AdventureWorld

The Greatest Show on Earth

This is going to be a monumentally fabulous year for my favorite meteor shower. I don’t celebrate my birthday but I do celebrate the Perseid meteor shower. It hasn’t been a great viewing year in a while and the last time it was (being ok moonlight-wise) I was in Bumfuck,Tx where it is usually guaranteed deep dark clear sky perfection but that time thick low clouds rolled in and pretty much spoiled the show.
I was up most the night waiting for them to break but they didn’t so I finally went to bed ..only to be awaken a few hours later by FuckabunchaAdventureBoy who got up just before dawn to check on the situation. The skies had cleared up some so I threw on my jeans and we drove out to some land he has outside the “city” limits.
We stretched out on the hood of the truck and watched the pre-dawn flurry. It was pretty cool but way too short. We did see one split and shoot off in two directions, which is always a gobsmackingly glorious thing to see.
This year there’s a new moon so there should be a great show. The only time I don’t like seeing a big fat full moon is when there’s a meteor shower—the bright moonlight really fucks with starshow. So, with the dim new moon this year’s show should be a doozie. But don’t just take it from me, take it from NASA (quoted from the NASA website). He didn’t actually say “doozie” but you get the point.

"It's going to be a great show," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The Moon is new on August 12th--which means no moonlight, dark skies and plenty of meteors." How many? Cooke estimates one or two Perseids per minute at the shower's peak.
The show begins between 9:00 and 10:00 pm on Sunday, August 12th, when Perseus rises in the northeast. This is the time to look for Perseid Earthgrazers--meteors that approach from the horizon and skim the atmosphere overhead like a stone skipping the surface of a pond.
"Earthgrazers are long, slow and colorful; they are among the most beautiful of meteors," says Cooke. He cautions that an hour of watching may net only a few of these--"at most"--but seeing even one makes the long night worthwhile.
As the night unfolds, Perseus climbs higher and the meteor rate will increase many-fold.
"By 2 am on Monday morning, August 13th, dozens of Perseids may be flitting across the sky every hour." The crescendo comes before dawn when rates could exceed a meteor a minute.
And there's a bonus: Mars. In the constellation Taurus, just below Perseus, Mars shines like a bright red star. Many of the Perseids you see on August 12th and 13th will flit right past it. Instead of following the meteor, you may find you have a hard time taking your eyes off Mars. There's something bewitching about it, maybe the red color or perhaps the fact that it doesn't twinkle like a true star. You stare at Mars and it stares right back.

I’m headed to a place outside of Taos for optimal dark sky viewing. I’ve rented a wee adobe abode with a 360 view.
And there’s a good band playing at a fun bar in town for a pre-starshow show.
And dancing!
Perfecto.

 

The Baby Planet

The Spitzer Space Telescope has detected the youngest planet ever found, claim NASA scientists. Planets are thought to take many millions of years to form after a star is born, but the discovery of a million-year old star with a planet already in orbit around it means scientists may have to rethink planetary formation models. By comparison, Earth and the rest of the solar system are 4.5 billion years old. And up until now, the youngest planets observed around other stars were a few billion years old.
In its first major findings, the Spitzer Space Telescope also has shown that protostars -- or developing stars -- are very common and that planetary construction zones around infant stars have considerable ice that could produce future oceans. University of Wisconsin astronomer Ed Churchwell said the discoveries have “knocked the socks off the experts”. Me too, Ed! My non-expert socks were also knocked off when I read about this exciting astronomical news.
That Spitzer is a marvel. It is NASA’s infrared space telescope that seeks to understand the origins of the Universe from the formation of galaxies and the evolution of stars to the making of black holes and planets. The spacecraft carries a state-of-the-art infrared telescope, which will allow astronomers to study the infrared universe in the greatest detail ever. Infrared radiation is blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere; hence astronomers have to build space telescopes and put them in orbit around the Earth. But what makes the Spitzer Space Telescope unique you might ask (or I’ll just pretend that you did)?
Infrared radiation originates from dust-enshrouded regions of the universe. Because infrared photons are not absorbed by dust, infrared astronomy can unveil phenomena invisible to other wavelengths. Spitzer is going to study a wide range of astronomical events and allow astronomers to see phenomena taking place in dust rich environments, such as starburst regions, galaxies and planet nurseries, for the first time ever. For astronomer-detectives, it's like looking through walls. You can see why I love the Spitzer.

My Favorite Meteor Shower

I love astronomy and my very favorite thing of all things astronomical are meteor showers. There are many annual meteor showers but one of the best is the Perseid which usually peaks around August 12. You can see as many as 50 to 100 meteors an hour around the peak. Like falling stardust, cast off bits of comet Swift-Tuttle hurtle through the upper atmosphere. A meteor is not a particle of matter itself. It is merely the short-lived streak of light produced by the meteoroid as it is heated to incandescence by its plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere. (The handful of objects that hit the ground are called meteorites.) The kinetic energy released per gram of the meteoroid’s weight far exceeds the energy efficiency of the most powerful man-made explosives. Thus, an object the size of a pea or pebble can create a substantial meteor trail.
The Perseid meteoroids are anywhere from 60 to 100 miles apart at the densest part of the swarm or gravel bank. Earth enters the outer fringes of the gravel bank around July 25 and does not leave it behind until we see the last stragglers around Aug. 18. All told, the Perseid stream is immense -- perhaps as large as 50 million miles in diameter.
Although it has been upstaged in recent years by splendid outbursts from the Leonids of November, the Perseid is my all-time favorite. For one thing August is a hell of a lot warmer than November wherever you are watching in this hemisphere. I froze my ass off watching the last great Leonid storm with my ex-beloved and my brother in Texas.
I have decided that I will go to Texas for this year’s Perseid where I can watch it in with my brother in a non-light polluted environment. With a waning crescent moon and being out in the country 200 miles from any city the viewing should be perfect ..and the beer will be cold and the company will be great. Who knows, we might even talk my oldest brother into coming up to hang out--we have talked him into worse things.
And goody for us, a well-known meteor astronomer, Esko Lyytinen of Finland, has concluded that the Perseids may put on an unusually strong display this year, with a short peak of a few hundred meteors per hour. This is because (Lyytinen believes) Earth will pass through a trail of debris shed by comet Swift-Tuttle during its 1862 visit. This is very exciting for astronomy geeks like me.
Even more exciting but a hella-long way off is the gigantemous meteor storm coming. In 2028, Lyytinen expects a real meteor storm [defined as 1,000 meteors per hour or more] as the Earth passes to within 37,000 miles from a stream of debris that comet Swift-Tuttle released into space back in the year 1479. So, try to remember this 24 years from now so that you don’t miss it ..and remember to thank me appropriately when you are gobsmacked by the monumental fabulousness of these celestial pyrotechnics.

Rare stargazing spectacle

For the next two weeks, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- the five closest planets -- should be easily visible at dusk, along with the moon.
"It's semi-unique," said Myles Standish, an astronomer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "They're all on the same side of the sun and stretched across the sky and that's what is kind of pretty."
The planetary lineup will be visible to the naked eye every night for an hour after sunset from around the world through early April. At the end of the year, the same five planets will reunite for a few weeks, but in the pre-dawn hours.
Standish said this particular planetary grouping may offer the best nighttime views until 2036.
The orbits of the five planets take them to the same side of the sun every few years or so. The conditions have to be just right for all five planets to be clearly visible at dusk or dawn; Mercury is often tough to catch. Even rarer are so-called alignments, where the planets are clustered together in the sky; this is not one of those.
Stargazers should look to the western horizon just after sunset. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn will be lined up in the sky with Jupiter close to the eastern horizon. They will span about 135 degrees. Saturn will be almost directly overhead.