We're Baaaaccccckkkk

We have been extremely negligent at maintaining this blog. I blame it on Cathy, who got pregnant and lost her way.

Actually, Cathy discovered her pregnancy shortly before she, Mary, my friend, Barbara, and I schlepped to Gila, NM, to see the Leonid Meteor Shower, which was SUPPOSED to be spectacular. It wasn't. During the three nights we were there, we probably saw 25 meteors, few of which were actually Leonids. But what the hey? The sky was astounding, pure black (new moon), with a brighter-than-I-have-ever-seen Milky Way. Also cold. It was in the 20s at night, and even with Cathy's NASA-approved blankies, champagne and other beverages, it was unbearably cold.

However, we had the Casitas de Gila (www.casitasdegila.com, (recommended highly)) host who brought out his 10-inch Orion telescope and showed us lots of stuff. Then, as we were walking back to our casita, we came upon another lovely person, an amateur astronomer who volunteered to show us other cool stuff. Plus, we got to spend time in the gorgeous NM desert. The highlight was Sirius rising, with colors changing from red to green to blue to purple and looking for all the world like those lights folks had in the 60s that changed the colors on their aluminum Christmas trees.

Back in Atlanta, I dragged everybody outside after Thanksgiving dinner at Barbara's house to see the ISS followed shortly by the shuttle -- both high in the sky and very bright. Everyone was impressed.

Recently, we had a double whammy -- the Saints won the Super Bowl and, that morning, STS-130 launched. My sisters Mary and Vicky were at the launch, and I called them from Atlanta. The NASA site, which I had up on my computer, was about 30 seconds behind the actual launch, which I could hear on Vicky's cell phone. So I looked up off my deck, and, damn, there it was. Beautiful.

I have booked a flight to Melbourne to be with Mary when STS-132 launches. That'd be the one with Garrett aboard. Mary thinks we have scared Garrett, who surely assumes we are all STALKERS. Which, I assure you, we are not. Or at least, most of us are not.

Anyway, Cathy's pregnancy is proceeding well. We already know that it's a boy (unusual in our family) and that he will be named "Drew" for his grandpa who died last April and is a big reason we are all space nuts. Drew will be born sometime in late April, and Cathy will post a photo of him (Cathy?) in his new NASA onesie.

Meanwhile, please check out the Traveler's Guide to the Planets on NatGeo. It's amazing.

Duck!

Spaceweather.com, which, if you don’t visit it often, you really should, has a regular listing of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), which are defined as “space rocks larger than approximately 100 meters that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 astronomical units.” (An AU is the mean distance between the sun and the Earth, and we all know that that is – say it with me, everybody – 92.something million miles.)

Spaceweather makes the comforting statement that none of the PHAs astronomers are following is in danger of hitting us, but the uncomforting qualifier is that astronomers are “finding new ones all the time.”

On October 8, one snuck up on them, blasting through the sky in Indonesia and freaking out the local population who thought, naturally, EARTHQUAKE! According to NASA’s Near Earth Object Program (which is missing a hyphen, but what can you do?), the explosion caused by the 10-meter asteroid “triggered infrasound sensors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization more than 10,000 kilometers away.”

Not to worry, though. NASA says asteroids smaller than 25 meters can’t really do much damage, unless, of course, they fall on your car. And asteroids the size of the Indonesia one only hit Earth every 2-12 years (seems like a remarkably large gap there). And I am sure I will have forgotten all this by 2011.

How annoying.

You just know Saturn just updated its Facebook status to: "OMG!OMG!OMG! I GOT A NEW RING AND IT IS SOOOOOOOOOOOO BEAUTIFUL AND AMAZING!!!!!!!!" <3 <3 <3

Adler after dark.

Man, I wish my sisters lived closer, because we would DOMINATE this trivia game.

Clearly, happy people were on Mercury

On September 29, MESSENGER spacecraft passed by Mercury for the third time, flying 141.7 miles above the planet’s rocky surface for a final gravity assist that will enable it to enter orbit above Mercury in 2011. During the encounter, the MESSENGER cameras caught a portion of Mercury's never-before-seen surface . With more than 90 percent of the planet’s surface already imaged, MESSENGER’s science team had drafted an ambitious observation campaign designed to tease out additional details from features uncovered during the first two flybys.

Somebody had to work hard to get this acronym: MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry and Ranging. Messenger delivered many nice photos of the surface of the planet, but I like this one the best.

And way up there, He'll hear our prayer and showwwww us where..

THERE'S WATER!
ON THE FREAKIN' MOON, Y'ALL!

Okay, so maybe I won't be at the STS-132 launch.*

*Not my actual pee stick, though mine looked pretty similar.

Due Date Calculator
Your baby will be born on or around Saturday, April 24, 2010.

Dangit, I miss all the good stuff.
(That's tongue-in-cheek, y'all. )

Pretty Pictures

The mission of Atlantis, the shuttle that launched last May to make the final adjustments to the Hubble, is already paying dividends. The shuttle's astronauts installed the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which snapped this photo of the "Bug" or "Butterfly" planetary nebula.

According to NASA, the star at the center of the nebula first evolved into a huge red-giant star, with a diameter of about 1,000 times that of our Sun. It then lost its extended outer layers. Some of this gas was cast off from its equator at a relatively slow speed, perhaps as low as 20,000 miles an hour, creating the doughnut-shaped ring. Other gas was ejected perpendicular to the ring at higher speeds, producing the elongated "wings" of the butterfly-shaped structure.

Check out the description of this photo and see others at NASA's website.

Thank you, India.

Now will all you lunatic conspiracy theorists please find another hobby?

Mt. Wilson Observatory Threatened by Wildfire

Firefighters waged a five-day battle to save the Mt. Wilson Observatory from the wildfires raging in the Angeles National Forest. The Mt. Wilson Observatory is important, well, because it's a freakin' observatory. But also because it is where Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. To lose that facility would not just be tragic from a scientific standpoint, but from a historical one, as well. And, given the fact that it hosts a wealth of emergency, cellular and television communications towers, well, I mean, LA without television? Could anything possibly be sadder?

From the LA Times:

Mt. Wilson Observatory, site of some of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century, appears to have escaped serious damage from the Station fire, but scientists working on the mountain say the blaze still managed to take a toll on the ongoing research there.

Hal McAlister, observatory director and head of the CHARA experiment that uses six telescopes to measure shapes and sizes of stars, said he was on his way to teach on Monday at Georgia State University, where he is an astronomy professor, when he heard that firefighters had pulled out and ordered his staff to leave. He was so worried he was unable to teach his class.

"I've been teaching 32 years, and I'd never lost it like that," he said.

As many as 40 different projects were under way, he added, and some people had waited a year to get observing time. They will have to be rescheduled, but McAlister was philosophical about that: "Losing observing time is a small problem compared to losing the observatory," he said.

Charles Townes, a Nobel-Prize-winning astrophysicist at UC Berkeley who recently discovered that the bright star Betelgeuse is mysteriously shrinking, said his team had been using three telescopes on mobile trailers to watch changes in the star CIT 6 when the word to evacuate came down.

The mirrors were just coated with a new aluminum reflecting surface in July. If that was damaged, the observatory might need to do the expensive process all over again.

Tragically, two firefighters died in the blaze, but, right now, it looks as if the observatory has been spared. It will be some time before it is known just how much damage it may have sustained.