Tweets

    Picture of the eclipse on May 20, 2012 over China.

    alanfriedman:

    Firecrackler

    Meet solar active region 1476. It’s a corker and it’s rotating in our direction. Will it grow and send flares in our direction, or subside and shrink? When the clouds depart - hopefully by midweek, I’ll have another chance to look and shoot. In the meantime, keep an eye on Spaceweather.com. To be continued!

    Milky Way 

    “Vela, SNR 263.4-03.0, Betelgeuse, IRAS 05524+0723, Rigel, IRAS 05121-0815, Procyon, IRAS 07366+0520, Orion, M 42, NGC 1976, Messier 42, Sirius, IRAS 06429-1639, Canopus, IRAS 06228-5240, LMC, Large Magellanic Cloud, IRAS 05240-6948, Crux, IRAS 13085-6443, SCP, South Celestial Pole.”

    Hubble European Space Agency
    Credit: Akira Fujii
    [x]


    Get ready for the transit of Venus!

    “Scientists and amateur astronomers around the world are preparing to observe the rare occurrence of Venus crossing the face of the Sun on 5-6 June, an event that will not be seen again for over a hundred years.

    The occasion also celebrates the first transit while there is a spacecraft orbiting the planet – ESA’s Venus Express.
    ESA will be reporting live from the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, where the Venus Express science team will be discussing the latest scientific results from the mission while enjoying a unique view of the 2012 transit under the ’midnight Sun’.

    A transit of Venus occurs only when Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth. Since the orbital plane of Venus is not exactly aligned with that of Earth, transits occur very rarely, in pairs eight years apart but separated by more than a century.

    The last transit was enjoyed in June 2004 but the next will not be seen until 2117. ”

    Don’t forget to where protective eyeglasses! Get your telescopes & cameras ready, skywatchers! This will be a show you surely won’t want to miss. You can read more about this historical event here, here, here, here, and here.  You can read about and see images from the last transit of Venus in 2004 here.


    [For more information : http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMLSGZWD2H_index_0.html
     ]

    A comparison of Earth’s sun & Sirius A.

    [x]

    ikenbot:

    Scientists Flood NASA With 400 Ideas to Explore Red Planet

    Scientists have responded in a big way to NASA’s call to help reformulate its Mars robotic exploration strategy, submitting about 400 ideas and Red Planet mission concepts to the space agency.

    NASA’s Mars program suffered deep cuts in President Barack Obama’s proposed 2013 budget, which was released in February. In response, NASA pulled out of the European-led ExoMars mission, which aims to launch an orbiter and a rover to the Red Planet in 2016 and 2018, respectively.

    The agency also undertook a broad rethink of its Mars strategy, to figure out how best to explore the Red Planet with reduced funding. NASA asked the scientific community for ideas and was expecting to get about 200 proposals at its recent Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration Workshop in Houston, officials said.

    Instead, twice that many submissions poured in from individuals and teams that included professional researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, NASA centers, federal laboratories, industry and international partner organizations.

    Is it bad that when I just heard the news forecast about the tropical storm named Beryl, I automatically thought of Queen Beryl from Sailor Moon?

    jtotheizzoe:

    A Self-Portrait of Opportunity

    I want you to stop and think about something. This is a picture of another planet. Where this robot is. Right now.

    As we sit here on Earth in this or any moment, we each have in our heads a flurry of worries and questions and ideas. And most of them pertain to our own lives. That’s okay, it’s human nature. We are each the center of our own universe.

    I often think about this in crowded places, like while in traffic, as the place I’m going is far more important than the place all of these other people are going. I’m convinced that they feel the same way. And so we sit.

    But that means that there are seven billion mental universes walking around on this planet. We are staring into them through little digital windows that we carry in our hands, and certain that this decision is the most important decision. Everything that is happening is happening to us.

    Yet for the past eight years, there has been a dusty, six-wheeled rover crawling around the surface of Mars, completely alone. Incidentally, that rover has exceeded its expected mission of 90 days by thirty-two times over. That’s admirable, and I can’t help but personify the little guy. Like a sort of scrappy, diligent explorer, quietly working hard for the benefit of someone else. “No complaints, boss!” Like Johnny 5 meets Wall-E.

    And so we get images like this, reminding us that every day we can look beyond our personal universe. What a thought! Look at how much is out there. Think of what else we could see! Let’s go.

    skaterboytae:

    When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odor that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. This might seem a supreme final act of social responsibility. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid [a fairly complex molecule, CH3(CH2)7CH=CH(CH2)7COOH, where = stands for a double chemical bond]. 

    What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid?

    Then, no matter how strapping and vigorous it might be, it is carried “kicking and screaming” out of the hive. Even the Queen bee, if she’s painted with invisible amounts of oleic acid, will be subjected to this indignity.

    Do the bees understand the danger of corpses decomposing in the hive? Are they aware of the connection between death and oleic acid? Do they have any idea what death is? Do they think to check the oleic acid signal against other information, such as healty spontaneous movement? The answer to all these questions is, almost certainly, No. In the life of the hive there’s no way that a bee can give off detectable whiff of oleic acid other than by dying. Elaborate contemplative machinery is unnecessary. Their perceptions are adequate for their needs.

    Ann Druyan & Carl Sagan, Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors: Who Are We?, What Thin Partitions 


    Miami Police shoot naked man eating other naked mans face off in broad daylight near MacArthur Causeway.

    “One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp, police said.The bloodshed began about 2 p.m. when a series of gunshots were heard on the ramp, which is along NE 13th Street, just south of The Miami Herald building. Witnesses said a woman saw the two men fighting and flagged down a police officer who was in the area.


    The officer, who has not been identified, approached and saw that the naked man was actually chewing the other man’s head, according to witnesses. The officer ordered the naked man to back away, and when he continued the assault, the officer shot him. The attacker continued to eat the man, despite being shot, forcing the officer to continue firing. Witnesses said they heard at least a half dozen shots.”

    Some interesting events took place earlier this weekend, if you haven’t heard about it yet, feel free to read up!!

    You can read more here & here & here.

    Truth has many shades.
    It’s not a matter of black and white… but gray.
    Morgan Freeman - Bombs Away - B.O.B

    ikenbot:

    Space Shuttle Rising

    political-linguaphile:

    brosephstalin:

    By now you are probably well familiar with the concept of the urban heat island effect, even if you can’t quite pinpoint the physics at play when your sneaker sole melts a little on a hot black street in July. Asphalt is an awesome material for storing the sun’s heat. On a steamy summer day, the surface of a road may be as hot as 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And it’ll stay that miserable long after the sun sets, pushing up the temperature of whole neighborhoods covered in this blacktop.

    A lot of work has gone into figuring out how to combat the effect. We could plant more tree cover. We couldpaint black surfaces white. We could construct… artificial glaciers. But this idea might top them all: Why don’t we use that heat instead of fighting it?

    “The bottom line is that roads get hot in summertime, even springtime,” says Rajib Mallick, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “They have a large surface area, which is collecting solar energy. Why not use that solar energy for something? It’s free energy, and if you use it, at the same time you can lower the temperature of the pavement.”

    Mallick and other researchers have been developing a model that would harness the heat contained in asphalt and put it to productive uses. Asphalt, for instance, could heat water coursing through a series of pipes embedded in the road. And that process would both cool street surfaces and send their heat somewhere useful.

    (Read More)

    Very cool. Cheesy pun intended. 

    ikenbot:

    Particle Sizes in Saturn’s Rings

    In the above image, the color purple indicates regions populated predominantly by ring particles larger than 5 centimeters, while the color green indicates regions with a significant population of small ring particles less than even 1 centimeter.

    The white center of Saturn’s B-ring indicates that the density of ring particles was too high to make a good determination. Other radio observations indicate that some ring particles can be as large as several meters across. The impressive nature and clarity of the above sharp image may help determine clues about the origin of Saturn’s beautiful but enigmatic ring system.

    I’m assuming the London Olympics will have Quidditch.

    This is a safe assumption. 

    (Source: voldemortoutbitches)