Meteor Shower 6 a.m. Don't Miss It

With our usual clouds in Kentucky, we don't get a good view of this stuff very often, so take advantage of a clear, dark, and extremely fucking cold pre-dawn.

Late night November 17 until dawn November 18, 2014, the Leonids
Radiating from the constellation Leo the Lion, the famous Leonid meteor shower has produced some of the greatest meteor storms in history – at least one in living memory, 1966 – with rates as high as thousands of meteors per minute during a span of 15 minutes on the morning of November 17, 1966. Indeed, on that beautiful night in 1966, the meteors did, briefly, fall like rain. Some who witnessed the 1966 Leonid meteor storm said they felt as if they needed to grip the ground, so strong was the impression of Earth plowing along through space, fording the meteoroid stream. The meteors, after all, were all streaming from a single point in the sky – the radiant point – in this case in the constellation Leo the Lion. Leonid meteor storms sometimes recur in cycles of 33 to 34 years, but the Leonids around the turn of the century – while wonderful for many observers – did not match the shower of 1966. And, in most years, the Lion whimpers rather than roars, producing a maximum of perhaps 10-15 meteors per hour on a dark night. Like many meteor showers, the Leonids ordinarily pick up steam after midnight and display the greatest meteor numbers just before dawn. In 2014, the waning crescent moon shouldn’t too greatly interfere with this year’s Leonid meteor shower. The peak morning will probably be November 18 – but try November 17, too.

"Shortly before dawn" means shortly before 7 a.m. here in Central Kentucky, so I'm going to be outside in the freaking minus 4 freaking degrees below freaking zero windchill because I am a science geek. With a death-by-pneumonia wish.

Total Lunar Eclipse Tuesday 3 a.m., Clouds Be Fucked

Seriously, wake up your kids and make them see this.  If you're lucky, they'll grow up to be Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

James Bruggers at the Courier:

In any event, whether we can see it or not, there will be a total lunar eclipse that is predicted to have a reddish color from atmospheric conditions and scattered light, according to experts at the University of Louisville. They're calling it a blood moon.
Tom Tretter, associate professor of science education in U of L's College of Education and Human Development, had this to saw about the eclipse:

In the Louisville area the total eclipse (when the moon is fully in Earth's shadow) will begin at about 3:07 a.m. Tuesday morning. It will last until 4:25 a.m. Unlike a solar eclipse, it is quite safe to view a lunar eclipse with bare eyes or even binoculars or small telescopes. Plus, it is clearly visible even with city light pollution, so you don't have to find a dark viewing spot.

The entire event may be visible from North and South America, according to NASA. And of the clouds get in the way, there's always the Internet. You can watch the eclipse live on the NASA website, with coverage starting at 1 a.m. NASA is also providing a central location for people to share their photos. All that can be found, here.

Merry Sciencemas

From TPM:

No, this image is not one of the Mayan apocalypse. NASA has a tradition of releasing spectacular Hubble images in time for the winter holidays, such as a 2011 photo of a space “snow angel,” and 2012 was no different.

This year, NASA published a breathtaking photo of a planetary nebula called NGC-5189, located some 3,000 light years away in the constellation Musca (the fly).

Nebulas like the one shown here are formed by dying stars — ones like our own Sun except that have run out of fuel and are ejecting their outer layers, which become superheated by the remaining stellar material and billow outward as clouds of gas, turning into beautiful patterns and shapes. The nebula pictured, NGC-5189, is said to resemble a “glass-blown ornament,” according to NASA, hence it being featured as this year’s holiday favorite.

Because I am an Old and to support the Post Office, I send out actual holiday cards on paper, with stamps and everything.  NASA needs to start a line of holiday cards with Hubble photos on them, and the explanation of the image on the inside.  All of us who remember the Apollo missions would snatch them up.

The Man Who Knew

As he does so frequently, Charles Pierce nails it on the death of Neil Armstrong:

For at least a time, there literally was only one other person in the history of man who knew what Armstrong knew — how that sandy soil feels when you walk on it, the exact places where the shadows fall, the precise geometry of the mountains of the moon. Today, there are only eight of them left, all of them in their 70's. What will happen when the last of them dies? It's very likely that there will not be a living human being who knows what Neil Armstrong knew. It will all be for videotape and digital libraries, for historians and, if we're very lucky, for poets, as well. But there will be nobody alive who actually knows. Not a single one of our fellow humans, anywhere on the Earth. That knowledge will be as dead in the world as Columbus is. One fewer person on the Earth was able to look up at the moon on Sunday night. What he thought when he looked at, night after night, is a perspective lost to all but eight old men. Sooner or later, there will be none of them left. On that day, like today, we should mourn for what we once thought we were. From that day forward, I fear, it is all going to sound like myth and magic, and the tales that the old men told around the ancient fires.

I remember clearly the debates in the '70s about the expense and uselessness of the mannned flights to the moon. "Think of what we could use that money for right here on earth!" Yep, abandoning manned space flight beyond our own orbit bought us a shitload of fossil-fuel subsidies and a Wall Street casino that makes Vegas look like a back-alley numbers racket.

It's no coincidence that the anti-science moronification of America began at the same time we abandoned the moon. Knowledge is what we lost. What we're losing now is the ability to gain any more.

We're on MARS, You Guys!

Slideshow from TPM:

I just cannot be more sophisticated about it than that. I was 10 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and nothing that cool has happened since. Anywhere. Barack Obama's election comes close.

 

 

Look at this picture. That guy with the long gray hair in the front is crying, y'all. I have no idea who he is, but I'm sure of this much:

 

- He saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and decided right then and there to be a part of the space program. If not as an astronaut, then as one of the guys (and back then they were all guys) who sent them into space and brought them home safely.

 

- He's watched the space program fade from a man walking on the fucking moon to the end of the tragic and pathetic shuttle program, and has worked his ass off every day to return NASA to its Apollo glory days.

 

- Now he can die happy.

 

In case you didn't notice, those are public employees who put an Earth object on MARS. Government workers. Paid with tax dollars. You know, worthless parasites.

 

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

The "Curiosity" rover/lab landed on Mars (Sunday) night, pulling off a nerve wracking and difficult landing stunt. It was a project over a decade in the making that will yield invaluable scientific insights.

These are the amazing men and women that a Macau casino magnate will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to say are greedy parasites mooching off "producers" like the vulture capitalist wannabe President. How small and pathetic.

Two hundred years from now, the world will not care that men like Sheldon Adelson, Mitt Romney and George Will walked this earth. If they are remembered at all, it will be with only mildest sneer of contempt.

But the fine souls who made this technologically marvelous contribution to the welfare of all mankind possible will be revered and remembered for their contributions to humanity as long as records and historians exist to tell the tale. And even after their individual names are lost to history, their fledgling accomplishments will live on as the building blocks of future generations of human endeavor. That advancement can take many forms, from science and medicine to academics to social justice. But helping along that advancement is the true purpose of our being alive.

Read the whole beautiful thing.

But the government never created a single job. CNN:

As the new rover that just landed on Mars looks for signs of life there, the NASA program that runs it is supporting life here on Earth -- with jobs.

NASA spokesman Guy Webster said the rover, named Curiosity, is currently supporting about 700 people, but has supported 7,000 jobs at various times over the last eight years. The Curiosity project and its $2.5 billion budget has generated jobs not just at NASA but at companies ranging from Lockheed Martin to a bicycle manufacturer in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"People wonder about throwing money at Mars, [but] no money was spent on Mars," said Webster. "There are no ATMs up there. All the money was spent here on Earth."

He said there are currently up to 400 NASA employees working on the project, in addition to 300 scientists outsourced by the government agency.

 Ray Bradbury may have turned into a reichwing nut in his old age, but I'm sorry he didn't live to see this.