German amateur astronomer Bernhard Christ was in the right place at the right time — due to very careful planning and foresight — and captured this astonishing scene:
[Click to embiggen.]
That’s the International Space Station crossing the face of the Moon, what astronomers call a transit (like an eclipse, but when something small goes in front of something big). This image is actually a composite of several images taken in a row, with some sharpening to make it cleaner looking.
The transit only lasted for 0.4 seconds, so Christ had to be on the ball to capture this. He used a digital astronomical camera that can take what is essentially video (really just rapid still shots, but after all that’s what video is), and processed the individual frames. It’s a gorgeous image, with the Moon looking really stunning.
And if you’re wondering why he only got four shots of the ISS, look again: there is a shot of it just inside the limb of the Moon, but it’s low contrast and hard to see. Just follow the path of the ISS as it crosses the Moon and you’ll find it.
My thanks to Herr Doktor Christ for allowing me to post this picture. Well done, and vielen Dank!
The annual Leonid meteor shower peaks this year on or around Tuesday night. It’s a slow-peaking shower, so even if you go out tonight, or later than Tuesday, you’ll probably see a few meteors streaking across the sky.
I’ve written about them many times in the past; a review is on my Bad Astronomy site, and I wrote a guide to watching the Perseids which is still apropos of the Leonids. NASA’s science news page has lots of info, and the International Meteor Organization has technical aspects, too.
Leonids over Uluru image courtesy Vic and Jen Winter at ICSTARS.
I am the king of all nerds. There can be no other.
What else is a guy supposed to do after a big snowfall and while waiting for "Waters of Mars" to air here in the States? And of course TLA helped, sawing the snowballs in half and shaping the body.
And hmmmm. Dalek and dork both start and end with the same letters. Coincidence?
[More pictures are in my Flickr Snow Dalek set.]
NASA has found a significant amount of water ice on the Moon!
Holy Haleakala!
On October 9, the LCROSS spacecraft watched as a Centaur rocket booster slammed into the south pole of the Moon, hoping to determine if any water ice exists under the lunar surface. The idea is that over millions of years, comet impacts and other events have brought water to the Moon. Most of it goes away over time, but if any water happens to accumulate at the bottoms of craters at the poles, where the Sun never shines, it can stay put, frozen forever in shadow. By impacting a spacecraft into the Moon, it can eject the ice where it gets hit by raw sunlight. The water breaks down into hydrogen and hydroxyl molecules (OH-), which can be directly detected.
The target crater, Cabeus, has a temperature on its floor of -230 Celsius, cold enough to store ice. The Centaur slammed into it at high speed, making a new crater about 20 meters across and splashing debris over an even bigger area. A plume went up and out of the crater, and it was that tower of ejected material that had the telltale signs of water. The infrared spectrometer on LCROSS definitely detected absorption lines from water, and the ultraviolet spectrometer saw it in emission. Not only that, the emission got stronger with time, which clinches the deal! That’s exactly what you expect by a plume containing water.
Wow.
The amount of water they found in the plume was a couple of hundred kilograms in total, but that indicates there is a lot more still lying on the surface. They don’t know how much exactly just yet; NASA wanted to release this news as soon as they were sure they had definite results, but there is still much to do. Where did this water come from? How long has it been there? How accessible is it to future astronauts? These questions and more will, hopefully, be answered in the coming weeks and months as the data are analyzed more thoroughly. So stay tuned. There’s lots more good news to come!
Jim Kakalios was the science advisor for the Watchmen movie, and wrote a book called The Physics of Superheroes. I met him briefly when we both spoke at the National Academy of Sciences about new ways to engage the public about science. He’s a nice guy.
He’s also a funny one, and a canny one. He was asked to give the 2009 convocation address at the University of Minnesota (sorry, the video is not embeddable, so go there and watch it), and he talked about geeks and nerds. I think he hit the right note. We do run this planet. "Revenge of the Nerds" was more than just a movie, it was a primer for the future of nerddom.
You might as well face it. If you’re reading my blog, you’re a nerd. Be proud. I am.
The ESA spacecraft Rosetta swings past the Earth in a few hours, but look at what it did when it was still 630,000 km (400,000 miles) from home:
Sigh. So lovely.
Rosetta took an image every hour for 24 hours; they’re making a movie which will be online soon. That should be spectacular!
The folks at the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah have a nifty little interactive gizmo on their web page which shows the relative sizes of small objects from a coffee bean down to a carbon atom. A slider along the bottom (or just running your mouse left/right on the graphic itself) changes the scale, so zoom in and out on the objects. You fly past a mitochondrion, E. coli, all the way down to a carbon atom. The sizes are given too.
This is pretty slick, and helpful; people (me included) tend to have a miserable sense of scale. If I had two wishes for this, it would be that they included a human hair, since that’s something of a standard for comparison to small things (a hair is 50 – 100 microns in diameter), and that they make the opposite one to zoom out from a coffee bean to the observable Universe. That would be pretty cool!
Note: Yes, of course I’ve seen "Powers of Ten". I remember the original, with Philip Morrison narrating. I used to sit in the Smithsonian on field trips when I was a kid and watch it over and over. I was always doomed to dorkhood.
