AC 72 out again...

 Yesterday Oracle took out their massive AC72 for a second trial day. That last time they had a break in the foil and had to return, I assume they have fixed this issue and maybe redesigned it. Oracle needs to test this boat to collect data for the final (if there is one) boat that will race in the AC next summer. It seems likely that Oracle will build another boat, I don't think they will use this one, beat it up, then sail it for the AC. They did biuld two for the last race, the Tri was built twice, I think they will do that again.

The problem is that the 'sailing season' is coming to an end in the bay. The wind will not be as strong and more storms will disrupt the water surface. Since the race will be in the summer, it would be best to test in the summer in similar conditions. But now the teams will have to practice in different conditions and the boat will respond differently.

 I would love to see these boats out testing and racing, The pictures don't really give them justice. I saw the Oracle 90 foot trimaran in San Diego and it was really something to see. I am sure this boat is the same, it is like a F1 car or an Indie race car. The thing is there are only a couple of them so to see one is very special. These boats will be some of the fastest sail boats  in the world, they are faster than power boats with 3 or 4 engines. Not many boats can match their speed, power included.

Lake County California

You may not know of Lake County California, the place where, on a pitch black night in '06, Sheriff Deputy Russell Perdock slammed his powerboat into a nearly stationary O'Day sailboat at high speed, killing passenger Lynn Thornton, a just-retired employee of the state of California. In a move that drastically undermined our faith in law enforcement and district attorneys, Lake County District Attorney Jon Hopkins inexplicably didn't charge Perdock with any crime, but rather charged Bismarck Dinius, a passenger on the idle sailboat who happened to be sitting in the helm position, with manslaughter. His defense cost Dinius a small fortune, but he was acquitted by a jury in a matter of minutes — about as big a slap in the face that a jury could have given Hopkins.
In a move that pretty much finished off what little faith we had left in the U.S. legal system, Melinda Haag, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, declined to reopen the case. Why, Melinda, why? You see nothing wrong with not charging someone for slamming his boat into another boat and killing someone? As for former D.A. Hopkins, who charged Dinius but not Perdock, he claims there was no corruption in his handling of the case. He reminds us of a woman who once tried to convince us that buttermilk was a diet beverage.

As for Dinius, he and his attorneys are suing the county of Lake, the Lake County Sheriff's Office, 34 county employees (in their inpidual and official capacities), Jon Hopkins, former Sheriff Rodney Mitchell, Russell Perdock, Dennis Ostini, Lloyd Wells, C. Brown, Captain James Bauman, James Samples, Wesley Frey, Dean Pick, Andy Davidson, and Sacramento County Sheriff's Dept. Sgt. Charles Slabaugh. Attorney Laurence Masson alleges that the county's conduct was “unconstitutional and corrupt” following the incident and throughout the court proceedings, accusing the employees of “conspiring” or “aiding and abetting one another” to conceal and fabricate evidence and defraud the court in order to prosecute Dinius for a “homicide that he did not commit.” Masson argues that this not only constitutes malicious prosecution but is also a violation of Dinius's civil rights as granted by Title 42 section 1983 of the United States Code.

Dawn at Vesta

The asteroid Vesta, photographed from the spacecraft Dawn. Dawn has been flying around the asteroid belt for five years. Vesta is one of the largest asteroids known and Dawn has been studying it lately. Dawn entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011. Following a year at Vesta, the spacecraft departed in July 2012 for Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015.

This image of the asteroid Vesta, calculated from a shape model, shows a tilted view of the topography of the south polar region. The image has a resolution of about 1,000 feet (300 meters) per pixel, and the vertical scale is 1.5 times that of the horizontal scale.

This perspective shows the topography, but removes the overall curvature of Vesta, as if the giant asteroid were flat and not rounded. An observer on Vesta would not have a view like this, because the distant features would disappear over the curvature of the horizon. (In the same way, if you were standing in North America, you would not be able to see a tall Mt. Everest in the distance, because of Earth's curvature.)

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Francis Joyon

In just 24 hours 1234 kilometres sailed. Francis Joyon’s latest achievement has just been ratified by the World Sailing Speed Record Council, the international body which is in charge of these records. John Reed, the General Secretary of the WSSRC, which is directed by Claude Breton, has just informed the Breton skipper, who already holds the outright solo round the world record with a time of just over 57 days.

San Salvador

San Salvador is being constructed in full public view at Spanish Landing San Diego, giving you the opportunity to watch from a close perspective as an example of the first modern industrial activity in the Americas comes to life before your eyes.

Enjoy a rare opportunity to visit this most historic of shipbuilding endeavors. As a Museum member you can visit the build site as often as you please, you will also be able to visit the site with your museum admission.

Building San Salvador at the prominent waterfront Spanish Landing village, some of what you will fine will be demonstrations on shipbuilding, blacksmith, sail making, Native American Kumeyaay demonstrations such as tulle boats, baskets, and pottery making. Ship models will be on display for your viewing enjoyment. Costumed docents from Cabrillo National Monument will be giving tours on select days. Gift shop available on site.

After construction, San Salvador will remain on exhibit as part of the Museum's fleet of historic and replica ships and will travel along the California coast as an ambassador for San Diego.

Webb Space Telescope

The first two of the 18 primary mirrors to fly aboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope arrived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The mirrors are going through receiving and inspection and will then be stored in the Goddard cleanroom until engineers are ready to assemble them onto the telescope's backplane structure that will support them.

Ball Aerospace, Boulder, Colo., under contract to Northrop Grumman, is responsible for the Webb’s optical technology and lightweight mirror system. On September 17, 2012, Ball Aerospace shipped the first two mirrors in custom containers designed specifically for the multiple trips the mirrors made through eight U.S. states while completing their manufacturing. The remaining 16 mirrors will make their way from Ball Aerospace to Goddard over the next 12 months as they await telescope integration in 2015.

"These first two completed flight mirror assemblies arriving at Goddard are an important first step leading towards the integration of the mirrors onto the flight structure," said Lee Feinberg, NASA Optical Telescope Element Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "These delivered flight mirrors meet their requirements, which is great news for Webb telescope being able to fulfill its scientific potential."

One of the Webb’s science goals is to look back through time to when galaxies were young. To see such far-off and faint objects, Webb needs a large mirror. A telescope’s sensitivity, or how much detail it can see, is directly related to the size of the mirror area that collects light from the objects being observed. A larger area collects more light, just like a larger bucket collects more water in a rain shower than a small one.

Webb’s scientists and engineers determined that a primary mirror 6.5 meters (21 feet 4 inches) across is what was needed to measure the light from these distant galaxies. Each of the 18 hexagonal-shaped mirror assemblies that make up the primary mirror measures more than 1.3 meters (4.2 feet) across, and weighs approximately 40 kilograms, or 88 pounds.

The Webb will be the first space astronomy observatory to use an actively-controlled, segmented mirror. The Webb is critical for future infrared observations. The Webb will be the premier observatory of the next decade. It will study every phase in the history of our universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of stellar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System. It is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

eXtreme Deep Field

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.

The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do the large, fuzzy red galaxies where the formation of new stars has ceased. These red galaxies are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their declining years. Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, more distant galaxies that were like the seedlings from which today's magnificent galaxies grew. The history of galaxies -- from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like our Milky Way -- is laid out in this one remarkable image.

Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits (made over the past decade) for a total of 50 days, with a total exposure time of 2 million seconds. More than 2,000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble's two premier cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends Hubble's vision into near-infrared light.

"The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before", said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) program.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars extraordinarily brighter than our sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a "time tunnel into the distant past." The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang.

Before Hubble was launched in 1990, astronomers could barely see normal galaxies to 7 billion light-years away, about halfway across the universe. Observations with telescopes on the ground were not able to establish how galaxies formed and evolved in the early universe.

Hubble gave astronomers their first view of the actual forms and shapes of galaxies when they were young. This provided compelling, direct visual evidence that the universe is truly changing as it ages. Like watching individual frames of a motion picture, the Hubble deep surveys reveal the emergence of structure in the infant universe and the subsequent dynamic stages of galaxy evolution.

The infrared vision of NASA's planned James Webb Space Telescope will be aimed at the XDF. The Webb telescope will find even fainter galaxies that existed when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. Because of the expansion of the universe, light from the distant past is stretched into longer, infrared wavelengths. The Webb telescope's infrared vision is ideally suited to push the XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled the early "dark ages" of the universe with light.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.

Hydrangea

Hydrangeas are nice flowers to have in a garden, especially if it is a damp location. These plants like shade and cooler temperatures and water of course. There are many varieties with interesting flower shapes and colors. These are a few I found in the area and just took a few pictures to capture this years flower. Soon they will be a memory once the cold comes and the plants loose there foliage.

ISS

The International Space Station is featured in this image photographed by an STS-133 crew member on space shuttle Discovery after the station and shuttle began their post-undocking relative separation. Undocking of the two spacecraft occurred at 7 a.m. (EST) on March 7, 2011. Discovery spent eight days, 16 hours, and 46 minutes attached to the orbiting laboratory.

Stopping traffic...

The space shuttle Endeavour, atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA, lands at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2012 in Los Angeles where it will be placed on public display at the California Science Center. Today's flight marks the final scheduled ferry flight of the Space Shuttle Program.

Halo Effect

This artist's illustration shows an enormous halo of hot gas (in blue) around the Milky Way galaxy. Also shown, to the lower left of the Milky Way, are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, two small neighboring galaxies. The halo of gas is shown with a radius of about 300,000 light years, although it may extend significantly further.

Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was used to estimate [link to press release] that the mass of the halo is comparable to the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. If the size and mass of this gas halo is confirmed, it could be the solution to the "missing-baryon" problem for the Galaxy.

In a recent study, a team of five astronomers used data from Chandra, ESA's XMM-Newton, and Japan's Suzaku satellite to set limits on the temperature, extent and mass of the hot gas halo. Chandra observed eight bright X-ray sources located far beyond the Galaxy at distances of hundreds of millions of light years. The data revealed that X-rays from these distant sources are selectively absorbed by oxygen ions in the vicinity of the Galaxy. The nature of the absorption allowed the scientists to determine that the temperature of the absorbing halo is between 1 million and 2.5 million Kelvins.

Other studies have shown that the Milky Way and other galaxies are embedded in warm gas, with temperatures between 100,000 and one million degrees, and there have been indications that a hotter component with a temperature greater than a million degrees is also present. This new research provides evidence that the mass in the hot gas halo enveloping the Milky is much greater than that of the warm gas.

Tree

While walking down a street, I came upon a large tree... This could be the opening line of a story and if fact it is in a way. I walked past this tree and just had to take a few pictures. If you have never seen a Sequoia Redwood, this is what a 'small' one looks like. The trunk is more than 7 feet across (2 meters) and this tree must be 150 feet (50 meters) tall. To take a picture you need to stand a bit of a distance back to get it all in.

Portraits: Saturn and its largest moon

Posing for portraits for NASA's Cassini spacecraft, Saturn and its largest moon, Titan, show spectacular colors in a quartet of images being released today. One image captures the changing hues of Saturn's northern and southern hemispheres as they pass from one season to the next.

A wide-angle view captures Titan passing in front of Saturn, as well as the planet's changing colors. Upon Cassini's arrival at Saturn eight years ago, Saturn's northern winter hemisphere was an azure blue. Now that winter is encroaching on the planet's southern hemisphere and summer on the north, the color scheme is reversing: blue is tinting the southern atmosphere and is fading from the north.

Cassini's visible-light cameras have seen a concentration of yellowish haze in the detached haze layer at the south pole of Titan since at least March 27. Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer spotted the massing of clouds around the south pole as early as May 22 in infrared wavelengths. After a June 27 flyby of the moon, Cassini released a dramatic image and movie showing the vortex rotating faster than the moon's rotation period. 

Some of these views, such as those of the polar vortex, are only possible because Cassini's newly inclined -- or tilted -- orbits allow more direct viewing of the polar regions of Saturn and its moons.
Scientists are looking forward to seeing more of the same -- new phenomena like Titan's south polar vortex and changes wrought by the passage of time and seasons -- during the remainder of Cassini's mission.

Endeavour

The space shuttle Endeavour makes a pass over San Francisco before making its final landing in Los Angeles. Today the shuttle flys for the last time before it is taken to the California Technology Museum. It is a sad day for all who followed the shuttle program and it is hard to see the last space craft end its career. The cost of space flight never came down to the levels predicted nor the risks never lessened. The Shuttle fleet did many great things and expanded our presence in space, it did what it was designed to do, build a space station, but with government officials always micro managing the projects at NASA, it was hard for the agency to have a long term plan and follow to it. The budget constantly changed and in-fighting and 'rice-bowl' wars pulled the agency in many different directions. I am sorry to see the shuttles go, but maybe some day we will have a system that we can be as proud of. The shuttles delivered.

SpeedDream27

 SpeedDream27
As you can tell I like to sail and sailboats. This is SpeedDream27, a new mono-hull that will try to break the speed record. As opposed to a multi-hull like the AC boats, this uses one hull but with appendages to foil like the Multi-hulled boats. This boat just looks wicked and it should be interesting to see it fly.

Whirlpool Galaxy

This image of the center of the Whirlpool Galaxy shows visible light from starlight, and light from the emission of hydrogen. Bright star clusters, highlighted in red, shed light emitted by hydrogen atoms. Intricate "dust spurs" branch out around the main spiral arms.

I remember seeing a picture of this galaxy when I was in elementary school. Of course then it was from a ground based telescope and the detail was not as good as the HST image. To me it was the classic galaxy image with the big swirl and arms, now we can see so much more detail and discern fine structure in the gas clouds and star distribution. As I studied Astronomy, in the days before the Hubble Space Telescope, optical astronomy seemed to be fading and being replaced by radio and other forms of study. But now with computer controlled and adjusted telescope mirrors, plus space-based telescopes. Optical astronomy has come back with spectacular results.

Endeavour flys for the last time...

NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) with space shuttle Endeavour mounted on top landed at Houston's Ellington Field at 10:40 a.m. CDT. 

The SCA and Endeavour, making the final ferry flight of NASA's Space Shuttle Program, are scheduled to land at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Friday, Sept. 21. In cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration, the SCA is scheduled to conduct low-level flyovers at about 1,500 feet above locations along the planned flight path.

The aircraft will depart Houston at dawn on Thursday and make a fueling stop at Biggs Army Air Field in El Paso before proceeding to Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. On Friday it will depart Dryden for a flyover of northern California and areas of the Los Angeles basin before landing at LAX between 11 a.m. and noon PDT. In October, Endeavour will move to the California Science Center to begin a new mission inspiring future explorers.

NASA's space shuttle fleet began setting records with its first launch on April 12, 1981 and continued to set high marks of achievement and endurance through 30 years of missions. Starting with Columbia and continuing with Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, the spacecraft has carried people into orbit repeatedly, launched, recovered and repaired satellites, conducted cutting-edge research and built the largest structure in space, the International Space Station. The final space shuttle mission, STS-135, ended July 21, 2011 when Atlantis rolled to a stop at its home port, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

As humanity's first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle pushed the bounds of discovery ever farther, requiring not only advanced technologies but the tremendous effort of a vast workforce. Thousands of civil servants and contractors throughout NASA's field centers and across the nation have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to mission success and the greater goal of space exploration.

AC72

Well after the first not so successful sail of the AC72 from the Oracle group, we are wondering how many boats Larry E will build. This first boat could be just a test-bed for the true race boat, but with the sailing season coming to an end in San Francisco, I and others think Larry E will take his team and boats to Hawaii and sail/test there over the winter.

The center 'pod' is an interesting design feature, it doesn't touch the water so it is not a hull, but it is large enough to hold equipment and add stability to the sail platform. I would like to see this machine up on a foil and see how fast it can fly, but I am thinking I would have to go to Hawaii to see it. San Francisco has a good summer wind, but come September/October, that wind dies out and the wind is much more related to massive storms passing through the bay area. That would not be good for testing or sailing a massive wing in choppy waters.

X-48C: Big toy or real plane?

Boeing and NASA’s remotely piloted X-48C aircraft successfully flew for the first time on Aug. 7, 2012, from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert.

The new X-48C model was transformed, or "modified" in engineering lingo, from the X-48B Blended Wing Body aircraft, which flew 92 flights at NASA Dryden between 2007 and 2010. The X-48C will be used to evaluate the low-speed stability and control of a low-noise version of a notional, future Hybrid Wing Body (HWB) aircraft design. The HWB design stems from concept studies being conducted by NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation project of future potential aircraft designs 20 years from now.

Primary changes to the C-model from the B-model were geared to transform it to an airframe that does a better job shielding engine noise from the ground – a potential improvement for communities around airports. External modifications included relocating the wingtip winglets inboard next to the engines, effectively turning them into twin tails. The aft deck of the aircraft was also extended about two feet to the rear. Finally, the project team replaced the X-48B’s three 50-pound-thrust jet engines with two 89-pound-thrust engines.

The X-48C retains most of the physical dimensions of the B-model, with a wingspan just longer than 20 feet and a weight of about 500 pounds. The aircraft has an estimated top speed of about 140 mph, and a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet.

Different sort of BANG....

This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years. In this image, representing Earth's night sky in 3.75 billion years, Andromeda (left) fills the field of view and begins to distort the Milky Way with tidal pull.

NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

"Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy," said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.

The solution came through painstaking NASA Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the motion of Andromeda, which also is known as M31. The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both.
Computer simulations derived from Hubble's data show that it will take an additional two billion years after the encounter for the interacting galaxies to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe.

Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today.

Soyuz TMA with a BANG!!!

The Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 32 Commander Gennady Padalka of Russia, NASA Flight Engineer Joe Acaba and Russian Flight Engineer Sergie Revin in a remote area near the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, on Monday, September 17, 2012. Padalka, Acaba and Revin returned from five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 31 and 32 crews.

Translations....

The two images below of the Italian sayings translate as follows:

The first one basically say; "The one who works gets a hump in the back (back pain), while to one who robs/steals works in a bank."

The second one says; "A house guest will smell like a fish after 3 days." (wear out his/her welcome).

SDSS J1004+4112

The gravity of a galaxy cluster called SDSS J1004+4112 warps and magnifies the light from a distant quasar. Light from the quasar, the bright core of a galaxy fed by a black hole, appears in the center of this image and four other locations around it. Other distant galaxies appear as arcs.

A dogs life..

This last weekend I rode a 50 mile road 'race' which benefited a local animal shelter. About 1500 riders did a big loop with a 1000 foot climb at about half way. The riders had costumes and at the break stops there was 'animal treats'.





I wanted to do a long ride and this was a good excuse to do one. The big hill is the same one I ride quite a bit so I didn't think much of it. The resat of the ride was easy except for all the stop signs and light... Hate stopping with clip on shoes. But all in all it was fun.



Victory at sea...

That doesn't look fun... Southern Ocean sailing is hard, no question about it.

International Etchells

 The International Etchells definitely has some of the prettiest lines of any racing boat.

Italian

NGC 6888

NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a cosmic bubble about 25 light-years across, blown by winds from its central, bright, massive star. This colorful portrait of the nebula uses narrow band image data combined in the Hubble palette. It shows emission from sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms in the wind-blown nebula in red, green and blue hues. NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years. The nebula's complex structures are likely the result of this strong wind interacting with material ejected in an earlier phase. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away.

Antares and Rho Ophiuchi

Why is the sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi so colorful? The colors result from a mixture of objects and processes. Fine dust illuminated from the front by starlight produces blue reflection nebulae. Gaseous clouds whose atoms are excited by ultraviolet starlight produce reddish emission nebulae. Backlit dust clouds block starlight and so appear dark. Antares, a red supergiant and one of the brighter stars in the night sky, lights up the yellow-red clouds on the lower center. Rho Ophiuchi lies at the center of the blue nebula near the top. The distant globular cluster M4 is visible just to the right of Antares, and to the lower left of the red cloud engulfing Sigma Scorpii. These star clouds are even more colorful than humans can see, emitting light across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Just a cool picture

This graceful arc traces an Atlas V rocket climbing through Thursday's early morning skies over Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, USA. Snug inside the rocket's Centaur upper stage were NASA's twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP), now in separate orbits within planet Earth's Van Allen radiation belts.

Speed sailing on San Francisco Bay

The super fast French Tri L'Hydroptere set a speed record on the bay last week, 37 knots! I was surprised to hear as others that there was no official speed record on the bay, so the Tri easily set a bar for only a few to try to break. Of course with the AC coming next summer and the massive AC72 cats plying the waters, that record could be broken. Of course L'Hydroptere is still in the bay, waiting for the weather window to Hawaii, and she could still go out on a good air day and smash that 37 knot mark. She has already done 50 knots before, so lets just wait and see if L'Hydro will raise the bar before the AC72's can start to challenge it.

Pleiades

Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters. The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light years away, and only 13 light years across. Quite evident in the above photograph are the blue reflection nebulae that surround the brighter cluster stars. Low mass, faint, brown dwarfs have also been found in the Pleiades. The Pleiades is sometimes mistaken for the 'Little Dipper'. Though the Pleiades looks similar, the Little Dipper is actually to the north and contains Polarus, the North Star. The Pleiades lyes to the West of the Constellation Orion and can be seen on Fall evenings, a pair of binaculars helps to see the mass of stars behind the main bright group or seven.

Airglow and the Milky Way

The Milky Way's graceful arc stretches over prominent peaks in the Italian Alps known as Tre Cime di Lavaredo. A 180 degree wide-angle panorama made in four exposures on August 24, the scene does look to the north and the sky is suffused with an eerie greenish light. Still, the subtle glowing bands are not aurorae, but airglow. Unlike aurorae powered by collisions with energetic charged particles and seen at high latitudes, airglow is due to chemiluminescence, the production of light in a chemical reaction, and found around the globe. The chemical energy is provided by the Sun's extreme ultraviolet radiation. Like aurorae, the greenish hue of this airglow does originate at altitudes of 100 kilometers or so dominated by emission from excited oxygen atoms.

Curiosity

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove about 70 feet (about 21 meters) on the mission's 21st Martian day, or sol (Aug. 30, 2012) and then took images with its Navigation Camera that are combined into this scene, which includes the fresh tracks. The landing area can be seen with the disruption of the grown cover by the landing rocket exhaust. Curiosity will now begin the long drive on it's exploration of Mars.

Northern Exposure

Last weekend I took a short trip up to the state of Washington to see my cousin and family. The drive up is not bad, just takes several hours driving through the Pacific Northwest.

One thing that is always nice is to be greeted by Lincoln, my cousin’s dog. As soon as I pull into the drive way, Lincoln is there barking and wagging his tail. At this time of year the berries and fruit are reaching there best and on the property there is a wide assortment of fruit trees and wild berries.

I spent a few minute picking plums and then moved to berries. Mostly black berries, they have a standard variety of berry but they have Imperial variety as well. These are very large berries and they have a taste similar to apple when you first pop one in your mouth, then that black berry finish taste comes in. The apples and pears were still had a little to go so we left them on the tree, but the plums made up for it.

Also a ride on the canoe was a given, and of course Lincoln had to go. The fun thing is that Lincoln love to ride the canoe but hates water. It makes for a fun time having the dog run around the canoe and keeping it from tipping. But it is always fun.