Category Archives: Space

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is right

Posted on August 28, 2009 | Comments Off on The Old Farmer’s Almanac is right

Sunspots, or their lack, really do affect global weather, and probably the climate as well. The Old Farmer’s Almanac has for many years been basing its annual forecasts on a formula involving Sol’s outbreak cycle, though frequently pooh-poohed by meteorologists. Hah.

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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space, Weather/Climate

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Orion Nebulae

Posted on August 27, 2009 | Comments Off on Orion Nebulae

OrionNebulae.jpg

Old School. The classic shot. At one thousand five hundred light years, it won’t be a weekend trip.

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Tilt

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Comments Off on Tilt

AxialTiltObliquity.JPG

The latest global warming scare? The warming oceans (that aren’t, actually, warming) could cause the Earth’s normal tilt of 23.5 degrees from the vertical to increase. Then what? They don’t say. But when it comes to Pap & Tax (otherwise known as Cap & Trade) the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is lobbying for a wait-a-minute debate on what could cause our drift into a Third World economy.

Via Watts Up With That.

UPDATE: Good analysis of the fraud by Norman Rogers, a former Zero Population Growth activist who remembers that exaggeration and scare stories produced membership in ZPG far better than facts.

MORE: Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee explain, in their 2002 book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, what an increased tilt might mean: "…if we tilted too much, or if the tilt shifted, our climate would become more extreme or be thrown into chaos. This may have happened to Mars, in fact, allowing that planet to lose its oceans."

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Getting Spirit out of the sandtrap

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Comments Off on Getting Spirit out of the sandtrap

When all you’ve got on Mars is a six-wheeled rover, and no prospects of getting a person there in the next generation or two, there’s no end of ingenuity you won’t come up with to get the blessed thing out of the sandtrap it’s driven into. Especially when you have no certain idea of what the sand is actually like.

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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space

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We are star stuff

Posted on August 17, 2009 | Comments Off on We are star stuff

An old story, panspermia. But always nice to have fresh evidence. This time, it’s from a comet.

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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space

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To the edge of space

Posted on August 16, 2009 | Comments Off on To the edge of space

Six years ago Mrs. Charm, Mr. Boy and I bought the rancho from a couple who were moving away from Texas. She was a homemaker. He was an airline pilot who had flown U-2 spy planes before he retired from the Air Force. I won’t mention names, they’d probably not like me to.

I’ve read about the U-2 so I have some idea of what it is like to work in full pressure suit at seventy thousand feet–more than twice as high as jetliners cruise. But, until now, I’d never seen the curvature of the earth from a U-2’s cockpit, out there on the edge of the black. Magnificent view really.

Via Flightblogger.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Rancho Roly Poly, Space, Texana

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In search of distant planets

Posted on August 7, 2009 | Comments Off on In search of distant planets

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Kepler, the robot spacecraft named for the sixteenth century astronomer who founded celestial mechanics (though today’s astronomers like to forget he made his living casting horoscopes), has confirmed the previous discovery of a Jupiter-sized giant in its first workout in the black. Still to come: finding new planets, especially habitable Earth-size ones. None are imaged directly, but inferred by the dimming of their star/sun as they pass in front of it.

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Posted in Space

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