Dirty Skies

Archive for the ‘In the News’ Category

Here is a flight through the Saturnian system from the eye of the Cassini probe! These guys are putting together a full IMAX rez film from from NASA stills. Again as with my last post, you must watch this 2 minute preview in full-screen HD… astounding! Find out more about this film here.

Posted on YouTube by yesterday2221.
This is crazy. I recommend you watch it full-screen in 1080p!

I stumbled upon this fantastic 360VR image taken on the flight deck of the space shuttle Discovery during its decommissioning in the Orbiter Processing Facility (now the new “Employee Lounge” for those still with jobs).

The official decommission date of Discovery was listed as March 9, 2011. By its last mission, Discovery had flown 148 million miles (238 million km) in 39 missions, completed 5,830 orbits, and spent 365 days in orbit in over 27 years. Discovery flew more flights than any other orbiter in the fleet. Discovery’s final flight was February 24, 2011.

Discovery will replace Enterprise in the Smithsonian’s display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

I received this email with a request to help spread the word. Sounds interesting!

This will be one of the better years for Perseids; the moon, which often interferes with the Perseids, will not be a problem this year. So I’m putting together something that’s never been done before: a spatial analysis of the Perseid meteor stream. We’ve had plenty of temporal analyses, but nobody has ever been able to get data over a wide area — because observations have always been localized to single observers. But what if we had hundreds or thousands of people all over North America and Europe observing Perseids and somebody collected and collated all their observations? This is crowd-sourcing applied to meteor astronomy. I’ve been working for some time on putting together just such a scheme. I’ve got a cute little Java applet that you can use on your laptop to record the times of fall of meteors you see, the spherical trig for analyzing the geometry (oh my aching head!) and a statistical scheme that I *think* will reveal the spatial patterns we’re most likely to see — IF such patterns exist. I’ve also got some web pages describing the whole shebang.

They start here

Chris Crawford