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Astronomers have discovered a new source of meteor showers, very likely from a comet, that may be coming to an Earth near you. While explaining why we shouldn’t panic at the news, Dr. Phil Plait gives us a great analogy for understanding meteor showers.
If the path of the comet intersects the orbit of the Earth, we plow through that material at the same time every year. Think of it this way: imagine a racetrack, and you are driving around it. Now also imagine a long line of gnats flying across the racetrack. You would drive through that line of bugs at the same point on the racetrack every time, right? OK, replace you with the Earth, the racetrack with the Earth’s orbit, and the bugs with debris shed off a comet. Since the Earth returns to the same point in its orbit every year, if there is cometary debris there, we’ll smack into it at roughly the same calendar day every year.
This loose stuff from the comet burns up in our atmosphere, and we get a meteor shower.
Find out more about the specific new information from the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance, or CAMS. at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
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The footage is from a webcam mounted outside the CFHT astronomical observatory in Hawaii (another view of it from a different webcam can be found here; sadly, both webcams are on Mauna Kea, not Haleakala). You see some stars and the horizon, then suddenly an ethereal pale arc pops into view. It rapidly expands into a thin circular shell, then fades away as it fills the view. The whole thing takes a few minutes to expand; you can see the stars moving during the event (some of the pixels on the webcam are very sensitive and make stationary “hot spots” in the field of view).
So what is it? Is it a trans-dimensional portal into the future, some wormhole from the Pegasus galaxy, or two alien spaceships battling it out?
Dr. Phil Plait followed forum discussions of the event and explains how online astronomy geeks figured out the source of the sight. Link
Duncan Kitchin is a stargazer and a Doctor Who fan. He also has a rather large telescope that’s too big to easily take inside and back out often. So he built a TARDIS box as a telescope shed! One side comes off, and the rest rolls away on wheels. When Kitchin is through with the telescope, just cover it up again and the instrument is protected from the weather. See more pictures at Astro Imaging Blog. Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog
Image: NSF/B. Gudbjartsson
What’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars and located under thousands of feet of ice in the South Pole? No, it’s not the lair of an evil scientist – rather, it’s the IceCube, a wonderfully named observatory that scientists will use to search for neutrinos:
Thousands of meters below the ice near the South Pole lies one of the most unusual observatories ever constructed. The instrument’s nervous system comprises 86 strands of light detectors, stretching down into the ice sheet like oversize strings of pearls. Each strand features 60 basketball-size detectors, spanning the depths from 1,450 to 2,450 meters below the surface. And the body of the observatory is the ice itself, an abundant medium with an astonishing natural clarity.
John Matson of Scientific American has the story: Link | Official IceCube website
Previously on Neatorama: The Wonderful World of Big Science
Photo: Art Verduzco
Psst! Wanna win your very own Monkey drawing by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford? Here’s your chance – but first, the ‘splanation by Art Verduzco, whose photo was featured in National Geographic Magazine’s Your Shot editor Susan Welchman’s Daily Dozen:
Her name is Minicooper and she is a one years old English bulldog. We where relaxing on the beach when I caught her looking thru the scope.
Your task is simple: caption the photo above to win! Place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please. You may enter as many funny ones as you’d like.
Good luck and be sure to visit Adam’s blog for your daily Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.
Update 11/11/09 – Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to sybann who won with this caption: I really wish you wouldn’t use a rocket launcher for "fetch."
This is what I ended up with after just a minute of playing around with Gigagalaxy Zoom, a project by the European Southern Observatory. Start with the Milky Way galaxy as seen by the naked eye, zoom into a section of it, then zoom to the next stage! There are lots and lots of variations, and cool nebulas to explore!
In December of 1995, astronomers did a risky experiment with the Hubble Space Telescope. They pointed it to a region in space the size of a speck of dust that is seemingly empty and kept the telescope watching for 10 days.
They could’ve very well ended up with a blank image – but what they saw instead was something completely mindboggling.
Here’s a wonderful clip by Tony Darnell of Deep Astronomy about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field that illustrates just how humblingly small us humans are in the grand scheme of the universe.
– via gizmodo
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by arbyn.
VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, a biotech start-up, has developed a tiny telescope that has can implanted into the eyes of people suffering from macular degeration:
Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart…Once inside the eye, it works like a fixed telephoto lens, acting in conjunction with the cornea to project a magnified image of whatever the wearer is looking at over a large part of the retina. Because only the central parts of the retina are damaged in the disease, magnifying the image on the eye allows the retinal cells outside the macula to detect the object and send that information to the brain.
Link via The Presurfer
This year is the International Year of Astronomy, so to help all of us armchair astronomers celebrate, New Scientist has a nifty gallery of the most important telescopes in history (from Eyes on the Skies: 400 Years of Telescopic Discovery
This one to the left is the Galileo Refractor (c. 1609):
Though he didn’t invent the telescope, Galileo improved on its design – gradually increasing its magnification power. And he was the first to realise that it could be used to study the heavens rather than just to magnify objects on Earth.
Here you can see Galileo demonstrating one of his telescopes to the ruler of Venice in August 1609 (Galileo is standing to the right of the telescope). In the years to come, Galileo’s observations – including the discovery of four large moons orbiting Jupiter – would lend credence to the sun-centred worldview of Nicolaus Copernicus, who removed the Earth from its central position in the universe.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.
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The European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany presents a 24-hour webcast involving astronomical observatories around the world. Live streaming video will be available, plus links for each participating observatory and the times they will be online in Universal Time (GMT). The webcasts will start Friday morning at 5AM Eastern Daylight Time, or 9AM UT/GMT with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, then move around the world. The webcast is part of the 100 Hours of Astronomy project to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Gemini North Observatory)
As part of the International Year of Astronomy, the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic observations, you get to decide where to point the Hubble next.
“Hubble’s Next Discovery – You Decide allows people across the world to vote online and select the next object modern astronomy’s most famous telescope will view. Six objects, which the Hubble has never before viewed, are available for voting.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
