Another Kentucky aurora?

Image

Spaceweather.com announced this just a few minutes ago:

Active sunspot 1401 erupted today, Jan. 19th, for more than an hour around 16:00 UT. The long-duration blast produced an M3-class solar flare and a CME that appears to be heading toward Earth. Forecasters say strong geomagnetic storms are possible when the cloud arrives during the late hours of Jan. 21st. High-latitude (and possibly middle-latitude) sky watchers should be alert for auroras this weekend.

This is what happened here the last time this happened:

Comet Lovejoy resurrected

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Moonage

Remember sundiver? That was the comet on a suicide mission plummeting directly into the sun a couple of months ago.

Well, guess what?

It’s BACK!

Comet Lovejoy, aka Sundiver, actually didn’t plunge into the Sun, but apparently skimmed 140,000 miles behind the Sun. It has now re-emerged with a few parts missing. Notably, it no has a tail. Whether it grows back at some point or not remains to be seen.

Romulans invading Mercury!

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Moonage

This is just too cool. Jump straight to the 34 second mark.

That’s right. That’s what you saw. Romulans de-cloaking next to Mercury!

NASA has the usual cover-up, this time’s it’s some crazy far-fetched fantasy like an echo ( ghost ) image on the camera. That takes a lot to buy in order to believe. It’s just so much more obviously Romulans.

UPDATE:

Actually, upon closer examination:

It’s obviously the Enterprise.

Public Opinion View Results

Kepler 22-B

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Moonage

Now we’re getting somewhere.

This artist’s conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. It is the first planet that NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed to orbit in a star’s habitable zone — the region around a star where liquid water, a requirement for life on Earth, could persist. The planet is 2.4 times the size of Earth, making it the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star like our sun.

Finding not-quite suns was pretty cool, but fairly meaningless. Now we’re looking where things should be living. Only problem of course is what we’re looking at is something that existed 600 years ago. Now if we could just over that pesky traveling at the speed of light problem we’d be rockin!

Time Lapse View from Space from ISS

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Moonage

This is just too cool. Makes me want to spend a few days on the International Space Station.

Who says there’s no such thing as magic?

Here comes ROSAT!

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Moonage

Remember everyone freaking out over UARS? It wasn’t that long ago. In fact, it was about a month ago. Well guess what?

This guy’s coming home next week. The difference between ROSAT and UARS is ROSAT’s a LOT sturdier than UARS was. When this one comes down, that entire dish is supposedly going to be intact. It’s made out of gold and some stuff that doesn’t melt until about 1100 degrees. It just won’t get that hot coming down. There’s another big difference between the two as well. UARS’s path was mostly over the Pacific and some pretty remote and isolated areas of the planet such as Siberia and Africa. It spent very brief periods of time over some populated areas. The path for ROSAT is a little different:

ROSAT will be flying over the US, South America, Indonesia, and some pretty crowded places.

One thing that will be the same as UARS tho, they won’t have a clue when it’s coming down until about one day in advance. That of course tells you where it’s coming down.

As with that last one, just keep your head up next week!

We really, really, need to figure what to do with all this space junk.

If you really want to watch ROSAT in motion, this is a really cool page that has a “real-time” map of ROSAT’s orbit.

Public Opinion View Results

Elenin’s BACK!

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Moonage

Remember the end of the world scare over an otherwise unknown comet that apparently was going to strike Earth? Just the mere presence of Elenin was going to cause earthquakes all over the planet. Eventually, ripping it to shreds.

Don’t remember? Doesn’t surprise me. A lot of people apparently forgot the date it was supposed to happen.

That was going to start happening in July, 2011. The end of the world as we knew it would occur………

Around October 16, 2011. That’s when Earth will enter the debris of what was comet Elenin.

Scared yet?

Me neither. Space.com was rather remiss in reminding everyone the end of the world would occur yesterday.

Oh well.

Keep your head up this weekend!

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Moonage

On September 12, 1991, the Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite was launched. Almost 20 years later to the day, it’s expected to return . No big deal you say?

It’s the size of your average school bus.

Granted all of it won’t make it to Earth, what does will be several hundred pounds most likely. And,

It’s going to traverse some pretty popular areas.

Guess this is a good time do rehash my space junk rants?

The irony is someone might very get killed by a satellite designed to research man’s damage to the environment.

Voyager 1′s Great Escape

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Moonage

A fantastic article on one of my all time favorite NASA missions:

Launched two weeks after its sister spacecraft, Voyager 1 lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s SLC-41 at 08:56.00 EDT on 5 September 1977 on a Titan III-E Centaur rocket.

Three months and five days later, on December 10, 1977, Voyager 1 entered the Asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Mars.

And lasting till:

However, in an effort to gain more information on this phenomenon, Voyager 1 conducted a test roll on March 8, 2011 to change its orientation in order to better detect the current direction of the solar wind.

For this maneuver, Voyager 1 rotated 70 degrees counterclockwise with respect to Earth. This was the first maneuver of the spacecraft since it took the family portrait in 1990.

What most people don’t think about is the fact that Voyager 1 is STILL a mission, thirty-four years after its launch. It’s mission, to boldly go where no man has gone before, is expected to last until sometime between 2025 to 2030, or whenever its power runs out.

And, according to one source, 2030 might not even be the end.

Marooned

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Moonage

This weekend we went to see Apollo 18. It was a really bad scared-in-space movie. I felt cheated.

So, I looked up an old movie I hadn’t seen since probably 1969 or so that did it right.

Marooned was a an amazing movie considering what it had to work with. CGI didn’t exist. It has the usual sci-fi errata, but not so much to totally distract from the movie. It has an 1968 all-star line-up. It even has the approval from NASA to use their trademarks. It is very well acted and features a lot of the technology of the time. You get to see Atlas rockets, Saturn V’s, a Russian Soyuz, weather satellites, etc. The concept of the movie affected some space flights ( notably Skylab ), and eerily preceded the events of Apollo 13 by a year. It was a damn good sci-fi flick.

Just a subtle reminder, all thumbs up, WATCH THIS MOVIE!

Performance Optimization WordPress Plugins by W3 EDGE

Moonage Spacedream

It's full of stars