The Fastest, Smallest, Biggest and Most Explosive

National Geographic Channel comes through for us again, this time with three new premiers, count em, three, The Fastest, The Biggest and Smallest and The Most Explosive. This coming Sunday February 15 starting at 8 pm EDT. National Geographic, using Computer Generated imagery (CGI), time lapse sequences, and easy to understand demonstrations takes you on a journey through our cosmos. Starting with The Fastest.

When exploring our universe, fastest is bestest. Exploration of space depends on speed, the faster we go the more we explore, the more we learn. You'll see new and emerging technologies to get us to where we gotta go, fast. Like the new Magneto Plasma Rocket, funneling hot plasma through magnets to produce lots of thrust, thrust= speed, propelling us to hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, getting us to places like Mars in 39 days instead of the chemical rocket time of 260 days. Less time in space means less deadly cosmic radiation exposure for the Astronauts. Seriously.......being confined for 260 days with a group of people with no sex and drinking recycled urine, the whole deadly cosmic radiation thing doesn't even rate on my "things to worry about list", given the choice leastest is better. But even hundreds of thousands of miles an hour aren't fast enough to take us to the outer reaches of our galaxy, then the universe, enter worm holes and warp drive, we are only limited by our imaginations.


In the "Smallest and Biggest" you see the vastness of our universe down to the infinitesimal particles that make up everything. You'll see how nano technology is making advances in medicine with nanodiamonds delivering chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells killing them off, image above.


Now my most favorite show, "The Most Explosive", who doesn't like a good explosion? You'll see lots, volcanoes, Super Novas, Gamma Ray Bursts and the ultimate, The Big Bang. You'll also see the coolest animation of an asteroid strike.

We just had a meteoroid hit Saskatchewan skies November 20 last year, they figure it was only the size of a desk yet It was seen by thousands of people from British Columbia to Manitoba. Can you imagine seeing a 10 km size rock, the size they think caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs enter the atmosphere, what a show it must have put on, that would be too cool to watch, a literal once in a life time thing, mostly because you be dead after. One can only imagine what the dinosaurs were thinking........"Crap, we... are... so... fracked".  The Big Bang, the biggest explosion ever. In a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, space time exploded into matter billions of miles across and created all the substance we know of today, all the ingredients for every explosion to follow. If you happen to miss the Sunday shows, they will be repeated Thursday February 19 starting at 7:00 pm EDT. These are American times only, Canadian times to follow once I know.

One last thing, a couple of satellites, one American and one Russian, both communication, collided 790 miles above Siberia Tuesday, what are the odds? I mean space is generally pretty big, kind of makes you feel it is getting crowded up there. No immediate risk to the International Space Station but they are monitoring the resulting 600 pieces of debris, which they feel will eventually fall to Earth and burn up in our atmosphere over the next few years. Unfortunately there are no pictures, I guess there aren't a whole lot of camera carrying tourists over in Northern Siberia.



Going through my images I've taken over the last year I came across my favorite lunar eclipse image, the blues and turquoise were cause by the sunlight passing through our ionosphere, which scatters the reds and allows the greens and blues through to the lunar surface, too cool, thought I would make an animation of it, next total lunar eclipse isn't until December 21 2010, long way to go.