth Century.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This was my first Poul Anderson epic novel and it's a dandy. I see why he's one of scifi's revered masters. As previously mentioned about some other such books, the Amazon reader-critics are pretty harsh, for such reasons as it being hard to keep the saga's many characters straight.

That's inane. It's easy to flip back a few pages to remind yourself, and the story is worth the effort. The tale's overarching idea, that most of humanity eventually becomes bored with space travel and retreats to study itself, is a shocking thought. Then you remember how we landed on the moon on this very day and forty years later what do we do? Except for our robots (and their contribution, however limited, certainly is worthwhile) we're not even exploring the solar system, let alone the stars.

UPDATE:  Indeed, fifty-one percent don't even want to go to Mars. Sigh.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Monday's fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing will be a mockery -- of us. It will be followed, with the death of the shuttle-to-nowhere program fourteen months from now, by... nothing. As Krauthammer says: "We came, we saw, we retreated."

UPDATE:  Tom Wolfe: "One giant leap to nowhere." And, when I say "us" above, I mean Americans. I wouldn't put it past the Chinese or the Indians to someday land on the moon and stay.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

'Tis the season. The luminous blue-white tendrils of cloud spreading across the high sky are back. Although not, probably, as far south as Texas.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It ain't rocket science. In some ways, it's harder. And never more so than this year. The August 5 games have come a long way since the tether was held up by a crane-on-wheels. This time it's to be held up by a helicopter hovering four thousand three hundred feet (one kilometer) above the Mojave Desert at Edwards AFB where the space shuttles land. For that reason alone, we're likely to see it on television and YouTube and elsewhere. So get your background here and here and here.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

They're stacking this baby down at KSC for what is billed as a test flight "later this year," mainly to see how the first stage works. I'll believe it when it happens. But I hope it flies eventually, before the Dems have spent all the available money on ACORN and pork. Because this is the rocket that will take us back to the moon to build a base where we will build a ship for Mars. Theoretically. In the space game the way NASA plays it, you should never count your space flights until they're launched.

Via SlashDot.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You might think, with all the AGW hysteria, and the Dems rushing to double our electric bills, that the whole globe would be saturated in CO2. You would be wrong. Sure, this satellite mapping of the earth's atmospheric distribution of carbon dioxide is a year old. But it's also the first one ever made, and was assembled from data collected between '02 and '08. The first one ever made. Think about that for a minute. I'm no great hand at graphics, but it sure looks to me like the major culprits are California and China. So how about it Speaker Pelosi? How about starting by doubling your energy bills?

Via Baby Troll.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This photoshopped image, by a commenter on this pilot's forum, shows where the jet's recovered vertical stabilizer apparently tore off--though whether in mid-air or on impact with the ocean is unknown. Meanwhile, previous notions of a superbolt of lightning frying the plane's electronics apparently have been quashed by this updated meteorological analysis:

"* Lightning -- Though in earlier versions of this study I had identified lightning as occurring in this mesoscale convective system, recent evidence from spaceborne and sferic sensors is pointing to the possibility that this system contained no lightning. Soundings do indicate moderate levels of instability, but there are indications in the literature that cumulonimbus clouds in oceanic equatorial regions entrain considerable quantities of drier, cooler air that dampen upward vertical motion in the lower portions of the storm, and in some way this reduces charge separation. In any case it does look fairly likely that we can rule out a lightning strike as being a factor in the A330 crash."

Indicating that turbulence within the storm apparently was the cause of the breakup at altitude unless there was some other factor which only analysis of the debris and/or the voice and data recordings could show.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sol may be quiet in terms of sunspots, but its solar prominences are cooking right along.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Scientists are getting so desperate for the return of sunspots that they are now counting sunspecks. The one on the left is fading away, the one in the middle is a "dead pixel," an artifact of the SOHO spacecraft, and the two on the right are the latest candidates for sunspots. I'm wondering if the lack of activity will mean a cooler-than-usual summer. Well, I can dream, anyhow, as our daytime temps at the rancho climb steadily into the 90s.

 Via Watts Up With That.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

And, above all, whatever you do, as Douglas Adams would say (did say, in fact): Don't Panic.

Via Simply Jews.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ole Hubble has imaged a lot of strange beasts since it was launched nineteen years ago. This is one of the strangest, part of a slide show collection at The Daily Beast and explained there.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watch the STS 125 Atlantis astronauts make the final visit to the Hubble Space Telescope live on NASA TV. It's hard to overstate the beauty and scientific value of the Hubble's nineteen years of discoveries.

Enjoy it while you can. As the Seablogger puts it "The remaining shuttles are soon to be retired, and no replacement is likely. I suspect much of the space program will be terminated as health care and other costs overwhelm the federal budget." That does seem likely, and that Barry will be content to grovel in the mud.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The HET at McDonald Observatory in West Texas didn't make this Top Ten list, but it should have.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or, rather, among Alaskans who live near Mt. Redoubt, the volcano that's erupted nineteen times since March 22. It's coated the countryside nearby in something very like moondust: "gritty, abrasive, electrostatically-charged," according to NASA, "giving Alaskans an unexpected taste of what it's like to live on the Moon."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Look south at 1 a.m., using this sky map, to find the green comet. It's supposed to be naked eye visible, but binoculars might provide a better view. And if the urban light cone is too bright or there's clouds where you are, try this photo gallery. Or better yet this live Web cast of the flyby.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Treppenwitz. More of these funnies here. Also this one.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The daily and various other local media, including News 8 in this video, claim the fireball was either a mystery, debris from the colliding Russian and American satellites, or other debris from previous space missions. But Space Weather says it was a plain (albeit unusually large) meteoroid.

"Astronomer Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has reviewed the video and confirms 'it's a natural meteor, definitely.' According to his analysis, the source of the fireball was a meter-class asteroid traveling at about 20 km/s."

So, UFO lovers/believers. Read it and weep.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Bubble Nebula, ten light years in diameter, a mere eleven thousand light years away. Striking, isn't it? 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In dark-sky locations, that is, well beyond the urban light cone. It's a pale "fuzzy patch" in the constellation Libra just before dawn--including at the Comanche Springs Astronomy Campus in Northwest Texas. And the photos and videos keep proliferating.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, according to Henrik Svensmark:

No sunspots = more clouds = lower temperatures.

The Central Texas winter, which began quite early last year, should be more or less over by March 1. Let's just hope.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Comet Lulin's portraits are accumulating. Should be a binocular object tomorrow morning as it was today.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't usually bother to tout comets any more, having once had to do it for a living when they generally proved a disappointment. But this green one looks to be unusual, with a Juipter-sized atmosphere, or coma. Of course, coming no closer than thirty-eight million miles away on Feb. 24 will keep it from seeming all that large.

Indeed, at only an anticipated fourth or fifth magnitude, it may be so dim that it requires dark country skies to see it at all. Even if it is brighter, observers deep inside the urban light cone are unlikely to see anything. On the cone's fringes, however, you can start looking on Friday if you like, when Comet Lulin is expected to be a binocular object in the runup to its flyby.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...John Theon of NASA, says Hansen's global warming data is bosh. No surprise, there. When science turns messianic, it's time to watch out. Hansen has even declared that energy industry execs who question his data should be jailed. Sweet reversal.

UPDATE:  Ah but, meanwhile, in Obamalot, the warnings continue as if nothing had changed. How brilliant.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Big Media, as usual, is twisting the discovery of the methane to mean that there probably are microbes beneath the windblown soil of the Red Planet. But the researchers say it could as easily be the result of geological processes. I agree with Instapundit that it would be best if the source was not microbial. If it was, we would then be faced with worrying about contamination of Mars from visiting humans or, perhaps worse, of Earth on their return. Be simpler all around if Mars is a reasonably sterile wasteland. Especially for the (admittedly debatable) dreams of making it a second, habitable home some day away from the threat of nuclear war.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Eight full-size school buses fit in the nose shroud of the Ares V rocket NASA wants to use to send astronauts back to the moon, according to the space agency. Or a telescope about four times wider than the Hubble with, consequently, a much bigger light-gathering mirror. Theoretically, this is all about the International Year of Astronomy. But it might also have something to do with the skepticism recently raised by Barry's aides about NASA's back-to-the-moon plans. Or not.

Via Space Weather.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Starting the year off right, with a starburst that began twenty-five million years ago, a mere eleven million light years away. A weekend trip into the black, when we get star travel worked out. Heh.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Instapundit remembers hearing it on Armed Forces Radio as a teenager in Germany. I was twenty-four in 1968 when it was broadcast from the moon. I was duty officer that Christmas Eve night at squadron headquarters of the Sixth Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Meade, MD. The duty NCO and I were transfixed.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 03:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bureaucratic intransigence is the order of the day at NASA, where Mike Griffin, the presumably soon-to-be ex-administrator, is fighting to preserve his little return-to-Apollo vision from Barry's transition team. As usual, going back to the moon seems to be about the last thing to all concerned. I'm betting the Chinese will have a base there before we do.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nice sentiment. Makes a great bumper sticker. I used to have one. But the reality? Not so much.

SF author Bruce Sterling: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach."

SF author Charles Stross: "Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there's the travel time. Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars."

Nevertheless, Stross, at least, foresees a Moon base in twenty years and ten years later, one on Mars. I would add that both will probably be Chinese. American pols are too gutless and greedy.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mars, it seems, for all its dust, airlessness and radiation, could be a livable place, after all.

Via the Seablogger.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

 A mosaic of astronomical images by Davide De Martin of Sky Factory, explained here. Via Bad Astronomy.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Hubble Space Telescope has made the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star: Fomalhaut b circles the bright southern star Fomalhaut, just twenty-five light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, the "Southern Fish."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cylindrical magnetic passageways about the width of Earth, depicted here with a measuring satellite in the foreground, open and close between Earth and the Sun every eight minutes. They allow tons of high-energy particles to flow one-way across ninety-three million miles as they form above the equator and then roll over the poles.

Satellites have flown through them, measured their dimensions and sensed the particles flowing past. Now scientists are studying the portals to see how they work and what they do. Among the unanswered questions: why do they form every eight minutes? Here's betting they affect our climate a lot more than carbon dioxide does. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nevermind global warming and rising seas, kiddies. The sun's protective bubble around the solar system has lost twenty-five percent of its size in the past decade and it's still weakening.

You can cap and trade carbon dioxide until you know what freezes over, but unless this heliospheric shrinking is cyclical, the knowledge of which is just out of our reach, we've got a big problem, Houston. Can you say DNA-destroying radiation?

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some recent science fiction, particularly Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross, offers a bleak assessment of humanity's chances of colonizing the solar system. The choices, from the moon to Mars and possibly Jupiter's moon Europa, are high-radiation, ugly places. So it's not as inspiring as usual to hear of Stephen Hawking's latest prediction that we have to move beyond the home planet to survive. Makes sense, of course, but where will we find the natural beauty and relative safety of the shielding atmosphere that we leave behind?

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I suppose eroticism has always been a part of science fiction, at least in the cover art, though I don't recall any as explicit as this tale, where a femmebot created to serve humanity's sexual needs is left to look for love in all the wrong places because humanity has long been extinct. Extinct by it's own hand, in fact, not through war or environmental disaster, but through selfish unwillingness to replicate--life with pets, instead, and all those forty-two-inch flat-screen boob tubes, I suppose.

I've now read three of Stross's works, this one, Halting State and Singularity Sky. While I enjoyed HS, which is more about the Internet's future than robotics, and SS had its moments, Saturn's Children was the most memorable. Not only, or even especially because of the eroticism, but because of the suprisingly bleak assessment of what life beyond Earth really would be like for "pink goo," us, in landscapes and interplanetary propulsion systems awash in deadly radiation where only robots with replaceable parts can thrive.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

NASA, for one, considers unproven Henrik Svensmark's theory that cosmic rays provide seed nuclei for the low-altitude clouds that keep earth's temperature low, thus having much more effect on climate than the favorite notion of the carbon dioxide movement. "Speculation," said the agency scientists who recently pronounced the current solar minimum the least since the space age began--meaning the solar wind is subsiding and cosmic rays are increasing.

Svensmark's and  science writer Nigel Calder's 2007 book, The Chilling Stars, A New Theory of Climate Change, shows the theory has ample evidence to be respectable, far more than the U.N.'s notion that industrial and automotive carbon dioxide will make the seas rise, the tropics move north, and give the Democrats another tax (carbon footprint) on which to hang their favorite boondoggles. It's a theory that invites collaboration from scientists as diverse as particle physicists, astronomers and biologists, and it really should interest NASA, as it involves such climate drivers as supernovae and the solar system's passage through the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.

But, even as a growing bunch of amateur scientists wonder if the sun's lack of solar-wind-increasing sunspots this year could mean we're headed for global cooling, even a mini Ice Age, Svensmark isn't assuming the leadership of a cosmic ray movement. He says it would be "scientifically rash" to use his theory to offer any firm climate forecast for decades ahead. Instead, he's hard at work searching for even more evidence for it.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Japanese are planning to build a space elevator. Nice work, if Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japanese Space Elevator Association, and his engineers can do it. So far they haven't even translated their web site into English. It ain't rocket science but, first, they have to come up with the materials to build the beanstalk. Been a lot of talk about that, and some minor experimentation, but no action yet worthy of an actual setup. Inevitably, they're starting with a conference.

Science fiction writers like Charles Stross in Saturn's Children, have predicted the elevators won't work well, except in isolated environments such as Mars to Phobos, or another of the red planet's moons. Time will tell.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NASA says observers are seeing the birth of a true sunspot on the sun's face, the first of its kind since the solar minimum began in January. That should alleviate any concerns about a new Ice Age coming in the years ahead. But some worriers say it's really too soon to tell if this spot will grow and last or merely fade like others of its class have done.

UPDATE:  The Seablogger prefers to call it a "sun-sputter," and, indeed, the day after the announcement, it's almost gone. Meanwhile, NASA held a presser to announce the sun's output of solar wind is at a fifty-year low. What that means for us, they didn't say, except that more cosmic rays will get into the inner solar system. There is a theory about the rays, however, which calls global warming into question.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My favs are Marse and Jopater.

Via Miriam's Ideas.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Computer simulations are of questionable value. Garbage in, garbage out. But this one is interesting because it says our solar system, like Goldilocks' porridge, is just right.

Via Instapundit

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Open Cluster NGC 290, a mere two hundred thousand light years away, in a recent snapshot by the Hubble Space Telescope, itself the subject of a new book. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The confirmation this week of liquid water on Mars may not be startling but it's a solid boost:

"Mars has become a much more attractive location for the establishment of earthly life. That knowledge will help in the refinement of plans for settling the planet in a self-sufficient way, whenever those who wish to do so can somehow raise the money to get there."

Government's bean counters will decide, for now, until private enterprise can figure how to make money off it.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It makes more sense to park the ISS in orbit around the moon, rather than let it burn up in the atmosphere after the space shuttles retire in 2010. Otherwise it'd just be another American space effort gone for naught, despite billions spent and years of work and tragedy. But Rand Simberg says it's a bright idea without a future. More likely, the Russians and Europeans might buy the thing.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Pan Am Clippers of the 1930s were for the rich, too, and we all fly now.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Almost twice the size of our Milky Way, M-101, shown here in infrared, is about twenty-five million light years away in the Big Dipper.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Burt Rutan is a former Misty FAC pilot of the Vietnam War who later became the first man to fly nonstop around the world without refueling. He's finishing up a commercial vehicle for suborbital hops to space, and here shares his personal vision that commercial space is just around the corner, and what a time it will be. And more.

Via Instapundit

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In fact, a stellar nursery about 5,000 light years away towards the Milky Way's center. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been strangely unmarked by sun spots or solar flares lately. Or is it so strange? NASA says not.

UPDATE:  The Seablogger disagrees and says the next Ice Age is "imminent."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ghostly shadowed streams of star debris from a torn-apart dwarf galaxy frame the Knife-Edge galaxy, another sure winner for a weekend jaunt, once we figure out how to vanquish forty million light years.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pick a dot, any dot, in the night sky. Say, one of those in my favorite constellation, Orion. Better yet, pick a blank, black space, where nothing seems to be. Then look again, through Hubble's eyes.

Via The Elephant Bar.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Space shuttle shots of the amazing cloud cover below. Thunderheads look menacing enough from the ground. They look like atomic mushroom clouds from above. The pictures are not current, but they could be, with all the rain that's going on down there these days.

Via DougRoss@Journal.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Orion Spur, about a third of the way in from the outer edge, is where the home planet and the sun lie on this map of the Milky Way. The view without the superimposed map is an illustration of what a distant  astronomer in another galaxy likely would see, according to new, infrared info gathered by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest on Jack's beanstalk, otherwise known as the Space Elevator: still a dream, but still...

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the first photos from Phoenix, a black-n-white "postcard," as the JPL engineers call it, of the Martian arctic. Color panoramas to come later. This is going to be fun. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The robot made a gentle, five mph landing on Mars about 6:53 p.m. CDT and all looks good:

"...we've found that the lander is tilted only one quarter of a degree, which means we've landed nearly perfectly level. The next step for Phoenix is surface initialization during which the solar arrays, Surface Stereo Imager (SSI), Biobarrier (which has been protecting the robotic arm from contamination since it was sterilized on Earth) and meteorological mast will deploy."

Stay with NASA's Phoenix blog for updates, and reports as the robot gets to work analyzing its site on the Arctic Plain of the Red Planet.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just five days from now, the Phoenix will land on Mars' icy northern plains. NASA has a new blog up in prep for the event, word of which could come as soon as 6:53 p.m. Sunday CDT. Should be exciting. Worth remembering: fewer than half the international attempts to land on Mars have been successful. Phoenix could crash and not be heard from again--nor arise from the ashes.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mars is scheduled to get another curious visitor from Earth on Sunday the 25th. The Phoenix robot lander will touch down at the Red Planet's North Pole and "taste and sniff" the soil and buried water-ice that other robot instruments have shown to be there. Why bother? Aside from the Moon, Mars is the best spot for human colonies beyond the home planet. NASA has a blog that will begin coverage of Phoenix on Monday.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the spectacular benefits of a journey into the black, even if it is thirty million light years away. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just in case you have troubling remembering the relative sizes of the rocky planets, like a certain blogger I read whose name I will not mention, who thought Mars was bigger than the home planet.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of a series, this NASA ultraviolet image of Saturn was taken when the rings were at maximum tilt of 27 degrees toward Earth. Saturn has seasonal tilts away from and toward the sun, much the same way the home planet does.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's quiet on the sun these days. Too quiet. No sun spots of note. Some scientists regard that as possibly the cause of much of the late snow this spring and say it could be forecasting colder days ahead. But, theoretically, that won't stop another brief super flare from our nearest star like the one that disrupted telegraph communications, caused auroras as far south as Cuba and surprised English solar astronomer Richard Carrington, in September, 1859. Imagine what another one would do to our electronic-dependent world. It could become known as the Day Silicon Died.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That seems to be Rand Simberg's conclusion in Popular Mechanics. Even McCain, the likely next president, seems lukewarm on W's backing of returning to the moon for a permanent base--now that millions have been spent planning to do so. And, without a microgravity base out there to start from, that's far less expensive than trying to get out of Earth's gravity well, you can forget human travel to Mars anytime soon. At least the NYTimes will be happy. They've always favored robots over astronauts.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Running Chicken Nebula. Can you find the running chicken? No? Me neither. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've been to the moon. Driven around, even hit golfballs. Been there, done that. Faced with the prospect of returning, and setting up a permanent outpost, however, NASA is studying the place all over again and finding things never imagined. Moondust, for instance. It made a mess of the Apollo astronauts, clinging to their spacesuits and their equipment. Now there's speculation that it could even be electrifying, at least during a full moon. That's when the moon flies through the tail of Earth's magnetic bubble. None of the Apollo landings took place during a full moon, so no one knows for sure, but future explorers may need to ground themselves against a shocking experience, at least once a month.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Genesis 2, faintly visible these nights, is a prototype space hotel room--no kidding! It was launched by Bigelow Aerospace as a test to see if inflatable satellites can be orbited and eventually connected together to create a sprawling space hotel. There are currently two modules in orbit: Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. They are easy to notice with the unaided eye because of their motion across the sky. For viewing times and where to look, go here. For pictures and video visit the Bigelow Aerospace web site.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The southern view of my favorite constellation, Orion. The hunter's three-star belt is in the upper left. The whole thing is moving out of easy nighttime view as we leave winter behind for another year. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Horsehead Nebula's neighborhood. That's the horsehead, the little black thing below center and just to the left. A mere 1,500 light years away. Only take a few months with a good star drive, though the folks at home would all be gone by the time you came back. Minor detail. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Next time you notice the Big Dipper, think of this spiral galaxy in its northern part--an island universe some 50 million light years away. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The afterglow of the farthest Gamma Ray burst ever seen by the unaided eye--measured by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in far West Texas, at 7.5 billion light years away.  

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As seen from low orbit on the International Space Station. Almost over, if you wait until midnight. Already past if you prefer sundown.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Sombrero Galaxy, a mere 28 million light years away, via the Hubble Space Telescope. Another weekend jaunt in the making, someday, when warp drive is perfected. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The home planet and the moon from 88 million miles, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ring of Dark Matter: You know, that unexplained stuff astrophysicists believe fills the gaps in the whole universe. Discovery by the Hubble Space Telescope in May, 2007, of this ghostly ring, formed long ago from the collision of two galaxy clusters, was the best evidence yet that dark matter actually exists.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Funny how exercised the Chinese communists (who did it in secrecy), ex-communist Russians (who've never done it at all) and the usual assortment of American critics (who can't do a day without whining about something) get over a little out-of-this-world target practice. The Navy's hitting the satellite on the first try, when it was 150 miles high, looked like nice work from here. With the side benefit of warning Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc., that their nuclear missiles won't be immune.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The moon's sky, that is, where robot surveyors from Japan (above shot) and China already are in orbit with India, Russia and the U.S, soon to follow. Something to think about during tonight's lunar eclipse (see below).

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See the moon turn red tonight, maybe even a bit turquoise. And, if you're near Hawaii, you may get to see the Navy shoot down a satellite at the same time. Eclipse Central is at space weather dot com.

UPDATE: Austin is famous for unviewable sky events due to cloud cover, and tonight, alas, is no exception. Fortunately there are Web cam views at the second link, if clouds are in your way, as well. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nor all water suitable for microbial life. So seems to be the early conclusions of Spirit and Opportunity's explorations on Mars. But they're not definitive, and more work by more rovers is yet to come. The great thing is that it's all been done by robots, and relatively inexpensively. Someday, when humans do set foot on the Red Planet, they'll land at spots that have been thoroughly investigated and found to be the best candidates for habitation.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There've been many newly-discovered candidates in recent years for solar systems like our own, but this latest, the work of researchers from eleven countries (led by Ohio State) and published in the journal Science, appears to be the best of the bunch--finding the giant gas planets sufficiently far from the sun to leave room for rocky planets like Earth. If so, then the home planet would be alone no more.

UPDATE:  Indeed, many, if not most, nearby sunlike stars may have rocky, Earthlike planets. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A light echo, about six light years in diameter, from the first recorded stellar flash in the Milky Way.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg--or Big Steve as his graduate students at the University of Texas call him--is down on human spaceflight, particularly NASA's latest goals of sending humanity to the moon and Mars. Down as in against it. Weinberg, who is quite the Austin party animal, makes some sense on it, at least on not sending anyone to Mars until robots like Spirit and Opportunity have thoroughly explored the place and found all the potentially-interesting sites. He does think it's worth considering Mars as a Lifeboat for humanity. But he doesn't consider the moon in this lengthy but worthwhile interview with The Space Review. Possibly because better arguments can be made for sending people there, such as trying to mine oxygen, doing hydroponics for future Mars flights, building a deep space telescope, etc.--and, frankly, just for the hell of it. Be lots cheaper than Mars, too. Anyway, read what Big Steve has to say. Afterall, his field, particle physics, invented the Web you're enjoying. Just too bad he doesn't discuss a moon colony.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Doesn't sound as romantic as "out of this world," now, does it? But, hey, for a few hundred thou Virgin Galactic (another exaggerated idea) will give you a slow climb through the clouds and into the black followed by a whole 4.5 minutes of microgravity. Hardly enough time to think, "Wow, I'm really in space, by golly, gee whiz." Well, actually, you'll be in LEO, otherwise known as Low Earth Orbit. More accurately, sub-orbital. Rather dull, actually, except for the view of Earth's curvature and the multiple sunrises and sunsets. Only you won't have time to see more than one or the other. The stars you'll have to leave for another time. A rather long time, most likely. Not to mention the galactic part.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I grant you this conjunction of the double remnants of two supernova looks like a kindergartener's sloppy attempt to modify his watercolor. But, man, look at the density of that star field in the background. When you talk about going into the black, you don't normally think of this kind of illumination. Getting there could be a problem, though. It's 160,000 light years away.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A mere 400 light years away. An overnighter, for sure, once we get the propulsion worked out.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mars, left, and my old buddy Orion, right, over Monument Valley, Arizona. Via The World At Night.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dust pillars in the Trifid Nebula. Now here's where a powerful vacuum cleaner would really be handy. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Actually, this is from 2005, but, following the sun from rising to setting on Dec. 22 that year, it's a good reflection of today's event as well: the official start of winter here in the northern hemisphere. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A pre-Christmas surprise from Comet 8P Tuttle, on Saturday, the 22nd, could bring us dozens of meteors an hour. Binocular photo of the comet and its attendant meteor dust by Chris Schur of Payson, AZ

"'We could be in for a merry surprise...when Earth passes through a trail of comet dust,'  astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute [tells spaceweather.com.] Previous returns of Comet Tuttle to the inner solar system have been attended by outbursts of meteors, most recently in 1980 and 1994."

The peak will be in the late afternooon, central time over North America, so you won't see much then. But there should be some as late as 8 p.m. But you'll need dark skies, as far from city lights as you can get. Look north after sunset.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another potential weekend jaunt-- just 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Casseopeia. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

So the Earth is dependent upon the sun. You knew that. But did you know that the Earth is not just dependent upon the sun, but is actually roped to the sun? Giant magnetic ropes attach the Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the sun--wherein we get, for instance, these Northern Lights over Alaska last March. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Photographing the sun in the X-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum reveals new insights about the origins of the solar wind--and makes a pretty picture, too.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Space Weather dot com, which originally reported on the Sun-Earth environment but has since added a good many other subjects, as well, is celebrating it's tenth year on the Web.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A humbling view for the Earth-centric (aren't we all?), taken by the HDTV camera aboard a lunar-orbiting Japanese robot satellite out in the black. It's mapping the moon in high-definition for possible future Japanese landings. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The moon has all but obscured Comet Holmes' big fuzzball, but it was still dazzling in this Nov. 11 view from southern France. The streak on the left is the track of a satellite. Speculation here on why Holmes' dust cloud is so big.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robots, alone, no matter how perfectly programmed, will never do:

"The station’s cost and complexity dwarfs any other international technical project in history. But such machines, built by people, are imperfect, and now and then, they will break down. To make the station work, we’ll need capable people on the spot. No robot we can build can cope with the complexity of what we’ve already built, what we’re now attempting in orbit."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

That's Comet 17P/Holmes (left), at least in the 1.4 million kilometer diameter of its dust cloud. But it's nowhere near the mass of the sun, of course, compared here to Saturn. Thank goodness. Got a little scary there for a minute, right? It's also an unaided-eye fuzzball in the Constellation Perseus.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wrapping up the 2007 space elevator games. It ain't rocket science, but it ain't easy either.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not us and the Russians. Japan, India and China. Japan's moon probes entered lunar orbit earlier this month, China's launched today and India is planning one for next April. Competition is good. Especially in space. Somebody needs to shake us out of our low-orbit inertia.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just when you think oft-photographed Jupiter won't yield any more secrets, a new space probe flies by and coughs up spectacular new shots of the solar system's dominant planet. The New Horizons robot, enroute to Pluto, imaged "super bolts" of lightning at Jupiter's poles and made a video of an eruption on the volcanic moon Io, shown here orbiting its master. The blue light at the top of the moon is the eruption. I presume the video is closer-up, but I haven't found a link to it yet.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A closer look, in PDF, via spaceweather.com. Where did all the water come from? The impact crater is below the water table. As for the mystery illnesses? Arsenic-tainted ground water.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It was lonely out there in the black when Sputnik started beeping away fifty years ago today. Now it's so crowded that a Sputnik-like robot on a 9-year trip to Pluto has to imitate its ancestor's speech just to get through the radio traffic.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's take a break from Longhorns football. At just 210,000 light years away, this little companion galaxy to the Milk Way--the Small Cloud of Magellan--would make the perfect weekend getaway--certainly better than watching Oklahoma romp this Saturday. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

New results of space shuttle research on bacteria has ominous implications. People get weaker in microgravity and have to exercise like crazy just to retain their normal health. But that same microgravity makes Salmonella typhimurium bacteria more virulent. The researchers say the finding might help them concoct new treatments for infections from the bug here on the ground. They probably also better be thinking about this new danger for already-impaired people out in the black.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What did you learn about in school today, I asked Mr. Boy. Einstein, he said. Einstein? In second grade? What did they say he was famous for? Mr. B. couldn't remember. No kidding. There are plenty of adults who couldn't tell you anything about E.'s work, other than that he was a genuis, etc. Well, there is, I said, his Theory of Relativity, but most adults would be hard-pressed to explain it. The only part I know about is this: You can't fly to the moon in a straight line. Because space is curved. (I hope I got that right. With the ToR, you can never be sure.) Wow, said Mr. B, that is cool. It is, too. And, last month, some astronomers used it to measure some really far away neutron stars.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An old picture, but still an inspiring one. It's been tedious and slow since the moon landings, but, in historical terms (geological ones, if you like) we're on our way. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don't you wish your eyes were cameras, with filters and digital enhancement? No?  

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:48 AM | Permalink

The Cassini robot spacecraft has flown by Iapetus, the strange, two-toned moon of Saturn, and the data will be rolling in and being analyzed for weeks to come.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm tardy getting this up, but the Space Elevator Games are on for Oct. 19-21 in Salt Lake City. The Spaceward Foundation has a preview of what to expect. And, for the newbies, a FAQ.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Its' a good thing NASA takes its own photos in space and displays them on the Internet. If we had to rely solely on the MSM, as we did before the Web, we'd never see them. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Total eclipse, yes, but, here in Central Daylight Time, beginning at 4:52 a.m. tomorrow, and ending at 6:22 a.m. Wish I could join you, but I have a child to help get off to school, so I need my sleep. Thankfully. So I'll just have to miss the exciting part.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Dark matter separates from normal matter, in a major mystery, as galaxy clusters collide, in a false color image by NASA's Earth-orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Armadillo Aerospace, the Mesquite contender for the X Prize suffered a set back when its mock Lunar Lander, Texel, was destroyed last weekend:

"Texel burst into flames after it crash landed during a test. Its fuel and liquid oxygen tanks were so damaged in the impact that it would be easier to build a new vehicle from scratch than to repair Texel, says Armadillo test team member Phil Eaton."

But company officials say they still can be ready to compete in October. That's a relief. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The space shuttle seems to have suffered some launch damage to its re-entry heat shield--again.

"On Sunday, the astronauts will use a robot arm and extension boom, tipped with a laser and camera, to determine the exact size and depth of the gouge... Experts will then decide whether the damage warrants repair. If it cannot be fixed, the crew would have to remain at the space station until a rescue shuttle could be launched..."

These things are getting old, obviously. Retirement can't come too soon.

UPDATE  There's enough worry for NASA engineers on the ground to start running heat tests to see if the gouged tiles can withstand re-entry temperatures, or if a fix in orbit is required. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The annual Perseids meteor shower is in play, with dozens of shooting stars and some fireballs each hour after dark (best after midnight), leading to a peak of potentially hundreds on Saturday-Sunday and Sunday-Monday nights. Best to get away from urban lighting, but some will be visible even within the urban halo. For what should probably be the best, look east before sunrise on Monday morning.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For a while it seemed that nothing could stop those unstoppable Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. Something finally has, and threatens to do it permanently. A huge dust storm is blocking what little sunlight Mars gets, the very ultraviolet that the rovers need to keep their juice flowing.

UPDATE By Monday, the 23rd, "...skies might be clearing a little."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No kidding. Talk about pathetic, as Instapundit says. Spend all that money, make all that effort, then go to the moon and pick up some rocks and hit a few golf balls. And never--NEVER--go again. Past pathetic. Bizarre. At least Houston got free advertising, and grew, and grew, and grew. Where was I? On patrol in Vietnam. Not, therefore, paying a whole lot of attention. I remember being only vaguely aware of it. Where were you?

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This sounds really cool, if a bit pricey at $399:

"Here's how it works: You point it at a planet, or star, or galaxy that you want to identify, aim as best you can, and press a button. Voila--information about what you're aiming at appears on the device's color LCD; some more important objects even have voice recordings and video that go along with them."

Of course it would then reduce your night-vision considerably. But that's a minor problem, I suppose. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lower Colorado River Authority meteorologist Bob Rose notes this at spaceweather.com:

"Grab your binoculars. Pretty green Comet Linear VZ13 is gliding through the constellation Draco this week. It's too dim for the unaided eye, [but some say a 7X35 binocular will do just fine]. To find [VZ13] go outside after sunset and face north; the comet lies just a few star hops from Polaris."

It helps to be high enough to see the horizon. A finder map here which is dated the 10th but should be helpful through tomorrow night. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the second time in three months, astronomers have concluded there is water beyond the solar system. This time, researchers at Harvard and in France say they've found suggestions of it on an otherwise inhospitable world--a red-hot Jupiter-size gas giant--64 light years away:

"Investigations showed the planet, which orbits a star in the constellation of Vulpecula (the Fox), appeared larger at wavelength bands that corresponded to water, suggesting the substance was present in the atmosphere."

The previous one, also a hot Jupiter, is twice as far away. All this long-distance research draws conclusions only by inference, but it's still pretty cool. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not the meteor-ological kind, but the shooting, falling star variety. Reminders you live on a planet:

"Got a calendar? Circle this date: Sunday, August 12th. Next to the circle write 'all night' and 'Meteors!' Attach the above to your refrigerator in plain view so you won't miss the 2007 Perseid meteor shower."

Of course, there are plenty of caveats. You need dark skies to see much, preferably with a view of the horizon. And, for best results, you need to plan on staying up well after midnight. But they are fun. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bright galaxy NGC 2903 looks like another inviting weekend destination, when we can figure out how to travel 20 million light years in a few hours. If ever. This one's in the constellation Leo and just a bit smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy. /Via NASA and Cosmotography.com. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Things certainly look placid enough. Ah, if only you knew. Folks at the equator, according to NASA, are riding the Earth's rotation at about 1,000 mph. In Texas it's probably around 700 mph. Meanwhile the Earth is speeding around the sun at 67,000 mph. Can't feel a thing, can you? Obviously, things are not what they seem.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Laser light. Where a killowatt equals roughly 1.3 horsepower, or about a quarter the thrust of a modern push lawn mower. What for? Preparing for the power beaming competition in the 2007 Space Elevator games. Beam transport for a space elevator. It ain't rocket science.

Via the Space Elevator Blog 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Opportunity robot rover on Mars is set to begin a treacherous journey into a deep meteor crater:

"Opportunity already has been exploring layered rocks in cliffs around Victoria Crater. The team has planned the descent carefully to enable an eventual exit, but Opportunity could become trapped inside the crater or lose some capabilities. The rover has operated more than 12 times longer than its originally intended 90 days."

I'm sure most people have forgotten the rover is still out there. This could help them remember. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An outbreak of neon-blue, noctilucent clouds over Europe's and the U.S.'s northern tier. Also visible from the space station.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The heat shield on Atlantis--the blanket shield not the tiles--seems to have a 4-inch hole in it, but NASA professes not to be worried. First time in a long time they've had an all-male crew, but they'll be coming back with a woman after one of them replaces her on the space station. All this work on the station has an air of anticlimax, since the shuttle will soon retire and the station itself may not last much longer. But these trips aren't trivial. They will be generally useful for building a base on the moon, which has not much more gravity than low-Earth orbit.

UPDATE Problem or no, they're going to fix it, anyway. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Sombrero Galaxy, in a composite photo of X-ray, visible light, and infrared. An unbarred spiral in the Constellation Virgo. A mere 28 million light years away./NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

M-81, a bright, spiral galaxy, in ultraviolet. It's about 12 million light years away, in the the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. But it's visible through most small telescopes/NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in the early 80s, shortly after the first space shuttle flight and landing, I joined a bunch of space enthusiasts in trying to figure out how to lobby for and promote an expanded space program. Not much happened, and things sobered up real fast after the Columbia disaster. But I remember one fellow, a computer programmer, whose main idea was that we should "give talks." I never gave any, and don't remember anyone who did. But, 25 or so years later here's a new forum for just that.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The so-called "Mercury 13," (or should it be 25?), a combination academic and media fraud, gets a going over by veteran space writer James Oberg. His piece is poorly edited, but the details are all there (just repeated now and then). How the University of Wisconsin lent credence to spurious claims of women denied astronaut status at the beginning of the space race. In fact, Oberg shows, they weren't the test pilots President Eisenhower had stipulated, and so they could not be chosen.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NASA's orbiter, Mars Odyssey, has found the perfect occupation for the first Martians: digging up all the ice for water to drink and grow things. The ice beds are estimated to be available on about a third of the planet, at varying depths.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New shots of Jupiter and its moons, from a passing NASA spacecraft on the way to Pluto, are pretty enough but raise the question of why all but a few are in black-and-white? No explanation I can find on the NASA sites. Maybe it's because it will be so dark at Pluto, so far from the sun, that there's no point in trying for color?

"New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28 in a gravity assist maneuver designed to trim three years off its travel time to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach, the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that information back to Earth." 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You'll never look at the Big Dipper again without remembering this item, 11.8 million light years beyond your vision, just off the lip of the cup. M81 in Ursa Major/Tony Hallas, via NASA

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking, advocate of humanity migrating into the solar system and beyond, will soon get his first experience with microgravity in a Boeing 727 on a parabolic flight:

"To be allowed to carry Prof. Hawking, Zero-G needed to obtain a unique certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)--no one has ever flown a disabled person in weightlessness before. Prof. Hawking will be accompanied by a team of three doctors and at least two of the Cambridge professor's experienced caregivers."

I had the chance for a similar flight out of Houston a few years before I retired, but passed on it. I get rather seriously seasick, and sometimes airsick, and while I would jump at an opportunity to go into space, a minute or less in microgravity (bookended by a stomach-churning 1.8 Gs) hardly seems worth it. Though it does look like fun.

UPDATE  Post-flight, Hawking tells the BBC: "It was amazing.The zero-G part was wonderful and the higher-G part was no problem. I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come!"

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Imagine living on a world where the sun, a red dwarf, is twenty times the size of the moon, and hangs permanently in the sky. That's because the planet doesn't rotate, but has one side permanently light and the other permanently dark. The temperature range, however, is roughly that of Earth, meaning you might have running water. That's if a new discovery by European astronomers, using telescopes in Chile, holds up. But because it's 120 trillion miles away, and its information has to be inferred rather than seen, it might not.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1672, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope at 60 million light years away./NASA

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

 Supernovae remnant in the Constellation Vela, in visible light/NASA and Skyfactory.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

 "NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has observed a remarkable eclipse of a supermassive black hole [just 60 million light years away], allowing a disk of hot matter swirling around the hole to be measured for the first time."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Some argue that repairing Hubble is pointless, since ground-based observatories have overtaken its capabilities. But terrestrial telescopes fall short of HST's resolution by a factor of 10 or more." 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And you thought geometry was only for terrestrial engineers and architects? Apparently it's involved in the maintenance of planets, as well. This six-sided hexagon--twice as wide as Earth--encircles Saturn's north pole. It was first seen by the Voyager robot spacecraft in the 1980s and recently photographed (here, in infrared) by the Cassini spacecraft. There is some (disputed) thought that it is a vortex-like flow in the atmosphere of the gas giant. But its cause remains a msytery.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Witch Head Nebula, about 1,000 light years away, in honor of Mr. B's and my reading of Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, which we are taking slow, since it's the last one before the concluding book due in July. It's also got more "kiss-kiss, boy-girl stuff," as Mr. B. calls it with wrinkled nose to show his disgust. So much that I find I have to read around those descriptions, partly because they're too old for him and partly because he dislikes them anyway. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The beauty of dusty nebula NGC 2170: hydrogen, dust and stars/Russell Croman Astrophotography

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturn's shadow stretches out across its rings on Jan. 19, 2007. This natural-color view, taken from about 764,000 miles (1.2 million kilometer) away by the Cassini spacecraft was released Thursday. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Total lunar ecplise Saturday evening won't hardly be visible at the rancho, beginning as it does in daylight and ending about dusk. But you folks on the east coast and in Europe will enjoy it. Directions and more here./Sky & Telescope photo by Richard Tresch Fienberg.

UPDATE  The Brits liked it, anyway. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Back in the early 80s when the shuttle was new, and enthusiasm for the world's first spaceship was at its highest, it occurred to me that, for all that, it should probably be named "the spaceship that can't fly in the rain." Though it took more than twenty-six years, it has finally lived up to the name.

"The space shuttle Atlantis's planned March launch has been delayed to late April so technicians can repair extensive damage to foam insulation on its fuel tank caused by golf-ball-sized hail."

It's a good thing the shuttles are going to be scrapped. Let's hope the new ship is hardier. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More good, if a few trifle far-fetched, reasons to return to the moon, by former moon astronaut Buzz Aldrin who recalls looking back from its surface in 1969 to "...the cloudy blue ball that should only be mankind’s starter home." The plan is to put the base at the moon's south pole, where there is some evidence of water ice and more shelter from the sun, and rotate astronaut teams in and out every six months. Top of the far-fetched list, it seems to me, is beaming solar energy home, but the argument's at least as interesting as the space elevator. /NASA

Via Instapundit 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Orion again. It is winter, after all. This is part of the nebula's cloud complex, imaged by a telescope in Hawaii. It's not visible without a big telescope but it's to the left and just below the belt of three stars in the constellation. So when you look at the strider and his belt, think of this/ Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NEOs, or Near-Earth Objects, are well known to astronomers who generally believe there is very little chance of them hitting the planet. Earth simply is too small and the solar system is too vast. Places like Meteor Crater in Arizona are notable for being so rare. But now scientists who study NEOs have a candidate for worry: Apophis, a 250-meter (750 feet) wide asteroid weighing an estimated twenty million tons might strike in 2036. Former moon astronaut Rusty Schweickart wants the hapless, corrupt and dictator-dominated UN to mount an effort to do something about it. Fat chance. At least there's plenty of time to talk about it, a form of "action" for which the UN is famous. Some sort of talk might be a good thing. Even if Apophis isn't the size of the object that is believed to have killed the dinosaurs, and even if the odds are it would fall in one of the oceans that form most of the planet, it could still do a lot of damage to coastal areas.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When the shuttles began flying in 1981, I thought it was the beginning of the real exploration of the solar system. Instead, most of the money went to support those low-orbit flights. Now that a return to the moon is the next plan--along with retirement of what remains of the expensive shuttle fleet--I have to wonder if there'll ever be enough money for it. It would certainly be a better investment, as this NASA article explains:

"'We need to set up shop on the Moon for one clear and understandable reason,' he concludes. 'The Moon is a school for exploration.'"

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Helix Nebula in infrared, 700 light years away, in the constellation Aquarius./NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm a month late getting this up (so to speak) but it's worth a look: NOVA ScienceNOW's Jan. 9 video report on the space elevator concept and last year's New Mexico challenge. It's more gee whiz than science, but you'll come away from the 12-minute show with a pretty clear understanding of the idea. After that try the Spaceward Foundation's new comprehensive FAQ on the research challenges.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mr. Boy and his pals like to "hunt aliens," as they call it when camping with the other Tiger Cubs in the woods at McKinney Falls State Park. Well, here are "real" aliens, explaining the war on terrorism--with really cool pictures, for the text-challenged. A big gracias to Miriam at Miriam's Ideas for the tip.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good views of Saturn possible this weekend with a home telescope, two hours after sunset in the Northern Hemisphere, looking east here until it's overhead by midnight. Should have a good view of the rings as they are tilting towards us.

From SpaceWeather.com: "Saturn is at its closest to Earth: 762 million miles. It thus looks bigger and brighter both to the naked eye [resembling a bright, yellow star] and through a telescope than it will at any other time in 2007."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The story behind the story of astronaut Lisa Nowak's cross-country odyssey of love gone wrong isn't just NASA's problem of psychological evaluation of future crews for the space station, moon base or Mars exploration, i.e. what if this had happened in space? It's a hidden one of the space agency's recruiting too many astronauts in the first place. They've created a surplus of high achievers chasing too few flights. Not to mention the problem of what to do with them after the peak experience they've been aiming at for so long is suddenly over? Nowak waited a decade before finally getting into low orbit last summer. Her chances of flying again before another decade passed were poor even before her escapade made them nonexistent.

UPDATE Nowak has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It ain't rocket science. It's plain old adultery and attempted kidnapping and murder. I'm sure everyone and his cousin will have something to say about NASA astronaut and Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, before she finally fades from view--probably behind prison walls. Wonkette is already calling her a "diaper-clad nutbucket." And there's this little irony. But really. I guess it just goes to show that not even a Naval Academy degree, pilot wings, an 0-6 rank, having three children and flying in Earth orbit can change the fundamentals. Among them: that the heart, to borrow the title of the Carson Mccullers' tale, is a lonely hunter.

UPDATE  As NYTimes science writer John Tierney says, wow, people are finally talking about the space shuttle. Unfortunately, it's about another tragic crash.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not a joke list, or even a few of the more serious, yet non-scientific, things I could think of to try in near weightlessness. But a list of scientific things to do, such as studying the color of Earth's oceans to gauge their health, and analyzing Earth's atmosphere to learn how it really works. The one I like the best is this:

"A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be shielded from Earth's copious radio noise, and would be able to observe low radio frequencies blocked by Earth's atmosphere. Observations at these frequencies have never been made before and opening up a window into this low frequency universe will likely lead to many exciting new discoveries."

Read the whole list here. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

 Barred Spiral Galaxy. Just 70 million light years away. Why, you could make it a weekend/HST NASA

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Sombrero Galaxy in infrared/by Hubble Space Telescope, NASA.  An electrical failure on the Hubble has put its main camera which is responsible for pictures like these out of action until at least 2008 when the space shuttle is scheduled to make repairs on the orbiting telescope.

"The [Advanced Camera for Surveys] actually consists of three sub-cameras that detect and filter light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. Astronomers can continue to use Hubble's other instruments - which include the Field Planetary Camera-2 and the Near Infrared Camera Multi-Object Spectrograph - but the loss of its primary camera is being mourned by the scientific community."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Think the Iranians pose no immediate threat to the American homeland? Think again. This missile, 18 of which Iran is believed to have purchased from North Korea, so far can only reach Europe, Israel and targets throughout the Middle East. But Debkafile says it is believed to be the missile that Allaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, says is being modified to launch a 300 kilogram spy satellite. "Once Iran learns how to put 300 kg into earth orbit," says Uzi Rubin, the former head of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, "it could adapt the satellite launcher into an ICBM that could drop more than 300 kg anywhere in the world, for instance, on Washington, D.C....every time the Iranian satellite passed above the U.S., it would remind America of Iran's potential to strike it." 

UPDATE Aviation Week's slightly different take on this is here predicting a different rocket to be used for the Iranian space launch, and soon. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Put away your inches and miles, Americans, and start thinking along with the vast majority of the world in centimeters and kilometers. If, that is, you plan to go to the moon after 2020 when American space policy says we'll have a base there. NASA has so decreed, deciding only the metric system will be in use on our portion of lunar soil. Set aside the fact of it being thirteen years in the future, far enough away that the current Congress won't have to worry about justifying spending tax money for it, which suggests it may not, in fact, become reality. In which case maybe it won't actually ever influence our continued stubborn use of English measurement (which not even the English officially use anymore, but only us, Liberia and Burma). Which might be a good thing when you think of all the vehicle mechanics and home handymen who would have to switch out their inch-based wrenches, nuts, screws and other devices for metric ones. But there's already some betting that the residents of any future moon base may, in fact, be speaking Chinese, and they use the metric system, so maybe it's a good time to start prepping for the inevitable. Me? I'm too old to worry about it.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can't stop thinking about Orion. This is Orion's Cradle, the area of new star formation in the Great Orion Nebula, 1,500 light years away/image by Tony Hallas for NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comet McNaught's feathery tail, visible mainly after sunset in the Southern hemisphere, but also reported visible low on the western horizon after sunset in the Northern Hemisphere. One of the brightest comets ever, McNaught is fading as it speeds away toward the outer solar system/image by Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, Australia

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Comet McNaught has left the sun behind but it isn't through with the inner solar system yet, and although it's no longer fully visible in the northern hemisphere, a part of it can still be seen low on the western horizon: the comet's extravagant tail, according to Space Weather:

"Even experienced astronomers say they've never seen anything quite like it.  McNaught's tail materializes at sunset in the southern hemisphere and is visible to the unaided eye as a majestic fan of pale streamers...but its tail sweeps all the way back into northern skies. People in California, Colorado and Hawaii have seen it peeking above the western horizon about an hour after sunset. This 'northern tail' is faint but pretty, and resembles a pale aurora borealis. (Dark skies are absolutely required.)"

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Details emerging from space sources indicate that the Chinese Feng Yun 1C (FY-1C) polar orbit weather satellite launched in 1999 was attacked by an asat system launched from or near the Xichang Space Center."

Interesting, of course, and probably important, but it's hard to believe the Chinese would want to upset their biggest world market, i.e. us, with an attack on our satellites, when the rest of their military ain't much to crow about. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Black Line Ascension, a new New York space elevator LLC endeavor, has a new web site with a cool animation of what a working elevator would look like and what it could do for travel to moon, Mars and beyond... Worth a peek.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Orion again, my favorite. The deep field here, in the belt on the left, with the nebulae in the upper right. When the clouds of the last few days clear out, I'll look for this winter companion again./NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comet McNaught is brightening so much as it nears the sun--the heat making the rocky snowball vaporize furiously--that it is becoming visible in daylight, which could make it the brightest one in centuries. Tricky to find, though, because it's close to the sun. Spaceweather.com advises: "Go outside and stand in the shadow of a building (or billboard) so that the glare of the sun is blocked out.  Make a fist and hold it at arm's length.  The comet is about one fist-width east of the sun." Bincoulars will allow you to see the structure within the comet's tail, but be careful not to look at the sun. You don't want a black (burned) spot in your eyes forever after. Comet pix here to see what you're looking for.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This could be the best night to see Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1), brightening as it speeds towards the sun. It's visible both at sunset and at dawn if you have a clear view of the horizon. At sunset, it shows up in the twilight as soon as the sun is down. In the morning, it emerges just before the sun rises. Looks even better in 10X50 binoculars. More images here./photo over Johnston, Iowa last night by Stan Richard, Iowa Public Television.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

3D map by Hubble Space Telescope (in lower left corner) shows clumpy nature of cold, dark matter which is invisible but accounts for most of the Universe's mass. Its gravitational attraction pulls normal matter--the stars in their galaxies--into the large-scale structures seen through telescopes.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 03:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was beautiful and a little scarey, at 6:30 this morning, but the tumbling body of a Soyuz U rocket captured on video here presented no danger as it burned up quickly, according to Space Weather. Witnesses described it as "brilliant, slow, twinkling, sparkly and full of rainbow colors." It was part of the vehicle that launched a French orbital telescope on Dec. 27, visualized here.

UPDATE  It didn't all burn up, but so far no reports of damage or injury. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Witch's Broom Nebula, in honor of my and Mr. Boy's embarkation on the second novel in the Harry Potter series. Mr. B. already identifies with Mr. P., as one might expect. /NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A closeup of the stars in the Belt of Orion the Hunter, my favorite constellation, and the only good thing about winter (for me), except for the fact that in Texas, at least, winter is rarely longer than six weeks. The worst part is in January, which is about to begin. Oh, well, it's short./ NASA. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Jack-and-the-beanstalk technology--it ain't rocket science--looks to advance by the so-far-unscheduled-but-planned games next fall, according to email from the Spaceward Foundation:

"In 2007, we expect to have real racing going on, with multiple teams achieving the minimum required speed and competing on the amount of payload [Jack] they carry. We're also considering, if we can raise the funds for it, a two ribbon, no payload, head-to-head race.  This will not carry the $500,000 prize purse (since speed alone is not the ultimate requirement) but will provide another opportunity for bragging rights and photo-ops.

"In tether [Beanstalk] land, we don't have grand announcements or plans, except for that oh-so-good feeling that we will probably give away the prize money this year.  While the tether competition is not quite as spectacular as the power beaming competition, we all know what awarding the prize money here means - we have placed the bar so that it will take a new tether material technology to claim the prize."

As always, worth a look.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some of that work the astronauts of STS 116 were doing last week, installing structural trusses and rewiring the International Space Station/ NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

 A geomagetic storm triggered Northern Lights as unusually far south as Arizona last night. The cause: a mass ejection from the sun which hit Earth squarely on Thursday. Our planet's magnetic field reverberated for more than 24 hours after the impact. A second one is due today, but is only expected to be a glancing hit, so it probably won't cause auroras so far south/ photo by Vic Winters.

Via Spaceweather.com 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Geminid meteor shower could be a winner this year, for the Northern Hemisphere, from Wednesday evening into the twilight before dawn on Thursday. If the waxing moon doesn't get in the way. To avoid that, face west with the moon at your back.

"...people in dark, rural areas could see one or two meteors every minute," for what could be the best meteor shower of 2006, in speedy, bright streaks of yellow across the star-spangled black.

Via Spaceweather, Sky & Telescope, and Space.com, the most pessimistic of the trio.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So scientists have long said, and now they say they have evidence that there is water on Mars. Not was water, but is water. It's sensor evidence in before and after photos taken by Mars Global Surveyor, which still needs to be verified by robots on the ground, but now the hunt for life can truly begin, even if it's only microbial. I might add that it also would seem to strengthen the controversial, decade-old finding of microbial life in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica.

Via Instapundit 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

British physicist Stephen Hawking recently said we must get off this rock or die here en masse.

"Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out."

The late President Ronald Reagan was more upbeat about it. He said only the Milky Way is big enough to encompass the human imagination.

"In a Sept. 22, 1988, speech at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, shortly before a launch of the space shuttle Discovery, Reagan said: 'It is mankind's manifest destiny to bring our humanity into space; to colonize this galaxy; and as a nation, we have the power to determine whether America will lead or will follow.'"

Via NewsMax for the Reagan quote, from their email alert, but I can't find a link.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

 The Andromeda Galaxy, about two million light years away, yet the closest major galaxy to our own Milky Way/NASA

Posted by Dick Stanley at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Glories, ice haloes, and the opposition effect. Amusing atmospheric optics while traveling over the holiday at eight miles high--including craning your neck up against the window to see the beginning of the black.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Who doesn't love Orion, striding across the winter sky? Orion's Great Nebula is also good--just below and to the left of Orion's belt--through a big telescope./ NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Meteor showers are a good way to remind Earthlings that their home really isn't as stable as it feels but is, in fact, hurtling through space while turning like a top. Since you can't see the shooting stars unless it's night where you are, you can think of yourself as part of Earth's windshield. The thin windshield of the atmosphere is the leading side colliding with a cloud of icy dust shorn from some snow ball of a comet's heating up as it rounded the sun, replenished by subsequent roundings.

So it will be this weekend, from Saturday night into Sunday, with the Leonid meteor shower, one of the better of the annual showers that cycle through the year as Earth encounters a variety of comet dust clouds, in this case from Comet 55P/ Tempel-Tuttle.

"'We expect an outburst of more than 100 Leonids per hour,' says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. This pales in comparison to the Leonid storms of 2001 and 2002, when sky watchers saw thousands of meteors. Even so, a hundred per hour would make the Leonids one of the best showers of 2006."

The bad news is the show is going to be best in the northern hemisphere, with the best views in Europe and eastern North America, and you're going to need a fairly dark spot, away from streetlights and other causes of urban light pollution to see the whole show. Otherwise you might see only one or two streaks of color an hour and miss the rest. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 06:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, orbiting the red planet since 1996, has developed a mystery communications problem.

"No signal was received on Nov. 3 and 4, but a weak signal was received on Nov. 5, suggesting the spacecraft had switched to a safe mode and was awaiting further instructions from Earth. The signal cut out completely later that day and nothing has been heard since. Engineers think the spacecraft has performed a programmed maneuver in which it turns its solar arrays toward the sun to maintain its power supply. When it does this, it also reorients its entire body in the same direction, thus making communication with Earth less effective."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Cat's Eye Nebula, clouds of gas from a dying star 3,000 light years away/NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Light echoes across a dust cloud from the outburst of a star at the edge of the Milky Way, 20,000 light years from the sun/NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hubble's snapshot from back in February, when it discovered two new moons of Pluto, from Hubble's 100 greatest hits./NASA 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comet Swan, photographed by Italy's Cimini Astronomical Observatory. The comet is now visible in the Northern Hemisphere through binoculars on the northwest horizon, where the sky is dark enough.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 04:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new way for satellites and rovers to study a planet. Today, Earth. Tomorrow, the moon, Mars and beyond.

"EO-1 is a new breed of satellite that can think for itself. 'We programmed it to notice things that change (like the plume of a volcano) and take appropriate action,' Chien explains. EO-1 can re-organize its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash-floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice—in short, anything unexpected."

Posted by Dick Stanley at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The official results of the Space Elevator Games are in.

"...the competition was obviously a huge success. It was the first full-form competition, and we already had 7 major universities participate, three professional engineering teams, and one aerospace company. We've had very good press coverage, and a spectator crowd of 20,000 people."

The climber definitely has improved. The beanstalk still needs work. Next year's prizes will be increased to $500,000. 

Posted by Dick Stanley at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Getting a few hits today from people looking for Space Elevator news from Las Cruces. Not a lot to tell, except that the tether and crawler competitions didn't amount to much: "Saturday’s Space Elevator Games...showed that they are still a long way off."

Ted Semon has the latest:

"The Tether Challenge ended just about a half-hour ago and NASA’s Prize money for the Tether Challenge is safe for another year."

Alas. 

UPDATE  It wasn't all a bust. The crawler of the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team (USST) made the fastest ascent (just not quite fast enough) and is expected to do better next year.

Posted by Dick Stanley at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)