Lightning and The Phoenix Lander

We had an awesome display of lightning the other night and was able to capture some cool shots.


Some interesting facts on lightning, did you know for example that lightning can increase the temperature of the air around it by up to 50,000 degrees F, and that it contains up to 100 million volts? Also the leading cause of injuries in the home during a lightning storm is talking on the phone, wow, I never knew there was such a category, what is going on in people's minds? "Wow, cool thunderstorm, think I'll make a phone call and then take a bath."





Having said that I thought I would post one of my wide angle shots of lightning, what was I thinking? Most lightning injuries occur in the spring/summer when a lot of people are out doing things like, swimming, golfing, biking, taking pictures of lightning in a wide open space under power lines, ect.

If you hear thunder you are within 10 miles of lightning and you could be struck, seek shelter! You should avoid situations in which you may be vulnerable, like being under power lines, at the end of my photo shoot there was rain, lots of thunder, lightning, hey I don't have just one guardian angel, I got a group of them tag teaming.



A quick update on the Phoenix Lander, apparently the lander had some ice water rich soil in it's latest scoop, it was to be delivered to it's optical microscope Thursday and if there was any left over the rest was to be delivered to one of it's ovens for analysis to be done next week.

Scientists and engineers are thinking this could be the last chance to use the lander's ovens due to the fact one has developed an intermittent short. Whenever they deliver a sample to the ovens they have to shake the ovens to get the sample into them, no shake no sample to analyse, if oven number 4 shorts out again and causes the other ovens to stop shaking before they get a sample into the target oven number 0, they are not going to be able to perform any tests on the soil, if they get a sample into the oven and then oven 4 shorts out, they can still do tests, apparently the short doesn't effect the oven's abilities to analyze the sample once it's made it into the oven.

I'll leave you now with some shots of lightning I took a few days ago.

The Moon's Occultation of the Pleiades

Lunar Occultation of the Pleaides June 30, 2008

Mentioning the word conjunction to me gets me excited, mention the word occultation and I go into a frenzy, and that's what happened here in Saskatchewan at 1:50 am June 30, 2008. The crescent Moon complete with earthshine covered two of the Pleiades stars, Atlas and Pleione, doesn't get much better then that.

By the time the Moon rose here in Western Canada the occultation was to be over, some astronomy sites had the exact times when the Moon would be occulting every star in the Pleiades for Eastern North America, but nothing for Western Canada.


Lunar Conjunction of the Pleiades June 30, 2008

You can see from the above image the two stars now uncovered that were once occulted by the Moon. Pictures and words just don't do it justice, I wish I had you all here at that time, sure it was at two in the morning but the busy quiteness of the early morning sky was just too beautiful to keep to myself. It was kind of odd, the brownish crescent Moon with the Pleiades looked surrealistic, as I stood out there all alone with my sky chart, like a treasure map, I felt so lucky, like gazing on a found treasure for the first time.


I took lots of images to pass along the event to you. Below is a clip I put together of 54 images over 10 minutes actual time of the Moon Pleiades Rise. If you look closely you'll see Atlas being uncovered near the end of the video clip, look to the bottom right of the Moon.

Occultations, Conjunctions and Phoenix Lander

Took some images of the gathering of Saturn, Regulus and Mars, Mars will continue drawing closer to Saturn till July 10 when it will start to pull away. If you are interested there will be another very cool conjunction this coming June 30, mind you it will be at 3:00 am EDT, when the Moon rises in the east, it and the Pleiades will once again be in conjunction, in fact if you live out in Eastern Canada you will see the Crescent Moon complete with earthshine occulting, or covering some of the Pleiades stars, what a photo op. They are calling for clear skies here so even though in Western Canada the Moon rises after the occultation I will be getting pics of the conjunction for my next post.

For my Fathers Day present my youngest daughter took me to the latest Indiana Jones movie, a great movie and a great time, me and my youngest have very similar tastes, both like the same type of movies, video games, believe that aliens had something to do with the building of the pyramids, and like to make up words, my oldest daughter and Wife have basically disowned us.

Wife " The Smiths are coming over tonight, you can talk about your space stuff but keep anything to do with aliens out, understood?"

Me " nyup"

Wife "what"

Me "hmm"

Wife "Bob"

Anyways I said all that to bring up something cool, at the very beginning of the show, I forget if it is part of a logo for the production company or the first scene, a huge image of a Moon/ Pleiades conjunction appears, how awesome was that, so if you go see the movie you can point that out to who ever you are with, or if by yourself, the person sitting next to you, they will appreciate it.

More good news on the Phoenix Lander front, after analyzing a sample of the Martian soil in one of the lander's wet labs, (a wet lab is an area where they mix water brought from Earth with the Martian soil so as to be able to do chemistry and test the soil for salts, acidity and other goodies) have found it to be similar to the dry valleys in Antarctica and has all the necessary ingredients to support life, although they have yet to find any water in the samples they are still hopeful that in later digs they will be able to get some of that ice water into their labs.

I'll leave you now with an animated 85% of Full Moon taken June 13th through some clouds.

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 Finds Ice Water

Well scientists are convinced they have found water on Mars, I remain cautiously optimistic, now if they were to come back with a picture of a green alien I'd be saying "I knew it, in your face all you mockers of me", why am I cautiously optimistic? I don't know, I kind of would like to get some of that white substance into one of the lander's ovens to confirm it more scientifically before I jump for joy, I mean that's what the ovens are for, right?



If you remember my last post I had mentioned that the Phoenix People over at NASA were keeping an eye on the white substance in one of their previous digs. If the substance either developed frost or evaporated through sublimation, which is just a fancy term for changing from a solid to a vapour without going through the water stage, it would be ice water. Well as you can see from the above animation, some of it has, the only other thing the white could have been was salt, and salt doesn't work like that.


If this is indeed ice water it has profound implications, besides a water source for future colonists, you now have the ability to manufacture oxygen and fuel. When you are talking space travel, weight is key, the lighter the payload the less the cost, if you have the ability to manufacture the return trip fuel on Mars, the weight along with the cost of the mission goes down and the doability factor up. On a deeper level, with the finding of water on Mars, the possibilities of finding life increases dramatically, think about it, to find even a microbial alien life form on Mars, in our own backyard so to speak, opens up the imagination and possibilities to other life forms in the billions and billions of galaxies in our known universe, to say the least , exciting times and a step towards answering the age old question, "are we alone?"

Strawberry Moon June 18, 2008

In case you missed the June Full Moon I took some images. Called the Strawberry Moon by the Algonquin tribe because they harvested Strawberries during the month of June. I love horizon Full Moons, they always look squashed. The squashness is caused by the Earth's atmosphere acting like a lens and refracting the bottom of the Moon upwards.




As the Moon rose higher in the sky I took some images of it through my telescope, notice on both these images you can see light mist and clouds , the top image notice the dark shadow on the top right of the Moon, the bottom Moon most of the right side is covered with a light shadow, also notice the gold color of the image below, it was lower on the horizon and it's moonlight had to travel through more of our atmosphere which scatters the blues and allows the reds through to be seen by us.




I'll leave you with a clip I put together of the Moon Rise consisting of 54 images over a 7 minute time frame.