Unstructured Lunar Eclipse

If you're willing to stay up late, and you're at a good longitude, you can see a lunar eclipse tonight. Details here.

Still no word on the next time there's going to be a total eclipse of the heart.

Unstructured Constellations

I grew up in the suburbs which is to say that I knew that there were stars in the sky, but they were never very bright. On those infrequent occasions where I got to sleep under a real night sky, I have always been amazed at how many stars there are to see.

The Night Sky is a neat, little instructional site that covers the basics of finding constellations. By the end of it, you'll be able to identify the constellations Orion, the Big Dipper, and Cassiopeia, as well as the particular stars Betelgeuse and Polaris (from which you can derive north).

Unstructured Astronomy

Poets and romantics have long lamented that science destroys our sense of wonder leaving us only the cold realities of a bleak universe. That's what Keats was going on about when he complained about Newton unweaving the rainbow.

I've always had a hard time understanding this point of view. In my experience, science reveals the universe and what it finds is a place of unexpected and surprising beauty, albeit one that doesn't always conform to human expectations.

The latest installment of this phenomenon is the discovery that when stars fade away into white dwarfs (which is the common end for the vast majority of stars in the universe) what is left at the end is a gigantic diamond.

For a long time white dwarfs were viewed as being nothing more than the degenerate remnants of once magnificent stars -- little more than cosmic husks. The notion that the final stage of a stars life is something as exquisite and beautiful as a diamond is actually rather romantic.

Unstructured Scale

Every so often, it helps to have a little perspective.

New Horizons Web Site

Well, I haven't posted anything for awhile and I wanted to assure everyone that all is well. Work has, again, been eating into my time and energy (that and I'm still passing that damned kidney stone -- urologist appointment on the first).

In the meanwhile, I thought I'd post a quick link to the New Horizons page. Be assured, this isn't a link to some sort of new-agey self-improvement thing; it's the site of the new Pluto-Kuiper mission, which is launching today. Pluto, as you may know, is the last of the planets (or the first of the ice dwarves, depending on your definitions) to be explored. It'll take nine years for the probe to reach it and, honestly, I can hardly wait to see what they'll find.

A Unique Day

Today is a unique day. For the first time in our history, humanity, via our robotic proxy, is touching a fresh world for the very first time. As I type this, the news is reporting that the Huygens space probe is descending through the atmosphere of Titan.

A century ago, man was barely taking to the air in rickets craft whose sustained flight time was measured in minutes. Now we are confidently sending sophisticated probes to the outer planets.

As I wrote in my ratfish blurb, we are, indeed, in the midst of a new era of discovery. In spite of all the turmoils and controversies that have beset us in this new century, it is still an exciting time to be alive.

If you are reading this from the norther hemisphere, Saturn should be visible in your night sky (in fact it's especially bright given that it's nearest approach to Earth was yesterday). If you can, I would suggest sparing a moment, tonight, to look up at it and to contemplate the fact that we are, at this moment, doing amazing things there.

Unstructured Asteroids

One of the catastrophes that really captures my imagination is a giant asteroid or comet strike such as the one that apparently wiped out the dinosaurs. I've often wondered what such an impact would do if it happened now. Alas, I've never been good with doing complex calculations. Now, thanks to the Earth Impact Effects Program calculator, it's simplicity itself.

By plugging in some simple numbers, for instance, I know that if a 7 mile wide iron metorite were to strike Salt Lake City, then over here, in Colorado Springs, I would likely suffer third degree burns, get tossed around by an earthquake strong enough to move heavy furniture, get pelted with burning rocks up to two and a half feet thick, and be blown away by a 665 mile per hour wind. It's a good thing that I have Apocalypse insurance.

Probe

It's has been less than 400 years since Galileo Galilei first glimpsed Saturn's rings (although it took another forty years to determine that they were rings). Before than, Saturn was just a bright, wandering spot in the sky with various mythological associations.

In that immensely brief time we've gone from looking up at it to actually visiting it. Of all the recent achievements of humanity, I am perhaps most astonished that we've gone from Leonardo Da Vinci's hopeful drawings of flying machines all the way to sending sophisticated probes on multi-billion kilometer journies with pin-point accuracy to the far planets of our solar system.

At the moment, the Cassini-Huygens space probe (named after Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens) is currently approaching the Saturnian system. NASA has a page dedicated to this with current photos and data. In particular, be sure to visit the image gallery for the latest images from the mission.

Be advised, it may take awhile for the mission pages to load. They're getting a lot of hits, right now. It's worth the wait, though.