ISON: Alive, Dead, or Playing Hookie?

ISON update 11/28/13 6:30PM EST.

Well, well, well. After making about a bajillion posts on Facebook about ISON, the long 50 million year journey from Mr. Oort'd Cloud, its perilous and much watched advance toward the Sun, its perihelion journey, and its apparent death, it now looks like some of it may have lived! Damn comets!

Above image is compliments of SolarHam.com. It shows what MIGHT be a small bit of ISON still traveling in the trajectory it was heading in hours ago. Reports from ESA, European Space Agancy, via CNN claim this is nothing more than some of the original tail of ISON, but the nucleus (solid part) is gone.

Stay tuned, this may be the Little Comet That Could.

Comet ISON Update 11/28/2013

I've been busy running a few online things about ISON, including a TV appearance on WTNH Ch8 show called CT Style, and have neglected my own blog... A few online updates at WXEdge.com:

1. 09/16 Tracking Comet ISON (Interview with Meteorologist Erika Martin)
2. 10/18 ISON Coming Into View (Interview with Meteorologist Erika Martin)
3. ISON Comes Alive

Here's a few updates on ISON! It's looking GOOD!

Both above images compliments of NASA's SOHO.

In the last few days, NASA and the proverbial ton of amateur astronomers have been keeping their collective eyes on ISON as it makes its “death” plunge toward the Sun. The above images are stills from a sequence of 97 shots taken by NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) yesterday and today (Wed & Thurs). Note a few things:

1. ISON brightens drastically overnight! This is great news! It means the Sun is blowing off gases by sublimating ice and not just making ISON fall apart by shedding dirt and rocks. The indication here is that ISON is still intact and MAY make it all the way. He says with fingers crossed…
2. ISON’s double tail is evident! The brighter “upper” tail is dirt & dust falling off after the ice holding it in place is gone. The longer fainter tail is the ion tail caused by solar winds (high energy protons & electrons) smacking into the gases surrounding the comet, knocking electrons off these atoms, then as the electrons scramble to reform with these now positively charged gas molecules, they emit light by dropping back to their ground state.
3. In both images, solar CME’s are evident. In the first image, you can clearly see a Coronal Mass Ejection expanding downward. In the 2nd image, one is seen heading toward the seven o’clock position. Had one of these smacked ISON directly, it may have spelled an early doom.

This image is a composite of three observatories.

According to Dr. Phil Plait at BadAstronomy.com (personal friend and hero):

The picture above is a combination of three different views from space-based solar observatories taken at 16:45 UTC (11:45 EST) today [Wednesday 11/27/2013]. I’ll explain, but the important thing to note is that ISON looks intact, despite earlier worries, and is poised to put on quite a show. In the picture, the inner (orangish) circle is the disk of the Sun seen by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, observed in the far ultraviolet. It’s there to give you a sense of scale; mind you, the Sun is about 1.4 million km (860,000 miles) across. The red ring is from the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, showing the space directly around the Sun. The streamers are from the solar wind, subatomic particles flung out by the Sun’s fierce magnetic field. The blue is also from SOHO, but shows a much larger area around the Sun (the black line to the upper right is an arm that holds a disk of metal used to block out the direct light from the Sun, allowing fainter objects to be seen).

Above image compliments of Damian Peach (UK Astrophotographer) & SpaceWeather.com

Want to watch ISON live today as it makes the perihelion trip? NASA is running a live Google+ hangout with real honest-ta-goodness scientists and live telescope views from around the world and space. Again, according to Phil Plait:

But you can watch the whole thing live, with me, and a pile of NASA scientists on Google+! NASA is holding a live video Hangout on G+ during ISON’s perihelion passage (peri = close, helion = Sun, so perihelion is the closest point in an object’s orbit to the Sun). The event is from 18:00 – 20:30 UTC (1:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST). There will be live feed from NASA’s SOHO Sun-observing satellite (that should be spectacular) and from the Kitt Peak Observatory solar telescope. Guests include astronomers C. Alex Young, W. Dean Pesnell, Karl Battams (who runs theSunGrazingComets feed on Twitter), and me! I’ll be on from 1:30 – 2:30 EST to talk about the comet, the Sun, and what we’ll be seeing on the screen. We’ll also be answering questions live from Twitter; ask away using the hashtags#ISON and #askNASA.

Absolutely Incredible Video of an EXPLODING Perseid Meteor!

Via Universe Today,

Personally, I’ve never seen anything like this, and photographer and digital artist Michael K. Chung said he couldn’t believe what he saw when he was processing images he took for a timelapse of the Perseid meteor shower. It appears he captured a meteor explosion and the resulting expansion of a shock wave or debris ring. “It was taken early in the morning on August 12, 2013 from my backyard in Victorville, CA,” Michael told Universe Today via email. “The fade to white is NOT an edit- it is overexposure due to the sun coming up. From what I can tell, the timelapse sequence of the explosion and expanding debris span an actual time of approximately 20 minutes.”
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/104149/incredible-footage-shows-a-perseid-meteor-exploding/#ixzz2cJjb6qkc

Russian Meteor Impacts CONFIRMED!

This is a startling reminder that "Space Is a Dangerous Place"!

Image: RM-Crater Image Credit: RT ] Photo courtesy of the press service of the Interior Ministry's Main Directorate for the Chelyabinsk Region.(RIA Novosti)

News just broke from RT Online (http://rt.com/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/ ) that three distinct impact sites have been located! Two are in a frozen lake (images on next slides) and one in a near-by town. I quote RT: "Army units found three meteorite debris impact sites, two of which are in an area near Chebarkul Lake, west of Chelyabinsk. The third site was found some 80 kilometers further to the northwest, near the town of Zlatoust. One of the fragments that struck near Chebarkul left a crater six meters in diameter.”

Above image is a confirmed meteorite strike. This is, according to the Russian Interior Miisistry, the hole bored into a frozen lake just out of town. Small black “fragments” measuring 1-cm of “black matter”, not to be confused with Dark Matter, were found spread around the impact site. There is apparently another hole in the ice of the same lake and one small crater found 80-km northwest of Chebarkul. This is too cool! Reports also state that a zinc factory in town was struck by a fragment and collapsed. Images are not conclusive and investigators are searching the rubble as I type.

Before you buy into most of the media hype/errors, here is what we know at this point about the Russian Meteor of 02/15/2013.

[IMAGE: Dashcam image from Universe Today Online] First, the words. A meteoroid is a small-ish rock that happens to be “floating” around in space. They are all over the solar system; floating around like a huge swarm of gnats. Most are sand-grain to large boulder sized rocks. During a typical meteor shower, as I wrote about the December 2012 Geminids extensively, are just “clouds” of sand-grain sized pieces of dirt and ice left over from comet passes.

However, some meteoroids, like this one, are large. Not nearly as large as the asteroid 2012 DA14 that will pass close to the earth later today. As I also wrote about this asteroid previously, 2012 DA14 is about 50 meters wide and ‘weighs’ in at a staggering 190,000 metric tons (tonnes)! If an asteroid this size hits the earth, it would more than ruin your day… This Russian meteoroid is estimated at 8 tonnes. Most if it burned up in the atmosphere as witnessed in the above image from Universe Today. Note the “split trail”. This indicates the meteoroid broke into at least two pieces then further disintegrated from there.

The telltale light trail left behind by a meteoroid streaking through the atmosphere is called a meteor. This is what is commonly and erroneously referred to as a “shooting” or “falling star”. These have nothing to do with stars. Nothing.

If this meteoroid survives the trip through the atmosphere and lands on the surface, it is then called a meteorite. Rest assured, there will be troops of meteor hunters scouring the Russian landscape searching for surviving meteorites.

In fact, as I type this, news just broke from RT Online that three distinct impact sites have been located! Two are in a frozen lake (images on next slides) and one in a near-by town. I quote RT: Army units found three meteorite debris impact sites, two of which are in an area near Chebarkul Lake, west of Chelyabinsk. The third site was found some 80 kilometers further to the northwest, near the town of Zlatoust. One of the fragments that struck near Chebarkul left a crater six meters in diameter.”

Image : Factory RT http://rt.com/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/ ]

The above is an amateur shot of the zinc factory downtown that media, particularly FOX, is claiming got hit by the meteorite. NOT CONFIRMED! It is more likely the building was damaged by the huge shock wave (sonic boom) from the passage of the meteor as seen in so many other videos online. YouTube is full of videos showing windows and doors and even garage doors being blown out from the sonic boom.

Meteor streak as seen from Weather satellite Meteosat 10 has taken an image of the meteorite shortly after entering the atmosphere.(Copyright 2013 © EUMETSAT)

So, stay tuned! This should be interesting!

Utterly Painful Ignorance on Display on ABC News!

[NOTE: Following is an updated edited version of my original post. The original post about this incident was written in my typical venomous no-holds-barred antagonistic tactless verbiage. Since then, I have gained a scientific respect for Erica Martin and am quite confident this was an inadvertent mistake that we all make from time to time.]

Well, now. The above image is a smartphone picture taken from my own living room TV while I was choking on a hunk of Birthday pizza 09/10/2012. I thought I heard wrong; a simple slip of the tongue, so to speak... But, NOOO!!!! Erika Martin, Meteorologist for Ch8 WTNH in CT, read this graphic.

It is wrong on so many levels, I can't begin to get my panties unbunched.

So, what's wrong with the info? Let's take a cursory look

1. The name, 2012 QG42, is correct.
2. 800 Miles wide? OMG! LOL! WTH! And other choice TLAs! Where the Hell did this thing come from? The largest asteroid in our entire solar system is Ceres at a meager 950 km (590 miles) wide.
FACT: 2012 QG42 is estimated at 800 FEET across! She is off by a factor of 5,280! Could be a graphics error.

The above image, compliments Wiki, shows, left to right, Vesta, Ceres, and our moon.

3. It is coming to within "1.8x10^-5 Miles"!! Like I said earlier; OMG, LOL, WTH! Quick conversions from scientific notation, moving the decimal point 5 places to the left gets us 0.000018 miles! That's 0.09 feet! 1.1 INCHES!!! THIS 800 MILE WIDE HUNK OF ROCK IS COMING WITHIN 1 INCH OF THE EARTH! WE"RE ALL DEAD! Run, Flee!
FACT: Closest approach is 1.8 MILLION Miles. Off by a magnitude of 11. You can't tell me that an ABC affiliate can't afford a text function that does superscripts! That number should read: 1.8 x 10⁶ miles.

4. Telescope needed. Yeah, right... According to Sky and Telescope Magazine's Tony Flanders, "Locating this asteroid won’t be easy; it requires excellent chart-reading skills and planetarium software capable of showing stars down to magnitude 14.5."
FACT: I have a 10" Orion Dobsonian. I'd never be able to see it with my meager object-finding skills. WTNH, however, stated that, "Backyard astronomers will be able to see it whiz by Thursday night." "Whiz by"? Hardly. According to Tony Flanders, it is moving one arcsecond per clock second. Only trained folks watching it for extended lengths of time will see it move...

sigh...

Yet Another "Earth-Like" Planet Found... Yawn....

COOL, TOO KEWL! Earth-like planet found that MAY have been a larger hunk of rock that split up after an ugly encounter with it's star! As my Super-Hero colleague and close personal friend, The Tick, said, "Gravity is a harsh mistress..."

See: SPACE.COM for more info...

I'm still wrapping my head around CT Gov Malloy repealing the death penalty even though 67% of CT folks said it (repeal) was a bad thing... Sigh... Just when did our "representatives" become less than that...

SUPERMOON Going To Kill Us All This Weekend! AAARRRGGGHHH!

Seems there are plenty of reasons to believe that our own moon is going to [A] crash into us, or [B] cause severe tides so that Denver becomes beachfront property, or [C] get so close as to pull us off the surface of the earth and fling us all into outer space where we will all explode in a horrible frozen bloody death. Those reasons, in order, are [A] stupid people on the internet or [B] stupid people who read stupid things on the internet written by aforementioned stupid people on the internet or [C] stupid people who run blogs who report on stupid stories about stupid people who read stupid things on the internet written by aforementioned stupid people on the internet or, lastly, [D] folks who have previously claimed to have been abducted by aliens, probed in unspeakable ways, then returned to their loved ones to rattle on and on about being probed in unspeakable ways.

Compliments SPACE.COM

Now, as anyone who has ever paid attention to this hysteric type of thing, I can say demonstratively and succinctly that the moon is not, let me repeat, NOT going to kill us this weekend. Nor, is it going to drown, smite, set on fire, collide, send locusts or otherwise spell doom for mankind as set forth by the stupid "2012" subscribers. I much prefer to follow the Armageddon-ish view where Bruce Willis will save us from certain death from a rogue comet originating iron-core asteroid the size of Texas that no one saw till it was too late. [Soliloquy: I'm relatively confident I'd be able to scream to my neighbors, whom I hold no love for, "Look! Here comes Texas!" a few days before Micheal Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer decided the world need to see it...] Anyway, I digress... Which is not a bad thing...

Anyway, the Moon is at Perihelion this weekend, the closest approach to the Earth in it's sorta wide elliptical orbit. So, yeah. It's larger than normal. DURING THE MONTH! The last time it was this "large: was May 2011! OMG! That was before I was born! Wait... Maybe not...

Take a look:

Compliments APOD.com

So, yeah, duh.

OMG: Oh My Geosynchronous !

Check out this video from APOD! It shows a line of geosynchronous satellites as the distant stars "fly" by. These satellites must remain stationary relative to the earth's surface, so have a period of 24 hrs. SO COOL!

Geostationary satellites in the Swiss Alps from Michael Kunze on Vimeo.

Feel free to embiggenate for better viewing!

Planets Putting On a Show This Month!!

Howdy! If you are even vaguely interested in viewing stars and planets and aliens, this is your month. The Giants Jupiter and Saturn are hanging out most of the night while all the little 'uns - Mars, Venus, & Mercury - are competing for your attention.

Image from Space.com

Let's start with the Little 'uns. Tonight, coincidentally, Mars is in what astronomers like to call "opposition". This doesn't mean it opposes us. It's simply that we are both on the same side of the sun and all lined up. Can you say, "Mayan disaster 2012"? I knew you could. Also, Mars is at it's closest approach to earth in it's 26 month orbit at about 63 Million miles away. This puts Mars prominently on any astronomer's list of "Things To See in March". And if you have a really good telescope, you might even see John Carter fighting 6-legged giant white gorillas in a Martian arena... Maybe not...

As for Mercury, well! This little elusive guy can't be seen very often due to its close proximity to that Million mile wide ball of fire in the sky. However, tonight, again coincidentally, Mercury makes its highest appearance in the western sky just after sunset. Find Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest things you can see right now other than the sun. Mercury is right beneath them, closer to the horizon.

Image from Space.com

The other Little Guy, Venus, is strutting her stuff as usual. Venus is lined up for the next several days with Jupiter. Both are big and bright and not necessarily in the heart of Texas. See image above.

Image via APOD.com

Meanwhile, Saturn, the King of the Rings, not to be confused with the Lord of the Rings, should be giving telescope and good binocular viewers a ring show the rest of the month.

Top-Notch Meteor Shower This Week!

Courtesy Sky & Telescope Magazine Online

Bundle up warmly and head on outside between 1AM and 5AM Wednesday January 04 2012! The annual Quadratid Meteor shower promises to be a great show this year. This shower, although much briefer than some of its more famous cousins like the Leonids and Perceids, this one is bold and loud. Predictions range from 60 to 200 meteor streaks per hour during peak. Even the average of 120/hr yields a breathtraking 2 streaks per minute! WOWZERS!

Here are a few factoids and tips for watching:
1. BUNDLE UP! According to AccuWeather.com, Tuesday night/Wednesday morning is going to be bone-chillingly cold! Low temps are to be around 13^oF. However, Weather.org claims it'll be serious Three Dog Night at only 9^oF! Yes, that's cold enough to freeze your coffee and your little toes. So, be prepared! Lots of proverbial layers and a few "heat packs" wouldn't hurt.
2. The peak hour is expected to be 2-3AM. However, the waxing gibbous moon (what the heck is it waxing?) won't set till right around 3AM. The Moon's light will inhibit some viewing in areas where optimal conditions (See #3) don't exist.
3. Optimal Viewing? Find a spot away from bright lights. The darker the area, the better. Make it a family adventure. Pack a warm drink and several dozen good buffalo wings and head out to a park or secluded area.
4. The shower’s radiant (its apparent perspective point of origin) is in the not-well-known constellation Quadrans Muralis about halfway from the end of the Big Dipper handle to the head of Draco, as shown above. Quadrans Muralis is not one of the "modern" 88 constellations recognized by the IUA; it's an older However, if you aren't in my Astrology class, who'd know where the heck Draco is? So, I look for both Dippers; Big and Little. Make an imaginary line between them and then complete an imaginary equilateral triangle downwards so the third vertx is UNDER the Dippers. That 3^rd vertex is the radiant. It’s fairly high up in the northeast after about 1 AM local time and keeps rising higher until dawn. The higher a shower’s radiant, the more meteors appear all over the sky. Watch whatever part of your sky is darkest, probably straight up.
5. The Quads are the result of an asteroid, not specifically from a comet like most other showers; Asteroid 2003 EH1.

So, bundle up and lead out to a dark place and have some fun with this! Next major metweor shower isn't till April's Lyrids.

Earth's Twin Found?

This news from NASA' Kepler Planet-finding Mission: Kepler Mission has confirmed the existence of an "earth-like" planet in our Galactic Backyard. This is just one of many possible planets they have found within the "habitable zone," or "Goldilocks Zone", the region around a star where liquid water could easily exist on a rocky planet's surface. Kepler has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling the previously known count. Ten of these candidates are "near-Earth-size" and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets and not just balls of gas or dwarfs.

According to Science News 12/05/2011 ; "The newly confirmed planet, Kepler-22b, is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don't yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets. Kepler-22b is located 600 light-years away. While the planet is larger than Earth, its orbit of 290 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our world. The planet's host star belongs to the same class as our sun, called G-type, although it is slightly smaller and cooler."

So, it seems less and less likely every day that we are alone in this hugely huge vastly vast Universe...

Weekend Meteor Shower!

Not a major deal, but a nice little meteor shower is happening right now. This is the annual Orionids shower. It occurs when the earth passes through the trail of debris and particles left behind by Halley's Comet. Yes, THAT Halley's Comet. It's not a major shower like the earlier Perseids, but at an estimated 15 visible meteors per hour, it's worth a look-see.

So, head on out and look for Orion. That's where the earth is headed toward and it looks like all the meteors are coming from that direction, hence the name Orionids. Have patience. I took a look last night around 2AM and waited a good 30 minutes before seeing my 1st one, but then BAM! Saw about 10 within a few minutes; one was big enough to leave a visible smoke trail behind that lingered for a few moments.

See NASA's Science News site for more info.

Visible Supernova in our Galactic Backyard!

Seems on Aug 25, a new supernova popped out in the Pinwheel Galaxy; a mere 21 Million light years away. Some techno-nerd info is at Astronomy Now Online, but a more down-to-earth layman explanation can be had at Science News.
With a good pair of binoculars or any size telescope, you can see it yourself! It's http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifjust above the handle of the Big Dipper. A boring, yet informative, video of where http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifto look is at Berkeley Labs .

Abstruse Goose!

Great online usually science-based comic. Here's an example.



Click comic to embiggenate and link to website...

AMATEUR Astronomer Finds Really Cool Nebula!

I saw this image of a newly discovered nebula a week or so ago. What I didn't know was that it was discovered back in January by an AMATEUR, not a PRO! That is SO KEWL!

According to Space.com and Sky & Telescope Mag, this "Soccer Ball" nebula "Kronberger 61, 'Kn 61' for short, is named after its discoverer, Austrian amateur astronomer Matthias Kronberger, who found the object after poring over data provided by the Digital Sky Survey. Kronberger and other amateur skywatchers were encouraged by professional astronomers to look specifically in the star field covered by Kepler [NASA's planet-seeking satellite]." It was found near Cygnus, The Swan, if that's interesting to you.

Ain't Astronomy grand!