On Going to The Moon and Beyond

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the Human Race to keep all it's eggs in", Robert Heinlein.

Woo Hoo, stopped snowing, but along with the no snow comes the -30c weather, sucks. In between the snow and clouds I got some clear skies. I was able to get some images the other day of a pretty crescent Moon and added a cool oil painting effect.


In my observing down times I have been watching "From The Earth to The Moon" on HBO, an interesting show about our adventure to the Moon. Also been watching for the like gazillionth time "In The Shadow Of the Moon", and... and I've been reading, "The Last Man On the Moon" an excellent book about the Apollo missions from the standpoint of an actual astronaut Gene Cernan. You may have noticed an underlining theme to all the above, I love the Moon, but most importantly, the fact we made it there, hopefully to return one day.


Well maybe not so much. I've also been reading a paper that was just released out of Rice University.

Rice University and NASA go back a long way. Rice University back in 1962 donated a lot of land for NASA's Manned Spacecraft center, later named the Johnson Space Center. The donation prompted Kennedy to make a famous speech from Rice Stadium where he states;

"We chose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard".

The report is directed to the new Obama administration and details the direction NASA should be heading, basically it states NASA should focus more on Earth centric projects like energy and the environment and put a hold on going to the Moon and Mars. They do have some good recommendations in the 15 page report, that is except for one, not going to the Moon and Mars, if it were up to me we'd be on Mars 30 years ago. We are in a galactic shooting gallery, we need to start thinking off planet for our survival, because it is a matter of "when" not "if" we get hit by a mass extinction asteroid/comet.

I know you're probably thinking like everyone else I talk to is, it's just not the right time to be spending money on such costly ventures with the economy the way it is, seriously I feel like I'm part of a bad Sci-Fi B movie, you know the type, you have a crazy scientist yelling the sky is falling, the sky is falling, we're all going to die unless something is done, and everybody writes him off as a crack pot, till near the end of the show when everybody sees he was right, implements his master plan and avoids destruction, and they all live happily ever after, and everyone's not dead. I'm kind of the star in my own movie, trying to warn people of the possible catastrophic impact event to come, and everybody has written me off, but you know it's not a matter of if I'm right, it's all a matter of when I'll be right.

For now it looks like we are going to have to depend on China and India, both have stated their intentions on getting a Man on the Moon by 2020. but you know,

"Any one Nation can get to the Moon, it will take the human and financial resources of many to go beyond, where we need to be, to ensure the survival of our species"........... me.

See now that I am a star in my own make believe crazy B movie I'll have to start to italicise more of my musings.

One last thing, look to the West tomorrow night, Friday the 27, just after Sunset to see a pretty gathering of the Crescent Moon and Venus, should make for a great pic.

Celestial Gatherings and Climate Change

Moon and Antares, June 16, 2008


First off I'm pretty pumped about the fact that redOrbit selected Black holes as a Red Hot Blog of the Day , very cool when a large reputable science site's editors choose your site as something worthwhile and recommend it to it's readers.

Got a couple images of some celestial gatherings that have happened in the past week. The above image taken June 16 of the Moon and Antares, Antares is a Red Super giant star in the constellation Scorpius, because of it's red color it is sometimes mistaken for Mars, it's diameter is 700 times that of our Sun and 600 light years distant. The image below is a conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter taken June 19 at 11:00 pm.


Moon and Jupiter June 19, 2008

If you are concerned at all with climate change you'll want to head over to Global Climate Change a brand new website just started by NASA's Jet Proplusion Laboratory. This site deals with educating the public on Earth's everchanging climate. They do an excellent job of explaining various things such as the condition of Earth's ice sheets, Global Averge Temperature, sea level change and concentrations of key greenhouse gases.

There's lots of interactive stuff like a Climate Time Machine, it takes you back to 1979 through to 2007 and shows how various things like ice melt, sea levels, CO2 emissions and the Average Global Temperature have changed through the years, wow, very scary, and I don't scare easy, well maybe I do , but that's beside the point, and the music is very scary cool, I was humming it all day at work today, very catchy in a scary sort of way, awesome site, NASA does such super work on their sites.

I'll leave you now with another Moon Rise , it consists of 42 images over 3.5 minutes real time.

Phoenix Mars Lander's Arrival

Well people they pulled it off, a flawlessly performed landing on the Martian surface at 7:53 pm EDT Sunday May 25th. by the Phoenix Mars Lander. The image above was taken by the onboard telescope from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, it is the lander parachuting to the surface. This was the first successful use of parachutes and thrusters, or what they call a power landing since the Viking missions in 1976.

The Phoenix lander (above image taken by the MRO) has onboard scientific instruments to determine whether ice and water on top of or just below the surface could have ever supported life. NASA'S Mars exploration program has 4 main goals.



1: Determine whether life ever arose on Mars.

2: Characterize the climate of Mars.

3: Characterize the geology of Mars.

4: Prepare for Human exploration.


The Phoenix lander has two main objectives.


1: Study the history of water in the Martian arctic.

2: Search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary.

I watched NASA TV for most of Sunday, very exciting, my pulse was racing those 7 minutes during descent and landing. Why am I so excited, and why should you care? Baby steps my friends, that's what space exploration is all about, we ain't gonna be warping to some far off galaxy anytime soon, but every little bit of progress helps us, so that one day we can reach for the stars.

I don't just see a lander on Mars gathering ice water, I see a successful completion of a step needed to get us on our way to the outer reaches of the galaxy, nay the universe. Earth is a great place and all, but we only have a limited time before our life supply burns out. Estimates range anywhere from half to a few billion years before our Sun will no longer be able to support us, we have to do what we can to propagate our species, or we can just give up and become extinct.

God gave us all the tools we need to complete this objective; curiosity, intelligence, why else did God create the cosmos?, has to be a reason, so many unanswered questions, so little time. I think we are in exciting times, sure I wish I had been born about 300 years from now, I need more technology, like a Holodeck or Replicator, but with our ever expanding space exploration programs and what I think is the most exciting thing to happen in science in a long time; the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, we are setting ourselves up for some of the greatest discoveries of humankind.

I'll leave you now with an animated Moonrise taken a few days ago.

Conjunctions, Meteor shower and Martian Landing

Got a cool image a couple days after the peak of the Lyrid shower when the Moon hadn't risen yet, above, while I was watching the meteor it looked odd, when I got home did the processing noticed the reason, either 2 meteors side by side or one broke up cool, and, and there is a start of an aurora, bottom left corner, the green part.

Heads up, Sunday April 27th. wee hours of the morning you can see the Moon just passing under Jupiter, that's right another conjunction, how early, well it is closest to Jupiter as it rises, around 3:00 am, but it is still conjunctinely (word?) close at 5:30 am just before Sunrise. I'll be out early to get a pic.

May is a crazy cool month for sky watchers, people, starting right away May 1st, look to the west-northwest 45 minutes after Sunset to see another stunning Pleiades gathering, this time with Mercury. I had mentioned before about the Eta Aquarids occuring May 6th, my bad, they are actually May 5th. 4:00 am just before the Sun rises, look to the east southeast around 15 degrees above the horizon, you have a new moon, so the contrast will be better, giving you brighter meteors and the amount of meteors varies on a 12 year cycle, which will peak between 2008-2010, so they are expecting, even though it's low on the horizon around 30 an hour.

Mark your calendars, May 6th., again 45 minutes after Sunset for a beautiful gathering of a crescent Moon complete with earthshine, Mercury, the Pleiades and Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus the Bull with the Hyades star cluster, excellent photo op. Look to the east southeast 45 minutes after Sunset.

You may have noticed I added a countdown clock for the Martian landing of the Phoenix Mars Lander. The lander touches down on the Martian landscape May 25th. The lander will use parachutes and thruster rockets to slow it down from 12,000 MPH to just 5.4 MPH to hopefully have a soft touchdown. NASA has not had a successful power landing since the 70's, lets keep our fingers crossed.

The lander has been given a tentative landing spot called "the Green Valley" a spot they are hoping will have plenty of ice within digging range of it's digging robotic arm so it can gather samples to analyse whether it had ever been able to support microbial life.

I'll leave you now with a cool Lunar Halo animated gif taken about a month ago.

New Images of Phobos, Moon of Mars

Julie over at Virtual Voyage, an awesome site with great photography, gave me a heads up about some new images that had been released of the Mars Moon Phobos. I had talked a little about this moonlet here, in my Beaver Moon post. Back then NASA had just released some new images of the Mars moons Phobos and Deimos.

Phobos and Deimos November, 2007

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took 2 images from around 6,000 kms out from the moonlet and combined them together for a stereo view. NASA also released some anaglyph images of the moonlet. If you have red /blue 3d glasses, and I do, you can see the little moon like it's coming out of the screen towards you, scary stuff.




This moonlet may have a lot of ice water, because of this there is a lot of interest in this little moon, so much so that Russia had launched a couple of spacecraft to Phobos. Phobos 1 was lost after a couple of months due to programming errors and Phobos 2 had made it to the moonlet took a picture of a UFO, so some say, and then one of it's computers died. Never say never, Russian and China have joined together to send Phobos Grunt to land on Phobos and Mars and then return with samples of their surfaces, a very ambitious mission indeed. Phobos Grunt is slated to launch next year.

The night after the Moon/ Pleiades conjunction I was back out and got a cool image of the Moon with earthshine in clouds, I'll leave you now with an animated gif of this image.

Asteroid 2008 CT1

We add another near miss asteroid to our growing collection. First there was asteroid 2007 WD5 close flyby of Mars, then we have asteroid 2007 TU24 coming within 334,000 miles of Earth now we have a newly discovered asteroid 2008 CT1 missing us by only 84,000 miles on February 5, came from behind the glare of the Sun, didn't see it coming. Now the size is only somewhere between 8-20 metres, still it could have taken out a large city if it actually got through the atmosphere and hit us. The asteroid was discovered by the LINEAR or Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Project.


Finally Shuttle Atlantis after a 2 month delay got off the ground to deliver and install the Columbus laboratory on the International Space Station. Video shows that a couple of what they think to be small foam pieces fall of the external fuel tank 2 minutes after launch, and then another piece of foam came off about 7 minutes into the launch. The astronauts spent most of Friday inspecting the Shuttle's heat shield using it's 15m boom and robotic arms. Pilimanary findings look good, no apparent damage.

On a final note, a musical note at that, NASA for the first time ever is using it's Deep Space Network to beam a song, a Beatles song Across The Universe into space, towards the North star Polaris, about 431 light years away. Had to get Yoko Ono's okay, just in case aliens have MP3 capability and do illegal downloads. The real funny part in all this is that some scientists are saying there needs to be more open discussions about the potential risks involved in sending even symbolic messages to potentially evil aliens, that's why I linked the lyrics to the song, maybe a rap song that says "come get a piece of me" over and over again, aliens could consider it a challenge and try to get a piece of us. Maybe they mean the part of the Beatles song were it says "nothing's gonna change my world" as an out and out challenge to the bad aliens, and they might see it as such and come and try to change our world, who knows for sure what aliens think. The song was sent to celebrate the 40th. anniversary when the Beatles recorded the song and the 50th. anniversary of the Beatles and NASA beginnings.

I'll leave you now with another prairie sunset animated gif.

God Made Meets Man Made

Is the title I've given my most current Sunset pic. As I was out looking to take an image of a Sunset a few days ago I noticed as the Sun was sinking it was going to land on one of the high voltage towers, not really though, the Sun is 93 million miles away, but it looked cool. The Earth has the capacity to produce 60,000 megatons of energy per year, sounds like a lot until you hear the Sun produces 77 billion megatons every second, in other words, in one second the Sun produces an equivalent of a million years of Earth energy. The Sun keeps our fragile planet warm and working even in the coldness of spaceland, makes you think on how much we depend on the little star we call the Sun.

Took another pic of Venus and Jupiter to show even though they are pulling away from each other they are still the two prettiest objects in the early morning sky and worthy of a peak at. Look to the SE. sky around 7:30 am, won't be long before the glare of the Sun blocks them from our view.

Shuttle managers have decided that a bent radiator coolant hose isn't enough of a problem to delay Shuttle Atlantis's February 7th launch, the weather on the other hand may be a problem, 40% chance of acceptable conditions for launch. The Shuttle's main mission is to deliver and install the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory. Remember NASA TV tomorrow at 2:45pm EST all the crazy cool camera angles of the launch.

I'll leave you now with another prairie sunset video, a bunch of individual images taken with my Canon 40D and stitched together to produce what you see below.

Fireball In The Sky!!

The University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon campus caught an awesome fireball Saturday January 5th. 9:05 pm. My hats off to the staff and students for having a camera on top of the chemistry building to capture such events, too cool for school!

A fireball is basically a large meteor, the fireball objects entering our atmosphere can range from a few inches to a few feet in size, entering our atmosphere at up to 70,000 mph they stop burning around 10-20 miles high and only 1-2% reach the ground to become a meteorite.

Messenger had it's closest approach to Mercury Monday January 14th, another spacecraft had an important happening on that date as well. Ulysses spacecraft was at it's highest point over our Sun's north pole. NASA and the ESA have joined together for the Ulysses mission, launched from the Discovery Shuttle October 1990 the Ulysses spacecraft used Jupiter for gravitational assist to orbit around the Sun's poles. Just as Earth's poles are crucial to studies of terrestrial climate change, the Sun's poles may be crucial to studies of the Solar cycle.

Photo credit Sky and Telescope

The Sun goes through an eleven year cycle from minimum solar activity, things like Sunspots and flares to maximum activity. We are at Solar minimum and January 3rd was declared the start of a brand new cycle, cycle 24 has just started with the arrival of sunspot, active region 10981. Active region 10981 has an opposite magnetic polarity compared to active region 10980 and is at a high solar latitude, both indications a new cycle is upon us. What this means for me is more sunspots and flares to take pics of.

Got my first picture of a Sunrise the other day and guess what, decided to make another animated gif, hope you like it.

Lunar Images and Black Holes

Finally a break in the weather, was able to get some good detailed shots of the Moon's surface. The last month or so we have either had cloud cover or frosty skies making the Moon look like a giant frosty ball, not good for taking pics. The above picture is a 68% of full Moon. I'd like to thank Anna over at My Only Photo for helping me figure out how to get the GIF file below working on my post, she had a great reflecting Full Moon on one of her recent posts which I just had to replicate with one of my Moon shots.

I also got good shot of a 43% of Full Moon a few nights back. I used a yellow filter to bring more of the Lunar surface detail out.

Hopefully the weather co-operates cause December 23/24 we have a Full Moon, which is cool but that's not all, here in Saskatoon Mars is going to get very close to the Moon as well, might be a good photo op, actually if you live in N.W. Canada, Alaska, Northern Russia or Eastern Europe, you will get what they call a Lunar occultation of Mars, that is when Mars slips behind the Moon, I'm not quite far enough N.W. to get to enjoy the occultation but Mars and the Moon should get close enough to get in the same image, we'll see.

Okay now here is a Black Hole with some serious attitude! NASA called a special news conference last Monday to announce the awesome discovery of what they are calling "The Death Star Galaxy" In the image above the bigger galaxy's black hole is shooting out massive amounts of X-Rays and Gamma Rays to its smaller probably friendlier neighbor galaxy. The effect of this unprovoked attack could be disastrous to any planets in it's path, especially since the galaxies are only 20,000 light years apart. Scientist figure this happened about 1 million years ago. Because of the rarity of the event NASA will be paying close attention to this one. To put this into perspective, a death ray this size would basically destroy our ozone layer within a manner of months and life as we know it would eventually cease to exist.


NASA has just announced that they have found the cause of Shuttle Atlantis's faulty fuel sensors. The problem has been traced back to an over sized electrical socket that bridges the interior and exterior of Atlantis's external tank. They now have to figure out if the repair can be done in time for the new January 10th. launch date.

Rovers Get Ready For Martian Winter

NASA is moving Spirit Rover to a sunnier place to prepare for the upcoming Martian winter. They have found a nice sun facing slope to park the little rover. Opportunity on the other hand is closer to the equator so they aren't quite as concerned about it as much, also Spirit still has a lot of dust on it's solar panels left behind from the dust storms so it will have less power over the winter months. The majority of Opportunity's dust was blown off by wind gusts.

NASA scientists are going over Spirit's most important discovery to date. Just before the dust storms Spirit discovered nearly pure silica, scientists say it could have come from either a hot spring or fumarole, fumaroles are vents or holes in a volcanic environment in which gases and vapor vent to atmosphere. Either of these conditions on Earth would harbor lots of microbial life, just more evidence life once or still may exist on Mars.

NASA has a cool section on their website called Spooky Sounds, check it out, one of the sounds is a sonic boom of Jupiter captured by Voyager 1 in 1979, the sonic boom is created as the Solar wind moves past the planets at supersonic speed. There is also a cool Saturn's Aurora sound picked up by the Cassini's Spacecraft electronic equipment. I found a YouTube video of a lot of these sounds together below including the Voyager 1 probe encountering Solar winds.

JD from "The Uneasy Supplicant" has once again honoured me with an award, the "Blogger Cleverness Award, for being terribly clever" Jd has an awesome story, poetry, photo site all grouped into one which I visit quite regularly.

I want to pass this award on to swubird, Ya gotta check out his blog, he has an extensive military background and has very interesting posts, very glad I found this one!

Okay just got a new toy, a palmcorder. Panasonic SDR-H18. My wife got it for me as a pre-Christmas gift. Think of the possibilities, my first use of this device is to bring you Bing and Dean, check out the video below, after Dean does his thing notice what he does with his mike hand, cracks me up every time!

Shuttle Atlantis STS 122

Shuttle Atlantis has been given the green light to launch Thursday December 6th. at 4:31pm EST. STS 122 main mission is to install the the European Columbus space laboratory onto the newly installed Harmony Node 2 on the International Space Station. NASA's website has had a cool makeover, very user friendly and aesthetically pleasing to the eye, check it out, has something for everyone, even the kids.

Anna over at My Only Photo tagged me with "Proudest Moment Of My Life". I have been tagged numerous times but being the introvert I am have not followed through with any of them. I am going to do something different this time, the last 3 tags I have received this week I will group in this post.

The proudest moment of my life besides being married of course was holding my new born baby girls in my arms for the first time, I was in the operating room for both procedures, very surrealistic, one moment they were in their mother's body, the next thing I knew I was holding a living breathing being in my arms, to this day I am proud of the fine young ladies that they have become.

DrowseyMonkey over at DrowseyMonkey has tagged me with name 5-10 courses you would like to take to improve your life and then one you would like to take with the person that tagged you.

1. A University course in Astronomy, I would love to learn more of the technical aspects and theory of the cosmos, also to help me sound more professional when I post about astrostuff.

2. Computer Science/networking, so I could be a computer IT guy, I just want to say to somebody over the phone, "is it plugged in?"

3. Automotive repair 101. lets face it wouldn't it be nice to be able to fix your car or at least do more then check that the battery cables aren't loose when your car doesn't start.

4. Photo shop, there is so much in this software that I would like to know how to use besides the saturation and contrast features.

5. Creative Writing, so I don't sound like a caveman when I do work memos or blog posts.

The last part of the tag is to pick a course you'd like to take with the person that tagged you, that would be the astronomy course, no particular reason for that choice other then the fact I love to share the wonders of the Universe and I think drowseymonkey would like that pick.

The last tag came from Tatiana from Totally- Useless, list 7 random or weird facts about yourself and tag 7 others.

1. I've just found out that I use "your" instead of "you're" when writing, spellcheck of course doesn't pick it up, and when I proof read my brain doesn't see it as a problem, I'm sure you will find lots of stuff like that in my posts with other words I shouldn't be using, see point 5 above.

2.I'm the only guy I know my age that loves video games. Right now I have a fake steering wheel, fake orange gun and fake guitar that I play more then my real one.

3. People who have monotone voices make me sleepy and bored.

4. Can't stand the sight of blood, or medical diagrams/pictures, you know the ones that show the muscles and veins and organs, get wheezy just thinking about it. I was getting an eye exam and the doctor had a medical diagram and was explaining the procedure he was going to perform, talked in a slow monotone voice naming all the various parts of the eye, I thought great I am stuck looking at this diagram and getting queasy, my only hope is he puts me to sleep before I pass out, too late the next thing I knew they were asking me if I was okay and if I would like some water, geez I hate when that happens.

5. I hate big giant books with no pictures.

6. I sing and play my real guitar really loud when no one's home.

7. My 2 most prized possessions are a couple of Christmas song singing dummies called Bing and Dean.

Because it is that time of year, and everybody is probably busy shopping and getting ready for Christmas I will put off the tagging other people part for a later TBA date. I'll leave you now with a pic of my fav singing dummies.

A Matter Of Perspective

Imagine with me if you will, you are orbiting the Moon in spaceship Boba at about 150 miles distant from the Lunar surface traveling 2,000 mph on your way to Tycho City (Tycho is the crater at the top of the image with a central peak), and you look out your window and snap an image, the above image is what you'd see, no it's not taken by a lunar probe or any of the Apollo missions, it is one of my highly magnified lunar images, I figured out how to change the perspective of an image in photo shop so that it looks like your flying over the Lunar landscape as opposed to looking at it through a telescope. I was going through some of the images taken by lunar probes and the Apollo missions in Virtual Moon Atlas and thought it would be cool if I could get the same effect on some of my images, so after many hours of fooling around with the free transform edit tool in photo shop I was able to come up with a totally different viewpoint hence the above image. You may ask why would I spend all that time doing that, I ask why not, it looks cool, takes me away even further then I already am from our Earthly constraints to a place where you can imagine the impossible, besides a had a few hours to kill the other night.

The Shuttle Discovery arrived home safely yesterday at 1:01 pm. EST. after a successful and complex mission. This is space exploration at its finest, from the ability and ingenuity of being able to develop things like cufflinks to repair one of the International Space Station's solar arrays to preparing the Space Station for further space exploration with the installation of the Harmony module, this is why I blog so much about the Shuttle program, these people are making things happen up there so we can reach for the Moon and beyond, they are our modern day Columbuses!

Okay this is just too cool. Japan's Lunar orbiter Kaguya has just sent back high definition Images of the moon along with a HD Movie. The movie has 2 sequences, one of the Lunar polar area as in the above image, and another sequence of the Oceanus Procellarum region. The images were shot about 100km from the Lunar surface, how exciting is this?!

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center's Fabrication Plant released a picture of a mock up of the Orion crew module. It is America's first new manned spacecraft since the shuttle was developed 30 years ago. The Orion is part of the Constellation Program which will return us to the Moon by 2020.

Most Dangerous And Difficult Spacewalk

Saturday November 3rd. astronauts on the shuttle Discovery mission STS 120 will be making what they are calling the most difficult and dangerous spacewalk ever attempted. During the mission's third spacewalk which consisted of moving a large solar array panel on the " P6 truss" which by the way weighs 35,000 lbs, as they were extending the array astronauts noticed a couple rips in one of the panels. They immediately stopped the extending process fearing more damage and took pics to send home. The array is 80% deployed, is still generating 97% of its full capacity but NASA scientists are saying it is structurally unstable and must be repaired.

The plan is to "button-up" the two rips with "cuff links" which the astronauts crafted with supplies found in the station's lab. Astronaut Scott Parazynski will be attached to an extension, attached to the Canadarm (above picture), take the one hour ride out to the problem area and effect repairs. What makes this mission more difficult is that as Scott Parazynski is repairing the array there is a possibility of electrical shock as the panel is supplying 110 volts, generating 13.4 hp. and there is no off switch, once the array is deployed it's on.


Comet Holmes continues to get bigger! It's like I found a new toy, every night I look forward to getting out and viewing the comet. What is really unusual about this whole situation is that I have had clear skies almost every night since the comet increased a million times in brightness. If you haven't yet, get out and take a look, very easy to spot now, as it gets dark look to the NE half way up from the horizon, you will see a fuzzy yellowish ball, that's the comet. I'd like to have you all over to show you what it looks like through a telescope, it is too cool, if you can get or borrow someones binoculars do it, who knows how long it will last, maybe only a couple more weeks, enjoy it while you can. Below is the first image I took last Wednesday October 25th. at 200x, below that is my most current one taken October 31st. at just 74x. Notice the green halo around the comet on my most current image, that is fluorescing gases mostly carbon monoxide, one of the byproducts of the explosion.

Comet Holmes October 25th. 200X

Comet Holmes October 31st. 74X

Rose over at World Outside my Window , who by the way helps many people out with her tips and knowledge on blogging, has honoured me with the "Community Blogger Award" It is awarded to people who reach out and make the blogging community a better one. Again I thank you Rose and will proudly display it with my other awards along the side of my blog. I would like to pass on this award to Shirley over at Way Cool Pictures. Shirley always brightens up my day with cool pics from around the globe, and on her blog as you scroll down has a "Thank You" and a picture of a smiley cat, and I love cats, so she gets the award.

Comet Holmes

Edwin Holmes was doing some observing of the Andromeda Galaxy and discovered comet Holmes way back in 1892, you know the story, you find it, it gets named after you. Just last Tuesday it started getting very bright, like about 1 million times brighter! Scientists figure the only way it could have gotten that bright that fast is through a major out gassing and releasing major particles from its nucleus. I took the image above last night, it is at 400x you can see it's pretty weird shaped for a comet, round and all, and the comet nucleus a star like appearance in the middle, you can make out it's tail pointing away from the Sun. It will be visible to the naked eye for at least the next week. You can spot it in the NE sky after it gets dark. It is just to the west of the star Mirfak in the constellation Perseus. It is quite easy to find, looks like an orange yellow star. Check out Rick's Deep Sky Blog, he has an interesting post on the comet as well.

I took a pic of my set up last night. I had just taken some pics of the comet and was now taking some highly magnified images of Moon craters, in fact if you look at my sucky VISTA operated computer in the pod you can see the Moon being imaged. A real cool thing that happened to me, I submitted one of my photos of the comet to Sky and Telescope magazine's website, and it got chosen to be added to their photo section, not only in one of their regular categories, which is an honor in itself, but as an Editors Choice. Who knows for how long it will be there because they get billions of pictures everyday, and the Editors choice is for all the categories. I'm sure it will be around for a while in the Comet Holmes area.



So far so good for the Shuttle Discovery. Successful launch and they are now docked with the ISS. They have mounted a camera on a special boom extension and attached it to their robot arm and used it to examine the Shuttle's underside for damage. Apparently a piece of foam from the external fuel tank fell off and hit the Shuttle during the ascent stage. The preliminary findings are good, no damage. I am watching NASA TV right now, they are into their first spacewalk, actually they just finished stowing a broken space station antenna in the Shuttle's payload bay, they are now preparing the Harmony Node for installation. Speaking of which the above pic is of the Harmony Node in the Shuttle's payload bay.