Hang in there, Space Coasters.

In which I see the most awesome thing ever.

Friday night, I met up with some friends at Millennium "We weren't 4 years late, we were 996 years early" Park to hear my friend Michelle and the rest of the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra and Chorus sing the final concert of the free GPSO Summer Concert Series.
The concert didn't start until 8:30 PM, because the Chicago Air and Water Show was going on, and I guess the GPSO wanted to ensure that they wouldn't be drowned out by FA-18s.
There was a fireworks show at 9, but we didn't even hear it from MP.
So the evening was wonderful and we were enjoying everything, when suddenly:

The sky started falling.

I was sitting on the western edge of MP, so the Aon Center (the 3rd tallest building in Chicago) was just east of my northern view, then a space of maybe 3" if you held up your fingers to measure, then more buildings.

There was no air traffic at this point. A very, very bright UFO (unidentified falling object) was suddenly visible. We first noticed it at about 1000' altitude, and watched it fall all the way to about 400'. Then it disappeared behind the buildings.
Towards the end, it appeared to split into two pieces.

We were amazed, and didn't know what to make of it. It was so close, so beautiful.
Everyone in our immediate area was stunned.

About 2 to 2 1/2 minutes later, it happened again, but this time, it was three smaller pieces falling at the same rate, at the same angle. Again, we were stunned.

Then about 5 minutes later, it happened for the last time - same sort of thing, but toward the end it appeared to zigzag a bit.

Then, my husband thought, "Oh, maybe it's skydivers with magnesium flares!"
I replied that if that was the AWS's skydiving show, it sucked. It was totally random, no rhyme or reason.

I talked to other Chicagoans the next day who had been in the same area. They said, "Ohhhh, did you see the end of the Air Show?! Wasn't it cool?"

Now, keep in mind, this happened at about 10PM, long after the Air Show ended.

So I told them, "That couldn't have been the Air Show. It was too late, and it was too random."
Skydiving is a very precise, very orchestrated "show", particularly when they dive at night with flares. The only way this meteor-shower nut can describe it? It looked like the coolest falling stars you've ever seen, but it definitely looked like falling stars.

The next day, Tom Skilling from WGN (incidentally, the nation's HIGHEST-PAID weatherman, period) reported that the Perseids were still falling and very visible in Chicago's skies.
He did NOT, however, mention this event, just that many people were still seeing meteorites.

My opinion? So many people (like my friends at work) saw it and thought, "That's the Air Show", even though it happened an hour after the show ended.
The rest of the people? Maybe they thought, "Oh, that's pretty cool" and then went back to talking about Lindsay Lohan being gay.

I wish someone who knows about these things and maybe saw it (HELLO, ADLER!) would comment on it.

UPDATE: I found one mention of a woman seeing four shootings stars over the Lake.
(FYI, if you are sitting on the west edge of Millennium Park looking due North, you are actually looking straight towards Lake Michigan. The shoreline curves (think the S-curve on Lake Shore Drive near the Drake Hotel), so the ones she saw could have certainly been the ones I saw.)

Launch of Soyuz TM-24

[Above: Валерий Григорьевич Корзун]

This date in 1996, Soyuz TM-24 launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome enroute to Fred Sanford's salvage yard Russian space station Mir.
Onboard were Aleksandr Kaleri and one of my very favorite cosmonauts space travelers of any country ever, Valeriy Korzun.

Mir EO-22 would become one of the most dangerous famous expeditions, giving us fun times like the Great Space Fire of '96, during which Valeriy's hands were badly burned had absolutely nothing of consequence happen to them, and the Great Human Waste Container Crisis of '96, during which the crew had to "improvise" storage for their space pee and space poo. Nice.
Korzun spent tons of time talking to amateur radio enthusiasts around the globe; he was really into this hobby. If it had been me, every single transmission I made would have been, "Get me off this piece of shit NOW."
But by all accounts, Korzun is good-natured and patient and professional and has a much less vulgar mouth than I do, so he kept a sunny outlook and a stiff upper lip and just talked about fun space stuff with average Joes around the world.

Undeterred by EO-22's mishaps and by TsUP's blaming of crisis after crisis on the cosmonauts, Valeriy went on to fly on STS-111 and was a crewman of ISS Expedition 5.

Valeriy Korzun is freaking awesome, and if I had the chance to meet one single cosmonaut, he'd be it.

An oldie but a goodie from The Onion.

"Mischievous Raccoon Wreaks Havoc on International Space Station"

A few select quotes:

• Padalka said he was startled to find the stowaway nesting in the centrifuge accomodation module and Fincke said that the mischievous animal scurried underfoot as he was replacing a failed remote power controller module on a recent spacewalk and knocked him into a weightless spin.

• When Padalka opened his locker last week and found an orbiting thundercloud of rumpled wrappers in place of his private supply of Snickers bars, Fincke laughed so hard he spit out the pouch of water he'd been drinking. However, Fincke was not the one laughing when he spotted the playful creature running off wearing his spare Orlan-M spacesuit helmet. But both astronauts could enjoy seeing the bewildered raccoon scrambling to keep up with the zero-gravity treadmill, after having apparently triggered its "quick-start" switch.
  "You have to give it to the little guy, he's persistent," said Fincke, who, while calibrating the ISS telescope last week, had a rare opportunity to view the raccoon up close, when its masked, bewhiskered face stared back at him through the telescope's other end.

• Although NASA has been unable to determine how the animal got on board, lab analysis of the beast's droppings suggests that it's the same raccoon that caused hell and tarnation on the ISS during Expedition 7 in 2003. While none of the previous crew's members would admit to feeding the raccoon—which would explain its return—many expressed affection for the animal.
  "I call raccoon Kosmo-Rascal, after favorite children's book," Expedition 7 Commander Yuri Malenchenko said. "If we caught him, I think we might have used him in benign experiment, maybe about training to do tricks. Is true nobody wants air filter clogged with nutshells, but nobody wants raccoon hurt, either. So?"

• But we aboard ISS Expedition 9 haven't met a problem too big for us yet, and we'll work this raccoon thing out sooner or later. Hopefully, before the clever little dickens figures out how to work the airlocks."

Seriously?

The guy that interviewed Greg Chamitoff from KRI-TV in Corpus Christi was hands-down the worst interviewer I have ever heard.
The questions sucked, he sucked, and it's five minutes I'll never get back.
Poor Greg Chamitoff made a valiant effort to answer what amounted to ridiculous, repetitive questions, but even he couldn't save this doofus.

Can't Mission Control screen these questions before they're asked?

"Sorry, sir, that's a dumb question. You'll have to come up with something else or you won't be able to conduct the interview."

And another thing: if you get the honor of interviewing the ISS crew, you probably should do your research so you don't have to waste your time or theirs with questions like, "How long have you been up there?" and "Have you done a spacewalk yet?" and "Is this your first spaceflight?"
(NOTE: These are NOT the questions the guy from KRI asked. These questions are genius compared to his blather.)

Why would you waste one whole precious question on, "How long have you been up there?" when you could have spent 3 seconds looking at a NASA astronaut biography online to find out that information, thus giving you time to ask something like, "How much do y'all miss Garrett Reisman?" and "Do you have a message for Garrett Reisman back on earth?" and "Do you still find yourself thinking 'I think I'll float on down to the US side and see what Garrett Reisman is up to', only to be crushed when you remember that he's no longer on board?"

"Big Ben! Parliament!"

On August 11, 2008 at 07:42 Eastern Daylight Time, the Hubble Space Telescope's odometer reached 100,000 orbits of Earth.
That's 2.72 billion miles at 5 miles per second.

In honor of this milestone, the Hubble team released this dreamy commemorative image:

About the image, from the Hubble site:

In commemoration of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope completing its 100,000th orbit in its 18th year of exploration and discovery, scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., have aimed Hubble to take a snapshot of a dazzling region of celestial birth and renewal.

Hubble peered into a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 (upper, left). The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our Local Group of galaxies.

The three-dimensional-looking image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.

The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars already born in NGC 2074 is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas at center, bottom.

In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our Sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the LMC are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies.

This representative color image was taken on August 10, 2008, with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Red shows emission from sulfur atoms, green from glowing hydrogen, and blue from glowing oxygen.

3 days and counting.

[Photo is called "Raining Perseids" and it was taken by a man named Fred Bruenjes. Unfortunately, I can't tell you more because the website where I found it is all in Chinese.]

From SPACE.COM:

Every August, just when many people go vacationing in the country where skies are dark, the best-known meteor shower makes its appearance.

It is also the month of "The Tears of St. Lawrence," more commonly known as the Perseid Meteor Shower.

Laurentius, a Christian deacon, is said to have been martyred by the Romans in 258 AD on an iron outdoor stove. It was in the midst of this torture that Laurentius cried out:

"I am already roasted on one side and, if thou wouldst have me well cooked, it is time to turn me on the other."

The saint's death was commemorated on his feast day, Aug. 10. King Phillip II of Spain built his monastery place, the "Escorial," on the plan of the holy gridiron. And the abundance of shooting stars seen annually between approximately Aug. 8 and 14 have come to be known as St. Lawrence's "fiery tears."

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE FOR OPTIMAL VIEWING TIMES, ETC.

I don't know about anyone else...

...but this scares the hell out of me.

I will be chewing my nails to the quick on 10/23.

Which explains why Saturn has such a high-pitched, squeaky "voice."

Saturn, Jupiter Full of Liquid Metal Helium

Ohhhh, perchlorates.

For a minute there I thought, "Wow - there really IS an advanced life form on Mars!"