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POPS2009 Leonid Meteor Shower More from the article below: ""We're predicting 20 to 30 meteors per hour over the Americas, and as many as 200 to 300 per hour over Asia," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "Our forecast is in good accord with independent theoretical work by other astronomers." "A remarkable feature of this year's shower is that Leonids will appear to be shooting almost directly out of the planet Mars," notes Cooke. It's just a coincidence. This year, Mars happens to be passing by the Leonid radiant at the time of the shower. The Red Planet is almost twice as bright as a first magnitude star, so it makes an eye-catching companion for the Leonids"
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POPSThe Electric Universe NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer adds more evidence that our Sun, like all stars and the universe itself is electric in nature.
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POPSBen's Chili Bowl I ate a halfsmoke at Ben's last week.....and yes Bill Cosby was right, yummmm yummm. You lucky bucks can order some of their food right online! See site for fun pics and more detailed stories, etc. The founder himself only died last month :(, but his wife was there and gave us a very warm welcome.
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POPSMars Rover Named "Curiosity" Checking out the neighborhood. Who knows, maybe our grandkids will found a new civilization. Check out Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" series (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) for a take on what is reasonably possible. It's a great read. Does both the tech and social side of what such an effort could look like.
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POPSAres I-X Launch: NASA's New Rocket Blasts Off On Test Flight The prototype moon rocket took off through a few clouds from a former shuttle launch pad at 11:30 a.m., 3 1/2 hours late because of bad weather. Launch controllers had to retest the rocket systems after more than 150 lightning strikes were reported around the pad overnight. Then they had to wait out interfering rain clouds, the same kind that thwarted Tuesday's try. The ballistic flight did not come close to reaching space and, as expected, lasted a mere two minutes. That's how long it took for the first-stage solid-fuel booster to burn out and separate from the mock upper stage 25 miles up. But it will take months to analyze all the data from the approximately 725 pressure, strain and acceleration sensors. Parachutes popped open and dropped the booster into the Atlantic, where recovery ships waited
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POPS"The World Will Not End on Dec. 21, 2012" Morrison said he tries to reassure people that their fears are groundless, but has received so many inquiries that he has posted a list of 10 questions and answers on the website of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (www.astrosociety.org). Titled "Doomsday 2012, the Planet Nibiru and Cosmophobia," the article breaks down the sources of the hysteria and assures people that the ancients didn't actually know more about the cosmos than we do. "The world will not come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012," E.C. Krupp, director of Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory, declared in a statement released Thursday by the observatory and Sky & Telescope magazine. Krupp debunks the 2012 doomsday idea in the cover story of the magazine's November issue. Morrison said he attributes the excitement to the conflation of several items into one mega-myth. One is the persistent Internet rumor that a planet called Nibiru or Planet X is going to crash into the Earth. . .
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POPSBombing the Moon Gives A New Meaning to Lunatics So how much does a metaphor weigh? A lot more than NASA thinks. The first man on the moon wasn't an American or a Russian, it was The Man in the Moon we all saw when we were kids, and somebody older showed him to us. That's the first man on the moon, her permanent resident, and now he's got a NASA rocket at his backside... They used to call the mentally ill lunatics. But now I wonder who the real lunatics are. And if there is water on the moon, what are we going to do with it? Grow moon-corn for ethanol until we kill the Earth? Such a great article it touched something, it really touched something more beautiful than finding water on the moon.
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