The annual Perseid Meteor Shower will occur Saturday night and Sunday morning. If you're in the right spot, away from light pollution, you can see up to 100 meteors an hour!
The Perseids have been observed for at least 2,000 years and are associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 133 years. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comet's debris. These bits of ice and dust -- most over 1,000 years old -- burn up in the Earth's atmosphere to create one of the best meteor showers of the year. The Perseids can be seen all over the sky, but the best viewing opportunities will be across the northern hemisphere. Those with sharp eyes will see that the meteors radiate from the direction of the constellation Perseus.
NASA will be up all night, with a live chat led by astronomer Bill Cooke and his team from the Meteoroid Environment Office discussing the Perseids. And if you have to work inside or have too much cloud cover to see the meteor shower, they will have a live stream online. Link
The title of this gallery is 10 Cryptids More Terrifying than the Mongolian Death Worm. However, it does have an entry on the Mongolian death worm, and I find the illustration of the Jersey Devil to be something other than terrifying -like, maybe, ridiculous. Still, it's a fine read on mythical monsters. Pictured here is the hodag, photographed in 1893. Link
ABC News' Nightline photographer Meredith
Frost snapped this photo of a cat all made up to look like Carol from
Where The Wild Things Are, over at the Pet Stylist Super Show
in Knoxville, Tennessee, in July 2012.
Check out the YouTube clip
(the cat made a brief appearance at 0.54) or go to ABC News for the pic:
Link
We've written a lot about the art exhibits at LA's Gallery 1988 -particularly their Crazy 4 Cult shows, and with the sixth annual show, now all you New Yorkers will have a chance to check out the great geek artwork by over 200 artists starting tonight at 64 Gansevoort St. -including this great peice titled "The Dude of Thrones." Good times!
Everyone loves apples, but when your little beak just can't get a hold of them, you're gonna have a little bit of trouble -as this fellow will gladly attest to.
Weather is no obstacle or excuse for the committed motorcyclist--even the extremes of Antarctic weather. That's why Bob Sawicki and Toby Weisser, two mechanics at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, built this chopper-style snowmobile from scraps four years ago:
“This is what McMurdo is throwing away,” Sawicki proudly pointed out to a visitor gawking at the heavy-framed snowmobile. The brake is a bent crowbar, the accelerator handle an old tent pin. Pre-bent pipes found in a waste metal recycle bin worked perfectly in shaping the frame.
“This was all stuff we found in the garbage — or headed to the garbage,” Weisser said.
The two mechanics, who work in the station’s Mechanical Equipment Center (MEC), spent their weeknights and Sundays off constructing the snow machine. They estimate it took about six weeks to build from start to finish, including a week salvaging parts out of recycle bins.
A discarded pickaxe, latched onto the long front forks, serves as an emergency break. So far, they haven’t had to test that feature. The tired motor, Sawicki said, really can’t pull the heavy frame too quickly.
Photographer Luke MacGregor caught a great sequence of shots Friday night, following the full moon as it rose through the Olympic Rings hanging beneath Tower Bridge in London. See the moon at different points in a gallery at Reuters. Link -via reddit
The grainy black and white
photo above was the very first photo from space. It was taken from an
altitude of 65 miles by a 35 mm camera aboard a V-2 rocket on October
24, 1946.
The US military launched dozens of these V-2 rockets, captured from the
Germans at the end of World War II, from the White Sands Missile Range.
They wanted to learn about how to build their own rockets, but invited
scientists to hitch along instruments to study the Earth's upper atmosphere
while they're launching them anyway.
Before this, the highest photo of Earth ever taken was from the 1935
Explorer II balloon, which went up 13.7 miles (the Kármán
line of 100 km or 62 miles is considered the boundary of outer space).
The famous "The Blue Marble" photo of Earth/NASA Johnson Space
Center
The first photograph from space that captured Earth in full view was
taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft as
they left Earth's orbit to fly to the Moon. The three astronauts aboard
the spacecraft took turns taking photos, and no
one knew for sure who took the photo above. We do know that astronaut
Eugene Cernan said
"I know we're not the first to discover this - but we'd like
to confirm, from the crew of America, that the world is round."
NASA archivist Mike Gentry later remarked that the iconic image, dubbed
"The Blue
Marble," is the most widely distributed image in human history.
[Updated - see below if Neatorama looks unformatted in your browser]
Hello, Neatoramanauts!
I'd like to welcome you to the new Neatorama (all you RSS readers, come
and take a look). We've been working
on this version for quite some time and we're excited that it's finally
here. The new blog is not simply a redesign - it is actually the biggest
change since the inception of this blog. Our developer Rommel
Santor has built a new blogging engine from the ground up. As a result,
we now have a custom software system that will enable us to do new and
neat things in the coming months.
There are quite a few changes, so let me give you a tour:
1. Larger photos and easier to read text We've made the blog column a bit wider, the typeface a bit bigger
and the leading (that's line-height to you CSS geeks and line spacing
to you word processor users) a bit more for easy readin'.
2. Love a post or a comment? Heart it!
Click on the grey heart in the post or comment to show your appreciation
- we'll use this metrics to help improve Neatorama's postings and reward
great comments.
3. Built-in Poll
New built-in polling capabilities will let us do quick and fun surveys
to see what you guys are thinking.
4. Comments on the homepage
This is quite nice: you can read and leave comments straight from the
homepage. Click the to
open the comment window:
The comment thread is nested two levels deep. You can reply to an existing
comment, or start a new comment thread on a different topic. We've also
updated our Comment
Policy, so please take a minute to read it.
To begin with, you can only post text comments, but with participation,
you'll be able to post links and images, as well as embed video clips
in your comments.
5. Keyboard shortcuts
If you're reading this on a desktop or a laptop, give this a try: Hit
J/K to go forward and backward a post, and hit C to open and close a post's
comment window on the homepage.
6. Neatorama Account
In order to leave a comment and participate in giveaways and contests,
you'll need to have a valid Neatorama account. Because we've changed our
blogging engine, we require that you register a new account (even if you've
registered one in the past - the system will recognize if you've had an
account with us before, and your past comments will then be associated
with the new account.)
Registration is easy, and you can use a pseudonym/screen name or real
name if you'd like. You do, however, need a valid email address as we
will email you an activation code to verify your account.
After you register an account, we'll send you an activation code via
email:
You can also sign in with Facebook or Twitter. If you sign in with Twitter,
you'd have to provide a valid email address afterwards so we can send
you the activation code.
One big benefit of registering an account is that you won't see
banner ads when logged into the blog ;)
7. User Dashboard
Your Neatorama Dashboard includes a neat Chartbeat counter showing real-time
visitors on Neatorama this very instant (yes, there are that many of you
on this blog right now), as well as your comment statistics and NeatoShop
orders and wish lists:
The Dashboard also has a feature called "My Discussions," which
lists all replies to your comments in one place. You can reply to these
comments there (just hover your mouse over the comment), so it's easy
to maintain conversations going across different posts:
You can change your commenting preference - for example, whether to get
email notification when someone replies to your comments and whether to
automatically follow a discussion by replying to a comment, at the Dashboard's
Preference page.
8. User Profile You can update your user profile in the Dashboard to tell other
Neatoramanauts a bit about yourself. Other users can view your user profile
by clicking on your Name in the comment, then initiate a conversation
with you either publicly or privately:
9. More Neat Stuff to Come!
That's just the beginning - we've got plenty of neat new features in the
pipeline. Stay tuned for a system to reward our best commenters with free
NeatoShop stuff, niche blogs under the Neatorama umbrella, and so on!
-----
There will, of course, be bugs. Layouts of many of the blog posts will
be off, and many comments will be missing (we're working to fill them
all back in).
If you found a bug, please email bugs neatorama dot com.
Please let us know in as much detail as possible what you encountered,
as well as a screenshot (if appropriate) and browser details. That will
help us out a great deal.
I'd like to thank Rommel for the
long hours and great effort that he has put into the project. I'd also
like to thank a lot of other people who helped as well. Robert Nienhuis
of Nienstudios
provided input on some of the styling elements in the new blog. Many Neatoramanauts
who participated in the alpha release helped us tremendously by testing
it out.
Lastly, I'd like to thank all of you who read this blog regularly - your
continued support makes this blog possible.
Update 8/5/12: Neatorama looks unformatted? You probably need to clear your browser's cache. Here is Google's guide on how to clear your cache in Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. If this doesn't work for you, it maybe an issue with our static content server not resolving for your browser. We're on it!
Update 8/6/12: Static content server issue is fixed - if you still see Neatorama not formatted correctly after clearing your cache, please email us!
