TechRivet has posted something like this before, but not quite this exhaustive or complete a graphic. This one shows the absolute distance in a logarithmic scale for objects ranging from the ISS to the Sloan Great Wall of Galaxies. You therefore end up with objects in close proximity by absolute distance that are in opposite directions from the Earth. Such as the “Extent of Milky Way disk” and the “Milky Way Center”. 
Never-the-less it is a fascinating chart to peruse. [link]
Betelgeuse, a famous red giant star in the constelation Orion, has been imaged with unprecedented clarity by LESIA at the Paris Observatory. This is the first time the surface features of another star have been resolved with such detail
Times Online Cool story about Brian May of Queen, who was studying for his PhD in astrophysics 30 years ago when Queen made it big and he had to go be a rock star and now has gone back to complete his research on dust clouds within the solar system and get his doctorate. May’s interest in the subject was rekindled last year when he co-authored a children’s science book with the astronomer Sir Patrick Moore.
Luna China's Chang'e-1 space probe has adjusted its orbit to just 200 km above the surface of the moon. Mars After last week's discussion of the possibility of long term climate cycles, and maybe even life on Mars, this week researchers at Cal Tech published a new study indicating that Mars' axial tilt could produce climate cycles on the order of 100,000 years in length, that's just under 50,000 mars years, by the way. Glad to see great minds think alike. Asteroids Bulgarian astronomers have discovered a new asteroid this week, 2008 WN96. The asteroid is estimated to be 2 km diameter, which is pretty large for an asteroid discovered so recently, with an orbital period of 3.2 years. Jupiter In a new report, University of Washington oceanographer Robert Tyler has calculated the heat required to maintain a liquid ocean on Europa could come from waves generated from the ocean itself. An axial tilt of less than one degree would be sufficient to produce enough heat to keep the ocean liquid. Deep Space CO2 has been discovered for the first time in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, HD 189733b, 63 light years away. Deep Space Report 1.11
News report: Meteor lights Sask. sky
And for a little bit of contextual reading: Asteroid Deflection Strategies
An impact occurs when both reach the same point in space at the same time, or more correctly when some point on Earth's surface intersects the impactor's orbit when the impactor arrives.
That must be the most precise description of Armageddon I've ever read.
Hubble Directly Observes Planet Orbiting Fomalhaut I can't help but wonder what the astronomers peering over these pictures did when they spotted the planet. Can you imagine the chills they must have felt when they spotted the planet? Did they leap up and "WHOOP?" Or were they more sedate? This is a remarkable achievement and has occurred sooner than predicted. 
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) That's a planet you're looking at 25 light years away. Now that's cool. News article: Hubble Telescope captures first image of alien planet seen with visible light
Back before the physics of the universe were uneerstood philosophers and scientists believed that the earth floated in a sea of aether. The concept of the aether impacted science long after scientists had rejected the ancient theory of the five elements. Prior to fully modern theories of electromagnetism, many scientists applied the term "aether" to the pervasive medium through which they thought light must propagate. Aether (classical element) Of course now-a-days, us being so much more enlightened about the ways of the universe, we are so much closer to knowing how the universe works, we can be more precise...or maybe not. The newfound flow cannot be explained by, and is not directly related to, the expansion of the universe, though the researchers believe the two types of movement are happening at the same time. Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe, Study Says The more we know, the deeper the mystery goes.
What is a Guelph? Is that the sort-of mediocre evil elf. Half as evil as a Drow? 
"This event was a relatively slow fireball that made it far into the Earth's atmosphere," said Phil McCausland, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at Western. "Most meteoroids burn up by the time they hit an altitude of 60 or 70 kilometers (37 to 44 miles) from the ground." - LiveScience.com ...and because you asked for it, here is where Guelph is. 
Hat Tip: Scooter over at GadgetGrid.com
Pretty cool animation of the orbits of the planets and the major asteroids. I'd like to point out one of the more interesting things to take a look at, find the asteroid Ceres. Look at the nice circular orbit. Ceres is the largest asteroid, has a stable orbit, it's a sphere, it has a lot of water...can you say "planet".
The sun is on the Orion spur. Just one of Billions...
Great video here from the NASA EPOXI spacecraft. This is a re-purposed mission that originally was the one that impacted a comet with a projectile so we could see what was inside said comet. After that it has been out doing other things. In this video it was looking back at earth and caught the moon transiting the Earth over a period of about one full day with the pertinent pass in front of the Earth taking approximately 5-6 hours. Lot's more information over here: HOLY FRAK! Moon transits Earth!
Very odd and strangely beautiful. http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Brilliant_Noise/BNoise.htm Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. cool.
 Two astrophysicists have estimated the largest possible thing in the universe for there is an upward potential limit due to the age of the universe.
A black hole could conceivably have grown to the massive size of a hundred thousand tredagrams*, or 50 Billion suns in size. Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses. Fifty billion suns, that's 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as "ridiculously stupidly big" and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287. That's a big twinky. New Scientist article. *note: As an interesting aside, a tredagram is not even an officially recognized SI prefix of measurement in the metric system. Merely a proposed prefix. This number is sooooo large that we don't even have a clearly defined unit to express it. Here is a pdf, wherein the the new unit of measure is discussed.
Somebody should sit down and write Declaration Of Principles Concerning Activities Following The Detection Of Extraterrestrial Intelligence...hey I found one it's called: "DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES CONCERNING ACTIVITIES FOLLOWING THE DETECTION OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE" more succinctly: - Double check your data.
- Tell other observers so they can triple check your data.
- Tell everybody. [everybody? EVERYBODY! <-- a la Gary Oldman in the Professional (Great Movie).]
- Tell all the scientists in detail and put all your data in the public domain.
- Keep monitoring and, like, record it m'kay?
- Clear up the frequencies from interference.
- And for Pete's sake don't send a response until we've ALL talked about it first!
Seems rather common sense doesn't it? This probably has little effect on the whole process. The people that are going to keep it hidden will not report it, those that are predisposed to broadcast a discovery will. This "Declaration" while neat will not influence them to change. In my opinion there are two more reasons why this is not all that important: - I don't think this is something that can be kept quiet.
- I think most [all] people would want this data shared and I think these rules are just common sense and I think this is how it would play out regardless. (just my opinion, but them I'm a fairly optimistic guy).
An interesting read here from Gregg Easterbrook regarding the risks from a major asteroid strike on the Earth. Once thought to be a terribly remote occurrence, it seems the more the astronomers look at the issue the less rare it appears to be. The Sky Is Falling A generation ago, the standard assumption was that a dangerous object would strike Earth perhaps once in a million years. By the mid-1990s, researchers began to say that the threat was greater: perhaps a strike every 300,000 years. This winter, I asked William Ailor, an asteroid specialist at The Aerospace Corporation, a think tank for the Air Force, what he thought the risk was. Ailor’s answer: a one-in-10 chance per century of a dangerous space-object strike. Although from what I can glean from this table: Sentry Risk Table [NASA], there appears to be only one rock that is of any concern at this time. [this one - 2007 VK184] and that will happen June 3rd...2048. The whole point of the first article seems to be that we may be more at risk than we had previously thought and spending some money on asteroid defense systems may be prudent.
That's German for "counter glow". On the darkest nights, 180 degrees around from the sun there is a reflection of light from the sun called the Gegenschein. This is a reflection of light off of dust particles in the asteroid belt. Check it out. 
We gotta keep this telescope operational: Hubble discovers 67 new gravitationally lensed galaxies What is gravitational lensing? Gravitational lensing occurs when light travelling toward us from a distant galaxy is magnified and distorted as it encounters a massive object between the galaxy and us. These gravitational lenses often allow astronomers to peer much farther back into the early universe than they would normally be able to do. Here is a cool video of an Einstein Ring. An Einstein ring is a complete circle image of a background galaxy, which is formed when the background galaxy, a massive, foreground galaxy, and the Hubble Space Telescope are all aligned perfectly. Therein creating a complete circle lense effect. So pretty pictures are nice, but what impact do these discoveries have on astro-physics? Well read on dear surfer, read on. ...they can be used to create a census of galaxy masses in the universe to test the predictions of cosmological models. Basically, since we understand how gravity works here, and we can get estimates of galaxy size out there, we can then compare and contrast and see if gravity remains constant from one side of the visible universe to the other.
Free. Probably available this month. Made Robert Scoble cry. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.  Official WorldWide Telescope site:
you can zoom in and zoom and zoom and zoom... It stitches together views from all the best telescopes in the world... It's "like a magic carpet ride". Technology rocks. We are living in the age of miracles.
BTW, that site is a great resource for finding wallpaper candidates.
oh and BTW I'm on a dual monitor system.
oh yeah one more thing, here is an indispensable tool for spreading an image over two screens in Vista: Display Fusion.
I don't see the benefits in this plan: Space leaders work to replace lunar base with manned asteroid missions Well let me re-phrase that, I see the benefits, but I don't think they're compelling enough to make a political argument. Which is the battle the space program needs to always fight. And in general they suck at it. They're engineers, not politicians. What they need to realize is the the whole man-in-space thing is a tough sell to congress. And the only things that spark the political will when it comes to the whole man-in-space thing is big mountaintops to summit. Asteroids are small and pointless. Small foothills in the landscape of space. The MOON! MARS! Those are marketing messages a politician can sell. So my space program engineer side says, "duh, the moon doesn't help us get to Mars much." But my congressional lobbyist side says, "Gimme something I can sell to joe sixpack, 'cause the asteroid belt ain't it." If it was MY space program I'd be spending way more money than 15 Billion, but it isn't mine, and that is the budget and you can't do everything you want and you HAVE to sell the program. Sell the moon, sell Mars! Don't try and sell small rocks with names like numbers...it won't work.
 Accelerating change is going on all around us. We see it in entertainment from computer games to movies. We see it in telephones as they keep getting smaller and more feature rich. We see it in cameras and music players and personal GPS devices. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
All of this creeps into our lives and becomes ubiquitous. The changes quickly becomes invisible, expected and, in a weird sort of way, un-important. But accelerating change is also affecting the sciences. For example the hunt for extra-solar planets. The first one discovered was in 1991. Since then there has been a rapid pace of discovery. The bulk of the discoveries essentially done by inference: careful detection of the wobbling of the star around which the planet[s] orbit.  So the point here is that before 1991 we had NO evidence of planets orbiting other stars. In theory we were 100% sure (or so close as to make no difference) that most stars had some planets, but we had no direct evidence. Now there has been over 250 planets identified. But wait that's not all! N ow there is a new technology under development by the Lyot Project, it's goal to create the necessary instrument and associated software to remove starlight from images thus allowing the much fainter planets to be viewed directly. Astronomers will no longer need rely on inference to discover new planets. This would be a remarkable achievement and would allow for a much greater number of planets to be discovered. It would probably also allow for the discovery of Earth like planets and the reading of spectrums from the planets themselves. What would the reactions be if we found a planet with a spectral analysis that matched Earth? Orbit, temperature, water, oxygen?... Would that spur some research into a viable star probe? Just asking... Accelerating change is cool. Sites of interest:
|
|
posted: Nov 15, 2007
|
scooter
|
I was able to find the video of this awesome footage on YouTube today. The rising image Wide Shot taken from near the North Pole, and the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean can be observed on the Earth.
The setting image Tele Shot taken from near the South Pole, and we can see the Australian Continent (center left) and the Asian Continent (lower right) on the Earth. Scooter GadgetGrid.com
|
|
posted: Nov 14, 2007
|
scooter
|
A Japanese moon probe, Kaguya, has recaptured the Apollo "Earth-rise" photograph but, this time it was captured with high-definition imaging. The relative locations of the Kaguya probe: the moon, and the Earth as the imagery was made. Credit: JAXA/NHK:
Earth-rise (2): In the image, made from a moving image taken onboard the Kaguya spacecraft, a region of the moon's surface near its north pole is shown. Credit: JAXA/NHK:
 Earth-set (1): This still image was taken from a moving image shot by the HDTV onboard Kaguya and sent to the JAXA Usuda Deep Space Center. The Moon's surface is a region near its south pole. Credit: JAXA/NHK: 
Earth-set series:
 Via Space.comScooter GadgetGrid.com
 So interplanetary travel...cool yes?
How do we do it? Shane Ross gives a compelling speech about the use of LaGrange points as entry and exit points into orbits of planetary bodies. The Interplanetary Transport Network Essentially there are low energy paths that lead from Earth orbit to L1 or L2. There are then low energy paths that lead from L1 to the Earth-Sun LaGrange point called E1 or E2. And from there more low energy paths to the LaGrange points around other bodies in the solar system. He uses the Genesis project as an example of very low energy orbits. The Genesis project used these low energy pathways to make its way from Earth to L2 and from there to E2 where it stayed and sampled the solar winds for 2 years. It then used the reverse of those paths to make its way back to Earth again. Genesis was able to do all this travel while using "...five hundredths of 1% of the fuel that it takes to get a rocket into Earth orbit." That is remarkable. The major point of this whole speech was summed up early: Once you reach Earth's orbit you are halfway to anywhere. Here is a little lighthearted graphic from the speech defining the low energy pathways as a Metro map. 
Transit stop Professor Ross argues that the Lunar L1 location become a gateway station. It's the best location for a manned space station because: travel time is a matter of days from the Earth, launching craft and maintaining craft from that location is cheap, launching from L1 up to E1 or E2 is cheap and therefore exiting the local Earth system to head to other planets is cheap as well. It becomes the closest rest stop on the interplanetary highway. Can we get into orbit cheaply? So then the remaining hurdle is getting into Earth orbit. If we can make that cheap then the entire process of interplanetary travel becomes inexpensive. What technology are we working on right now that might lower the cost of getting payloads into orbit? Space Elevator. Does it feel like we are on the cusp of a convergence here? If we are able to tie these two sciences together, the engineering feat of a space elevator with the comprehensive knowledge of how to navigate the solar system's "currents", what will the bounds of our exploration be? Cheap Planetary Travel It would no longer require huge chemical rockets to get from Earth to Mars or Jupiter or anywhere for that matter. It would be like nudging a stick out into a stream and watching it float on down to the next stop. Only you would be able to nudge the stick back upstream as well, whenever you wanted. Download and watch the video it's compelling.
 Just an example of accelerating change.
There were rooms and devices in history that could be categorized as planetariums dating back to the 13th century, but the first true planetarium was created in Munich in 1920. [ref. linky] [wikipedia] That planetarium used a metal dome with holes poked in it to project the lights onto a domed ceiling. This technology remained largely unchanged for 60 years. Since then we have seen rapid change. With computer processing power increasing continuously it is now possible to provide dynamic content up onto  the dome. I went to a local planetarium last year and the experience was more like a trip through space than a lecture from an instructor. It was remarkable. But it doesn't stop there. We now have sophisticated programs available to everyone for free that exceed the capabilities of ANY planetarium that was built before the year 2000. Stellarium [linky] is only the most sophisticated example. The power of a full planetarium placed in your hands for free. Accelerating Change: This is only one trivial example of accelerating change in our lives. We have the capabilities at our fingertips that only large institutions have had in the past. And even those institutions, whether business or government, have only had THOSE capabilities for a hundred years or so, before that essentially nobody could do these things. And we take it all for granted. We shouldn't. We live in an age of miracles. It is not an age of once in a blue moon someone gets healed by some mysterious means or someone walks on water or something trivial like that. It is an age where the miracles are so common and ubiquitous that they have become mundane.
http://www.stellarium.org/ Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go. Remarkable program. Go get it. Send a link for it to your Dad or Uncle who is into astronomy. 
 The Drake Equation is the equation formulated by Frank Drake. It is a speculative equation that is used to attempt to estimate the number of civilizations alive and kicking in the galaxy today. It is stated as such.
N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
So why are you bringing this up Greg? Well I'm glad you asked. Astronomers have been using highly specialized techniques lately to detect planets around nearby stars, in general by detecting the wobble in the star's path caused by massive close orbiting planets.
So historically we have been able to Estimate R*, which is the estimate of the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
And recently, with our new capabilities, we have been learning about how our estimates play out with fp, which is the estimate for the fraction of the stars that have planets around them.
But the rest of the variables have been wild ass guesses.
Now Astronomers have spotted a potential ne data point. ne is the number of planets per star that might sustain life. [linky] They believe they have spotted a candidate planet. Now this in its own right doesn't tell us much. What it does reveal is the growing capability of astronomers to detect smaller and smaller planets.
"On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X," Delfosse said.
As the technologies and skill of the astronomers continue to increase, we may very well nail down the front end of the Drake equation. We may statistically "know" three of the seven variables.
If we can refine our techniques and increase the power of our telescopes even further we might be able to answer fl which is the fraction of planets where life evolves. Spectroscopic analysis comes to mind.
With knowledge of four of the seven Drake equation variables we will have a much better grasp of our standing in the universe.
Beyond that we really need a way to communicate with the intelligent life supposed in fi and fc. But still...
Update: Let's hear what Carl Sagan has to say about it:
<<< Older Stuff Yo!
|
|
Total Posts: 667
This Year: 31
This Month: 0
This Week: 0
Comments: 0
Sign In
|