Going to space..!!

...
Technology today continues to amaze.

I mean, when you or I or any group can (with enough planning and preparation) send a video camera into space and return it safely (hopefully..!!) to Earth ...well, what is not possible..?!?


Too cool.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Make sure you check the perpetrators homepage at Brooklyn Space Program dot org for more information and views of the flight.


Too cool . . .wait; I already said that.


...tom...

Pimping APOD again...

...

I have it blogrolled there at the left, I make a point of checking it daily, and I pimp it out here all too often.

But I love the science, the beauty, the value of the photographs published daily at Astronomy Picture of the Day. This link is a bit clunky when you go there. But it dumps you on the main page for checking out the various offerings of the site, ranging from pics of the Cosmos, the Solar System, Space Technology, and more.


Most visitors access the site from the 'picture of the day' page. For instance, yesterday's image page:





This particular picture appears, at first, to not meet the usual high quality of the daily APOD pictures.

Until you stop to realize that it is a picture of the International Space Station taken from Earth..!! Indeed, the living blue of planet Earth is reflected from some of the panels on the Station.

APOD has several/many links in each day's picture text and you can soon find yourself wandering around website, forgetting what you had planned to do online just then.


Anyway . . .just another roll out of APOD by this blogger. I can guarantee you there will be more.


...tom...
.

Quadrantid this..!!

...

While the Perseid and Leonid meteor showers seem to get all the publicity, there are a few others that make regular visits to North America.

One is the Quadrantid meteor shower that peaks in January. Somehow it does not seem especially enticing to be out in the elements in the middle of winter. But that does not stop some fools from staying up to nearly dawn and driving miles out into the frozen countryside to view a meteor shower in Iowa.

My daughter had seen an online article about the Quadrantid meteor showers that occurred last night and decided that she wanted to 'go see them'.

Okay . . ..

Image source: Spaceweather dot com

These showers are actually expected to be one of the best displays of this year, 2009. While some sources cite meteor rates of up to a hundred per hour for the Quadrantids, we saw nothing near that rate earlier this morning. Though we did see several that looked like this shot by another viewer of this morning's shower:

Image source: Jodie Reynolds via Spaceweather dot com

It was very peaceful out in the Iowa countryside, far away from the nearest farmstead or highway. That it was as cold as a walk-in refrigerator and the wind blew like a dervish was just a minor inconvenience.


So if you get a chance to go sit in the dark and cold with your daughter in the middle of winter ... go for it. What is the saying..?? Oh yeah . . .priceless..!!


...tom...

Too soon into the dark night...

...

One of my earliest posts here at 'Sleeping In the Heartland' noted the arrival on Mars of the Phoenix Lander.

Its five year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out ...

Wait, that is not right..!! I am getting real life and Trek fiction confused again...





The Phoenix Mars Mission was "... designed to study the history of water and the habitability potential in the Martian arctic's ice-rich soil." Check out the resource-rich Phoenix Mars Mission website to learn much, much more.



From its landing on May 25, the lander performed nearly flawlessly and met most of its scientific objectives. It returned over 25,000 photographs and other scientific data from tests on the surface of Mars. Its planned mission of 90 days stretched to just over 5 months. It was active for all but a few days with scientific investigations. Study of the photographs and data obtained is expected to continue for years.






There is a possibility that the lander may reactivate itself after a long Martian winter but it is believed to be unlikely.


Congratulations to all who designed, built, programmed, and conducted the Phoenix Lander Mission. Job well done.



...tom...
.

' Starstruck '

...
I have written before of my 'love' for Astronomy Picture of the Day.

The images they send to my inbox every day continually amaze me. Not to mention their years of archived photos, explanatory text, and abundant links to more photos and information within their domain and across the web. The site truly is 'most helpful'.



Today's image, for example, is a fantastic look at "47 Tuc: A Great Globular Cluster of Stars".

"...the dense cluster is made up of several million stars in a volume only about 120 light-years across." They also note the light we see in this image took 13,000 years to reach us. Several million stars clustered in an area incredibly small (relatively speaking..!!) far from us in the Universe.




A link in the text for today's picture leads to a broader view of this cluster 'near' the Small Cloud of Magellan. Of course, they are not really 'near' each other but appear so only in two dimensions, as we see them from Earth. The Small Cloud of Magellan is actually much farther distant from us.






Also a today's pic/page (first photo above) is a link to a picture and discussion of "exotic x-ray binary star systems" that are found in 47 Tuc










If you have a pair of eyeballs (or even one), the imagination to think beyond your immediate surroundings, and the curiosity to wonder what is 'out there' ...you will find much to educate and amaze you at Astronomy Picture of the Day.


...tom...
.

Hey, move over..!! You are blocking my light..!!

...

Link





...tom...
.

Get the Big Picture

...
The Big Picture blog has been getting mad crazy pub all over the Internet. So why should I not pimp it also..??

Boston dot com is the website of the The Boston Globe. Among the many blogs they host driven with specific area content is The Big Picture. With its first entry dated May 21, 2008 it is a brand new player in the world of presenting visual images to the world.


Blogger Alan Taylor has been active on the net for over ten years and has been a Web developerfor a diverse collection of websites. His personal blog at kokogiak dot com explores his personal history and the reasons behind the latest project of The Big Picture.

The sizes of the photographs are deliberately large - taking advantage of the majority of web users who have screens capable of displaying 1024x768 or larger. The long-held tradition of keeping images online tiny and lightweight is commendable still - when designing a general purpose site. But one dedicated to quality imagery should take full advantage of the medium, and I hope I've struck a good balance with The Big Picture.

With perhaps a dozen or so sets presented so far, it demonstrates a wide variety of lesser-known events in the news and a series of pictures and interwoven narrative about each event.

I am particularly impressed with the astronomy picture sets presented to date. A view of Cassini Spacecraft images (example here) of Saturn and another set of The Sky, from Above are both breathtaking.


If you want a nearly daily source of quality news-realted web images that use the full capabilities of your web access to display quality images, you have to check this blog site out.

Hat tip to: Photojojo
.

The Arrival on Mars of the Phoenix Lander...

...
Launched in August 2007, the Phoenix Lander is scheduled to land on the red planet on May 25, 2008.

Reborn from the ashes, like its namesake mythical creature, of the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander (mothballed earlier this decade) and the failed Mars Polar Lander of 1999, the Phoenix Lander is set to study the "history of water and the habitability potential in the Martian arctics ice-rich soil."



The problems faced by the Lander as it approaches Mars at a speed of 12,500 mph and after Seven Minutes of Terror has hopefully safely landed on the Martian surface are documented in the video at Space dot com.

As it takes ten minutes for signals to reach Earth from Mars ...and the whole landing sequence will be over in seven minutes . . .well, let us say there is not a lifeline back to Mother Earth.


Excellently produced and very informative, the video is well worth the five minutes spent watching and thinking.



For some reason, I am seriously geeked by this whole mission and the idea of finding water and perhaps the possibility of past life on Mars. I feel ten years old again and living, once again, at the crest of mankind reaching for the stars.