Hey, lookat that! I mean, my sitemeter, over on the right hand menu. I had my 3,000,000^th customer to the blog today.

So lessee:

March 22, 2006: 500,000

January 29, 2007: 2,000,000

June 16, 2007: 3,000,000

Cool. Soon I will rule the world! I’d better take notes on what I want to change…

Update (June 18): I just went outside (4:00 local time), and the Moon is nearly straight up… and next to it, plain as day (har har) is Venus! Amazing. With the crescent Moon to guide the eye, Venus is really easy to spot. I put the Sun behind my house to block the light, which helped. This will get harder to do every hour as the Moon pulls away from Venus, but that will still lead to the beautiful alignment tonight described below.

Via astropixie, I am reminded that there are several interesting things to see in the sky coming up.

First, check the western sky shortly after sunset tonight and for the next few days. The bright star Regulus, Venus, and Saturn make a pretty line, and the thin crescent Moon will glide through them every night, too.

There are also several way cool occultations (where one object passes in front of another) this week:

1. For people in the NE US, Europe, and Canada, the Moon will pass directly in front of Venus on June 18. The website for The Socirty for Popular Astronomy (UK) has some great info. There is also a live webcast planned!
2. The Moon will also pass in front of the bright star Regulus on June 20. Note this will happen in the evening of the 19th for most folks west of England. It’ll be in the late afternoon for me here in Boulder, which means it won’t be a naked eye event; Regulus is too dim to be seen in the daytime. But I’ll see if I can see it with my ‘scope. That’ll be way cool.
3. The Moon will occult Saturn later that day as well, but the geometry of the event means most folks on Earth will miss it. Too bad.

Check the IOTA webpage for more. I need to remember to check this once a week, too. Now that I’m home a bit more I can try to catch more stuff like this!

Astronauts from Atlantis and onboard the International Space Station managed to get 4 of the 6 control computers back up and running. They are slowly giving them more tasks to take care of and from what I’ve heard they expect things to be back up to speed very soon. The other two computers are fried and will need to be replaced.

What caused all this woe? They still aren’t sure. MSNBC has more in a surprisingly complete article.

I have just learned that the launch of the NASA/DOE Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope has been moved back a bit, to January 31, 2008. Prior to this, the launch was scheduled for December 14. Delays like this are fairly typical given how hard it is to get spacecraft hardware put together. Mission planners know there will be issues, but since they don’t know what the issues will be exactly, they can’t make an accurate schedule too far in advance. So as launch approaches, delays are inevitable.

I’ll be glad to see this one go up. I worked on the education and public outreach for GLAST for six years, and I know it’ll do amazing science.

Keeping up with the problems on ISS is difficult; the situation is complex.

Apparently, when the new solar panels brought up by Atlantis were installed, a power supply box failed. This provided power to the six computers on board used to maintain the station’s orientation, which in turn is critical to keeping the solar panels aligned with the Sun. The leading hypothesis is that electrical noise generated in the solar panel wiring is affecting the electronics. Several attempts to correct the problem have not worked, though of course the spokesfolks for NASA are saying this is not a serious problem yet. That may very well be correct, but this situation is very much cause for concern. The Russians may move up a launch to get a new power supply sent up in July.

An interesting line from an MSNBC news article caught my eye:

The [electronic intereference] spike apparently knocked out an electronics box that provides power to all six of the German-built control computers.

Which makes me ask: why would there be a critical single point of failure aboard the space station? This to me is the bigger story here. Once this problem is fixed — and it probably will be — I wonder if the media will follow up with this?

As usual, James Oberg has more info on the situation.

Last week, the Mercury probe MESSENGER passed by Venus, changing its orbit and preparing it for its series of rendezvouses (yeah, yeah, I know, three years of French I took) with the solar system’s smallest planet. The probe took some interesting images of Venus this time, too. I particularly liked this one:

These were taken as MESSENGER left Venus. I like them because first, they look like the views of Venus I get through my own Earthbound ‘scope (though right now Venus is only half full, and not a crescent). But also, I like them because of the sense of leaving, of moving on. It’s not an animation or anything, but it does convey the sense that MESSENGER is still on the go and has things to do.

Incidentally, the "480nm" in the image title means 480 nanometers. That’s the wavelength of light passed by the filter in the camera, and it’s roughly the blue-green part of the spectrum. It corresponds to one wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen (the "H-beta" line), though I’m not sure that matters here. It’s also is the wavelength of light where the Sun emits the strongest — some people assume it’s yellow, but it’s actually blue-green. The Sun doesn’t look that color because it emits yellow, orange, and red light too, and we see them blended together.

Anyway, next stop for MESSENGER: Mercury. Well, that’s misleading: it’ll pass by Mercury several times before getting into its parking orbit. The images from there will be very cool indeed.

Tip o’ the sunshield to Emily, of course.

Generally speaking, once a star explodes, that’s pretty much it. It’s done.

But there are exceptions. In the 1870s, the star Eta Carina underwent a massive and violent outburst, releasing so much energy it was really a mini-supernova event. It ejected two monster blobs of gas — massing as much as the Sun! — at high velocity, and was temporarily the second brightest star in the sky, even though it’s 7000+ light years away.

Eta Car is one of the most massive stars in the sky, and one of the most massive stars possible, in fact. But how common are objects like Eta Car?

Maybe more common than we thought. In 2004, Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagaki discovered what he thought was a supernova in the galaxy UGC 4904, which is about 78 million light years away. The object faded rapidly, and was gone 10 days later.

Then, two years later, he saw another supernova in UGC 4904 — in the same spot! The image above shows the sequence of events.

That’s just too big a coincidence to be two separate stars, so they followed up with more observations. What Itagaki and his team found is that this was a single star that blew up, probably very much like Eta Car: it had a violent paroxysm, and then exploded two years later. Spectra revealed an overabundance of helium in the star, which is expected if you have a very high mass star. It was probably 50 – 100 times the mass of the Sun, and they don’t get much bigger.

Eta Car is a singular star in our Galaxy; we have not seen another like it (though there may be others on the other side of the Galaxy where they are hard to spot). Maybe every galaxy actively forming stars has one or two like it. But I doubt it — stars like this don’t live very long before exploding, so they are most likely rare (there is none in the Andromeda galaxy of which I am aware, or any other nearby spiral). So gaze upon that picture above, at that that little unassuming dot, and know that you are witnessing the passing of something rare and amazing, and violent and monstrous. And also know that while it’s almost 80 million light years away, we’ll have a front row seat to a similar catastrophe soon enough. Maybe tonight, maybe not for a thousand years, but in the life of a galaxy, it’ll be in the blink of an eye.