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.

Beaver Moon

The above Lunar image is my full November Moon. Taken with my BIG scope not my computerized scope, my BIG scope allows me to take wide angle pictures of the Moon, and at these cold temps if I were to turn on my computerized scope it would blow up and then start on fire. Taken last Friday night during a break in the clouds. The November full Moon is called the "Full Beaver Moon", a name given it by early Native Americans because it was time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze so they could gather a good supply of furs for the winter months, another reason for the name is the beavers are actively preparing for winter. I have also labeled my Moon with most of the major seas and some major craters and a couple mountain ranges, gives you an idea where everything is.

Ever wonder why we only ever see one side of the Moon? To really understand this concept you have to stick a loved one, cat or plant in the middle of the room and look the loved one, cat or plant in the eye, stand 3 feet or so away from them and pretend you have a surprise behind your back you don't want them to see. Do a complete circle (orbit) around them until you are back at your starting point. Notice what you had to do with your body to keep your back and surprise away from them, you had to rotate your body in the direction of your travel around them exactly 360 degrees. That's what the Moon does, it rotates on its axis one time for every orbit of the Earth to keep its alien bases surprise from us. Technically we are locked gravitationally into a synchronous rotation/revolution pattern with the Moon.

NASA just released a couple days ago images of Mar's moons Phobos and Deimos. Taken by CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars)Probe. CRISM is mapping Mars geology as well as looking for water and as they put it "Help locate Martian resources that could provide local support for eventual human exploration and colonization of Mars". Phobos, top image above is a captured asteroid and is on a slow collision course with Mars, slow as in 50 million years. Deimos is also a captured asteroid and the smaller of the 2 moons. Okay now take a look at our lovely and beautiful Moon, as in the top image I took above, now take a look at the second image of Mar's moons, need I say more? I'm just saying our Moon is an oddity not only in the way it was formed by a collision of two planets but also because of how beautiful and mysterious it is.

Comet Holmes Update

The above clip has my best 74x images of Comet Holmes, notice the size of the comet getting progressively bigger until it is bigger than my field of view of my scope set up. I played with with the last 2 images in photo shop to get below the debris layers to see what was going on again with the nucleus. The photo shopped versions really show how uniform the expansion of the debris field away from the nucleus is, very cool, also notice the green color in the second image, this is carbon monoxide gas, a by-product of the explosion/impact fluorescing in the sunlight.

Scientists still don't know the exact cause of Comet Holmes outburst which increased it's brightness one million times, there's 2 major theories; the comet was hit by an asteroid or due to the repeated warming of the comet's nucleus the protective ice subliminated exposing a piece of the nucleus which then exploded shooting 100 millions of tons of dust into space.

Comet Holmes is now moving away from us, it is 250,000 km distant, as you can see from above image it will be moving in the sky as well, you can now spot it on the other side of Mirfak in the constellation Perseus. It is actually getting harder to see because even though it's overall brightness has remained the same at around 2.5-3.0 magnitude the light is spread over a greater distance as the comet continues to expand from tens of thousands of miles across to now several hundred thousand miles across. Better get out and enjoy it while you can, won't be around for another 6.88 years and chances are unless it gets hit by an asteroid or has another explosion, you will not be able to see it, in other words, this could be a once in a lifetime event!

JD over at The Uneasy Supplicant , who by the way has an amazing blog, check it out, has awarded me with "You're an Amazing Blogger" award, I proudly accept this award. Awards are always good to get, shows that someone out there appreciates what you are doing. I will now pass this award on to some of the amazing blogs that I visit regularly, give them a try, from photos to the paranormal to totally useless stuff, it's all here.

Rand at My Paranormal Life ,

Anna at My Only Photo ,

DrowseyMonkey at DrowseyMonkey ,

Paula at self taught artist ,

JJ at Nature Shows and Dreams ,

Kathy at Photography by KML ,

Peter at St Vincents Darlinghurst Male Nurses,

Tatiana at Totally-Useless .

I don't usually give out this many awards, but it is Christmas time and to date I hadn't gotten these people anything, so, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"

One final note, the The Saskatchewan Roughriders won the Grey Cup last night, we are all pretty proud here in Saskatchewan!

Colors Of The Moon

Very happy, got a break in the clouds and was able to snap some images of the Moon a couple nights ago! It has been cloudy, cold and snowy here what seems like forever so when I got the opportunity, carried my big A_ _ ( hint, not arm) scope up the stairs and outside the front door to snap some quick pics before the clouds come back, which they did after about an hour. It was cold out, about -10c but that's good, less turbulence in the air, on my Moon shots there is more detail, the ray system of both Tycho and Copernicus really stand out.

I put my camera on the highest quality setting to squeeze as many pixels as possible out of it to see if I could draw out the colors of the Moon by saturating it in photo shop. The image below was the result. My best attempt to date. The blues/greens such as the Sea Of Tranquility, (the blue color sea top center of the Moon), represent Lunar basalts high in metals such as titanium, thorium and iron; the rust colors are metal poor basalts like the Sea Of Serenity , just to the west of the Sea of Tranquility and one of the eyes of the famous face on the Moon; the white colors represent the continental highlands platform ejecta, consisting of anorthosites containing some aluminum and finally the bright white areas are recent impact ejecta.

Notice Tycho crater, the bright white crater bottom right of the Moon with the extensive ray system, scientists believe that the impactor which hit the Moon and created Tycho was the result of a collision between 2 asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars and they also believe that same collision created another impactor which in turn hit the Earth 65 million years ago and caused the mass extinction of the dinosaur. Well right about now you're probably wondering as I am how you got from a guy taking a picture of the Moon in his front yard to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, don't ask, couldn't tell you, I do this on the fly a lot of times, hope you find it interesting.

I was reading an article the other day about how odd our Moon is, odd in the sense that our Moon was probably created by our Earth colliding with a Mars size planet about 4.5 billion years ago, the rocks and dust that were blasted from the collision formed the Moon. Scientists are saying this only happens 5-10% of the time. Planetary systems are usually formed side by side or planets acquire their moons by gravity.

Magnificent Desolation

Just when I thought I'd have to wait until February/08 to watch Astronauts walk on the Moon I happened to be surfing the net and found a newly released DVD called " Magnificent Desolation Walking on the Moon ", it's tag line being, "Only 12 have walked on the moon, YOU'RE NEXT". So within a half hour I had picked it up and double bonus just as I arrived at Rogers they were unpacking Guitar Hero III for the PS3 which I picked up for my boss, you can not find this game anywhere in town, so killing two birds with one stone made both of us happy and made 10 bucks in the process, the tip from the Boss. The movie is Narrated by Tom Hanks and you can't go wrong with Tom Hanks as a narrator, second only to James Earl Jones in this category, oh and both Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are the executive producers.

Buzz Aldrin the second man to walk on the Moon and the Apollo 11 Lunar Module pilot actually coined the phrase "A Magnificent Desolation" when he stepped on the Moon , magnificent for the ability of man being able to go to the Moon and desolation for the extreme desolation of the Moon. There is a lot of rarely seen footage on this DVD, some of the astronauts would be walking along just talking to capcom (capsule communications from Earth) when they would trip over a rock or just trip up and fall, quite funny the amount of times this would happen, never saw this on the live versions. Another very interesting thing I learned from this DVD is that the Moon played visual tricks on the astronauts, because there was no buildings or trees on the Moon the astronauts perspective was out of sync, they had a hard time telling how big or far away things were, example, Capcom was asking the Apollo 15 astronauts about how far away they were from Hadley Rille, they replied they weren't too sure but estimated about 50 metres, right after that they were surprised when the edge gave way and it started to slope down to the bottom of the Rille, now Hadley Rille is a gorge comparable to the Grand Canyon, yet they couldn't see it coming, I found that very interesting and as they put it they had to be very careful because of it.

Overall a very good movie, if you like the Moon and space travel it is a no brainer pick it up.

There is a newly released computer network sharing program called Cosmology at Home. Works on the same principle as SETI at Home, you donate your computer's free time, resources and bandwidth for the greater good of either looking for aliens as with SETI or help solving the mysteries of the universe with cosmology at home. Some of the things you will be helping research with cosmology at home are items such as the universe acceleration, distribution of galaxies and fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, right now as I'm doing this post I am also looking for new pulsars as well as aliens, no flys on me! All you do is go to their web site and download their interface a program called Boinc and you're good to go. You don't have to do aliens or cosmology stuff there's numerous research programs you can help with, such as temperature patterns if you're in to global warming, to researching malaria.