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

The NASA employee indicated that they are likely pubic domain due to the fact that NASA is a government agency. If this is not the case I will gladly remove them if legally notified to do so. I would love to be able to properly credit these images.

This batch is from the final Atlantis mission in May. They were taken from one of the f-15s patrolling the skies over KSC.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Here we go. I found one of these images on Discovery. I assume the same credit applies to all.

Lt. Col. Gabriel Green and Capt. Zachary Bartoe patrol the airspace in an F-15E Strike Eagle as the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches May 14, 2010, at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Colonel Green is the 333rd Fighter Squadron commander and Captain Bartoe is a 333rd FS weapons system officer. Both aircrew members are assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C. (U.S. Air Force photo/Capt. John Peltier)

click for larger

There is a chance I’ll be getting more so tune in again soon!

The next landing opportunity at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is at 10:23 a.m. ET

via CNN

UPDATE:

The space shuttle Discovery will not land today. The last landing attempt for Kennedy will take place tomorrow at 7:34 a.m, then it’s on to plan B – Edwards Air Force Base in California.

UPDATE: She’s home!

You can click through for the HD version!

I found this video over at NASA this morning. It’s called the 2009 Tour of the Cryosphere. Produced by the Goddard Space Flight Center, it combines the satellite imagery with computer animation to take the viewer on a brief tour of our planet’s frozen regions –- the cryosphere.

“The Tour of the Cryosphere 2009″ combines satellite imagery and state-of-the-art computer animation software to create a fact-filled and visually stunning tour that shows viewers the icy reaches of Antarctica, the glacier-pocked regions along the Andes Mountains, the winter snows of the American West, the drifting expanse of polar sea ice, and the shrinking Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland.

– NASA

The video is in .ASX format which leaves Mac users in the dark so I’ve re-encoded and mirrored it here. It’s a nice piece.

Crepuscular rays occur when objects such as mountain peaks or clouds partially shadow the sun’s rays. The name crepuscular means “relating to twilight” and these rays are observed at sunrise and sunset. Crepuscular rays appear to diverge outward from the setting sun, and are visible only when the atmosphere contains enough haze or dust particles so that sunlight in unshadowed areas can be scattered toward the observer.

The light rays are actually parallel, but appear to converge to the sun due to “perspective”, the same visual effect that makes parallel railroad tracks appear to converge in the distance. Crepuscular rays are often red or yellow in appearance because blue light from the sun is selectively scattered out of the beam by air molecules.

- University of Illinois

I live about 15 miles WSW of Tampa and crepuscular rays are a common occurrence. I suspect that what is causing them here are the buildings in downtown Tampa to the east in conjunction with the “flatness” of Florida. I’ve been observing them for years about 1/2 hour before sunrise and have never really considered them uncommon phenomena. It will be interesting over the next few days to see if they appear in the same configuration. If so then they are not caused by clouds… and CERTAINLY not by mountains.

This morning’s apparition.

I was fortunate enough to pick up an Orion 10-inch SkyQuest Dob, Orion 9 and 25 mm plössls, a Celestron 3.6mm plössl, and an Orion DeepView 35mm multi-coated lens for a measly $200 at a “we’re getting divorced get this the hell out of our house” sale.

Needs a little cleaning up but it’s all in GREAT shape! Now if I could only get first light for the brand new ETX125 AT I got for $200 two years ago at a clearance sale, I’d be happy!

Anyhoo, I’ve rectified this and verified/updated all my links. I hope nobody thought I had just deleted them from my blogroll… no one even told me.

At any rate, here it is. This was definitely one of those launches that looked ALOT better to the maked eye from my location and didn’t transfer well to video.

NASA’s Kepler Launch (from my front yard) 
(launches on YouTube in a new window)

 If you missed the NASA TV coverage, I’ve mirrored it here.