And all this might make you hungry…top it off with dry ice ice cream.
These are just a few of the many little science experiments you can do…I’ll admit I left off some of the more dangerous ones I know because I want you to have a good Fourth of July!
Just a quick post, I just found out that as part of its 250th anniversary, Guiness is giving you a chance to win a trip to space on Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic will take you on a sub-orbital flight to 60 some miles up (60 miles is widely considered space) where you can experience weightlessness and get spectacular views of Earth.
That’s not the only prize. They are also giving away a trip to an underwater bar and a private show by the Black Eyed Peas (all three involve black, get it? Dark beer, dark prizes!)
I can definitely think of worse reasons to have a beer!
Today NASA will be shutting off one of its longer missions, the Ulysses spacecraft. Never heard of it? Not surprising. It did not get a lot of publicity in the popular media. Ulysses was launched in 1990, and swung by Jupiter 1992. Jupiter’s gravity was used to change its orbit so it passed over the top and bottom of the Sun as seen from Earth (or close to the Sun’s north and south poles if you prefer…not quite exactly over them as the orbit was inclined about 80 degrees). Unfortunately, Ulysses didn’t take lots of pretty pictures so it wasn’t a media darling.
Ulysses was studying the environment, the solar wind, the magnetic fields, and cosmic rays. Since Earth orbits in a plane that goes roughly around the Sun’s equator, we have never made measurments over the poles before. Ulysses provided us with a wealth of information about this environment. Ulysses lasted 18 years, well over the length of a solar cycle so we got to see the Sun at solar maximum and some data from the currnent deep solar minimum.
There is a live webcast starting at 10:35am EDT of the switching off ceremony.
Ulysses has been a very productive craft for many years. It will be missed. Wish it could have lasted for the next solar max, but its hard to ask for more than 18 years!
I have been busy and on travel but will be trying to write up some ideas this week. I wanted to post a short one to get ball rolling here.
Nature is twittering Apollo 11. Well, 40 years after the fact. They are doing kind of a media mashup where they are twittering 40 years after the Apollo 11 mission. They have already started with tweets on the astronauts training and other launch preps. On July 16th, they will twitter the launch. Everything is being done 40 years later so we can experience the mission in a way you just couldn’t in 1969.
You don’t have to subscribe to twitter, just check out the Apollo 40 plus feed and you can see what they are doin.
I remember in 1989, I think it was A&E, aired the original news coverage with David Brinkley. I wasn’t home for some of it and was setting the VCR to tape it. Now, on the 40th anniversary, videotapes are already fading into history…if the do television broadcasts, I will Tivo it this time. Wonder what I will be doing on the 50th anniversary?
You don’t see Enceladus…just its shadow! Enceladus is off the screen. This animations was made from 7 images snapped 30 seconds apart, so the event didn’t last long at all. Cassini was about 800.000 miles away when it snapped this sequence of images.
These eclipses can only occur near Saturn’s equinox. Most of the time the orbits of Saturn’s Moons are tilted with respect to the Sun so their shadows will pass above or below each other. Only near the equinox (which occurs in August for Saturn) will they line up just right so they can eclipse each other. Neither of the Voyager Spacecraft passed Saturn close to an equinox so this is the first time we have been able to see events such as this.
I was catching up on podcasts at the gym this morning and listened to the most recent episisode of Radio Lab on stochasticity. Stochasticity is fifty cent word for randomness. Most people think they know random when they see it, but frequently find patterns where there is really randomness.
The show starts off with a very interesting story about a young girl letting go a balloon with a note tied to it. It is found and, at first, the commonalities she shares with the girl who found it seem extraordinary…but only if you look at the things they have in common of course. A quick examination of their differences makes you wonder a bit more.
They discuss one of my favorite games I did with students occasionally. They do it with two groups but I would do it with 5-7 depending on class size. The game is you give one group a coin. You tell them to flip it 10o times and write down the series of heads and tails (using h and t). The other groups are just to write down (what they think) is a random series of h’s and t’s without flipping the coin. I leave the room so I don’t know which group has the coin. I then come back a few minutes later when they are done and tell them which group was flipping a real coin based on their sequences. What they think is a random sequence has easily recognizable differences from a real random sequence. I am going to make you listen to the episode to hear one way of doing this (they don’t reveal all the tricks, but the others are similar to the one they use).
We are programmed to see patterns. That served us well when we were dodging tigers, but now we can see patterns where there are none. From an evolutionary standpoint, we not recognizing a tiger attack results in death and a false positive results in a change of underwear at worst. Therefore, we tend to have a lot of false positives when it comes to recognizing patterns.
We see everything from the face of Jesus on a tortilla to Elvis in the Eagle Nebula (recognizing faces has its whole own subcategory). Gamblers think they recognize patterns (reinforced by bells and flashing lights) that keep them gaming. They have an interesting statistical analysis of athletes who get the hot hand and find it usually isn’t as hot as you think it is.
People base their lives on patterns that don’t exist. Everything from who they date and marry to their stock market picks and the lottery tickets they buy. We all could use a little better understanding of statistics and how to pick out meaningful patterns.
It was cloudy for the nice conjunction yesterday, but it was still pretty good this morning (click to embiggen)
The crescent Moon is obvious with Earthshine. Venus is very prominent with Mars slightly to its upper left. You might have to click for a larger version to detect Mercury almost directly below the Moon (it is hard to see at this resolution, but the full picture is a pretty big file). The Moon was very close to the Pleaides, but I got up too late and the sky was too bright to get a good shot of them together.
I went ahead and zoomed in on the Moon, Venus and Mars for a closer shot. The Moon will be even a more slender crescent tomorrow morning and almost directly left (north) and a little higher in the sky than Mercury (well, for Tucson at least). New Moon is Monday at 3:35pm EDT, so the crescent could be a little challenging, but I have spotted it that close to new several times, so it is definitely achievable.
I am almost at a loss for words, but might be able to find a few choice ones for the city of Bozeman, Montana. It is known that employers can check out the web for information about you and there is even an industry that will help you spruce up your online presence.
Okay, public info is public. Fair enough. But Bozeman now wants to not only see your private profiles on sites like facebook and Myspace, but for you to GIVE THEM YOUR PASSWORDS to “any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.” (and I bet they want your Adult Friend Finder and eHarmony accounts also!)
That does not just give them access to my info, but the info of all my friends as well.
Just don’t tell them? Say you don’t have an account? Well, lying on a job app is a firable offense.
And you are in a Catch 22 since it is against the Terms of Service of many sites to divulge your password to others! They say they are trying to judge your character by asking you to break the a contract with a social networking site…but if you don’t tell them, you are breaking law! WTF?!?
And of course many of these sites have associated email accounts and calendars with them. Giving out your password potentially lets people read all your old emails, doctor appointments, vacations, hot dates, etc.
I thought it was bad when employers wanted to start doing credit checks…better throw away your diary…they might want to take a look at that as well!
I don’t delve into politics too often here, but this is a practice that needs to be stopped before it goes any farther!
UPDATE: Well, a lot of us were clouded out today. Tomorrow is a different arrangement by worth trying. The Moon will be over near the Pleiades tomorrow morning. Venus and Mars will still be very close together. The Moon will be even lower in the sky Sunday morning, but will provide a useful guide to find Mercury. Mercury will be almost directly south (to the right) of the Moon Sunday morning. Don’t give up quite yet…still some interesting sites to see!
Conjunctions of planets and the Moon happen on a fairly regular basis. The players, however, are constantly changing and we get different combinations at different times.
Tomorrow morning, June 19th, we get a nice trio before dawn. This trio will consist of the Moon, Venus and Mars. The Moon is a waxing crescent. If you have binoculars (or a telescope) train them on Venus and you can see its phase as well! Venus is about half lit right now and even a modest pair of binoculars reveals its phase. Mars is not nearly as bright, but should be easily visible between the Moon and Venus. Mercury rises right beneath the Pleaides later (exact time depends on where you are) but it will probably be very difficult to see in the pre-dawn glow.
Here is the sky chart for tomorrow morning…click to embiggen.
I am not that great at getting up in the morning, but will set my camera up before bed tonight and an alarm to see if I can drag myself out in the morning.
Tomorrow is a big day for our continued exploration of the Moon. NASA is launching two missions on one Atlas 5 rocket…currently scheduled for 5:12pm EDT.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (or LRO). It will go into orbit around the Moon with a suite of instruments to measure temperature, gravity, and UV albedo. That may not sound exciting, but the really cool part is it will have a very high resolution camera (almost identical to the one on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) that will be able to take pictures with a resolution as fine as 18 inches…the pictures from this are going to be spectacular! LRO will be searching for good landing sites with an emphasis on the polar regions, a likely spot for a lunar base.
The second mission is the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). LCROSS will separate from LRO shortly after launch (and it’s a good thing too as you will see!) and engage in a long, looping series of orbits around the Earth before heading to the Moon. LCROSS will take along the Centaur upper stage that put it into orbit. The upper stage will separate from the other piece, called the Shepherding Spacecraft, and head on a collision course with the Moon. The upper stage will crash into the Moon blasting a small crater. The Sheperding Spacecraft will follow the upper stage and fly through the cloud of debris kicked up by the upper stage. The Shepherding Spacecraft will take pictures and data as it flies through the debris on the way to its own crash landing. The impact will take place sometime in October (exact day and time TBD and depends on the exact launch time). NASA is going to time the impace to that it can be observed from the U.S. Amateur and professionals astonomers will train their telescopes at the Moon in hopes of seeing the impact…and it better be clear here in Tucson that night!
