Winter Solstice

NASA is so sure the world will not come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012, they've already released a video about the day after. View "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY_Gc1bF8ds

Instead on December 21st, researchers will use NASA's Cassini spacecraft to observe a rare transit of Venus visible from the planet Saturn:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/20dec_transitofvenus/

Sir Patrick Moore

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde

British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died, aged 89, his friends and colleagues have said.

He "passed away peacefully at 12:25 this afternoon" at his home in Selsey, West Sussex, they said in a statement.

Sir Patrick presented the BBC programme The Sky At Night for over 50 years, making him the longest-running host of the same television show ever.

He wrote dozens of books on astronomy and his research was used by the US and the Russians in their space programmes.

Described by one of his close friends as "fearlessly eccentric", Sir Patrick was notable for his habit of wearing a monocle on screen and his idiosyncratic style.

"Through his regular monthly programmes he was telling us what to look for and what was out there and that was a real inspiration”

Maggie Aderin-Pocock Space scientist

Sir Patrick presented the first edition of The Sky at Night on 24 April 1957. He last appeared in an episode broadcast on Monday

Black Marble

Scientists unveiled today an unprecedented new look at our planet at night. A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite, shows the glow of natural and human-built phenomena across the planet in greater detail than ever before.

It has been assembled from a series of cloud-free images acquired by one of the most capable satellites in the sky today - the Suomi spacecraft.

The platform was launched by the US last year, principally to deliver critical meteorological data.
The Black Marble dataset shows off one of Suomi's key innovations: the low-light sensitivity of its VIIRS instrument.

VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) can discern a range of phenomena of interest to weather forecasters - cloud, snow, fog, etc - even when the satellite is on the dark side of the Earth.
Most of the time, all VIIRS needs to do its work is some illumination from the Moon. But if that is not available, the instrument can still detect features down below just from the nocturnal glow of the atmosphere itself.
And, of course, just as this Black Marble rendition demonstrates, VIIRS is also very good at capturing the lights of our cities.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Jim Al-Khalili talks to astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell forged her own path through the male-dominated world of science - in the days when it was unusual enough for women to work, let alone make a discovery in astrophysics that was worthy of a Nobel Prize.

As a 24-year old PhD student, Jocelyn spotted an anomaly on a graph buried within 100 feet of printed data from a radio telescope. Her curiosity about such a tiny detail led to one of the most important discoveries in 20th century astronomy - the discovery of pulsars - those dense cores of collapsed stars.
It's a discovery which changed the way we see the universe, making the existence of black holes suddenly seem much more likely and providing further proof to Einstein's theory of gravity.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was made a Dame in 2008 and a year later became the first ever female President of the Institute of Physics.

Meteors

October 7, 2012 Draconids

The radiant point for the Draconid meteor shower almost coincides with the head of the constellation Draco the Dragon in the northern sky. That’s why the Draconids are best viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. The Draconid shower is a real oddity, in that the radiant point stands highest in the sky as darkness falls.

This shower is usually a sleeper, producing only a handful of languid meteors per hour in most years. But watch out if the Dragon awakes! In rare instances, fiery Draco has been known to spew forth many hundreds of meteors in a single hour. With no moon to interfere you may be lucky!

October 21, 2012. Orionids

With the waxing crescent moon setting before midnight (on October 20), that means a dark sky between midnight and dawn, or during the best viewing hours for the Orionid meteors. On a dark, moonless night, the Orionids exhibit a maximum of about 15 meteors per hour. These fast-moving meteors occasionally leave persistent trains and bright fireballs. If you trace these meteors backward, they seem to come from the Club of the famous constellation Orion the Hunter. You might know Orion’s bright, ruddy star Betelgeuse. The radiant is north of Betelgeuse. The Orionids have a broad and irregular peak that isn’t easy to predict.

Watch the skies, keep watching...

with thanks to http://earthsky.org/earth

Curiosity searches for evidence of life

from NASA
Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian Surface

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence -- images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels -- is the first of its kind.
Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream's flow.
"From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. "Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it."

FIREBALL!

This text is taken from BAA e-bulletin 698 written by John Mason.

Hundreds of eyewitness reports are coming in of a brilliant fragmenting fireball, visible at about 22:55 BST (21:55 UT) on Friday, 21st September2012. This is clearly one of the most dramatic events reported to the BAA Meteor Section in recent years.

On Friday evening, there was scattered and more continuous cloud cover over much of South-East England, but the rest of the UK and Ireland were largely very clear, with transparent starry skies. This, coupled with the fact that many people were out on a Friday evening and the truly spectacular nature of the fireball itself, are clearly the main factors in it being reported by so many thousands of people over such a very wide area. This extends northwards and westwards from a line roughly linking Norfolk in the East to Devon in the South-West, with the majority of sightings so far received coming from Wales, the North-West, Central and North of England, Scotland and much of Ireland.

When first seen the fireball appeared as a single very brilliant object but it then fragmented into a very large number of bright secondary fireballs, all travelling along roughly parallel paths across the sky.

One highly unusual feature of this fireball is the length of time for which it was visible due to its apparent very slow speed of movement across the sky.  This has led some people to speculate that the fireball was due to the re-entry of a large fragment of space debris.  However, there are several aspects of the event, at this very early phase of the investigation, that do not appear to fit with this hypothesis and it would be unwise to rule out other possibilities at this stage.

More details here.