Weekend in southern Oregon

Bandon Beach

This past weekend I took a drive to the southern Oregon coast. This is the area where I would go as a child to spend my summer vacation. The Oregon coast in this area has many large rock formations on the beach and just off shore. These are referred to a “sea stacks", like in hay stacks. The drive out is nice once you leave the main freeway and get to the state routes, lots of winding through tree lined river and stream valleys. There are several rivers which wind down to the sea and each river has a road that parallels it. I took the highway that goes out to the coastal town of Reedsport and this road follows the Umpqua River. At this time of year the fall salmon are coming in and the rivers have many small boats with fishermen trying their luck.



Bandon Rocks



Once on the coast, the road took me south through the town of Coos Bay and finally to the small town of Bandon, my destination. I have been to Bandon many times and always loved the beach with the big rocks. The town is nothing special but the coast is great. Heading north from Bandon, and before Coos Bay, is a wonderful area called Shore Acres and Point Argos. This is a state beach area and is very interesting to walk and hike, plus there are some beaches to go on. Like most of Oregon beaches, it can be windy and cool so you need to be prepared.

Shore Acres

Heading farther up the coast, past Coos Bay, there are many little fishing towns and surprisingly a lot of lakes very close to the ocean. Also there is a very large area of dunes. The sand dunes are fun to go out on, kind of like the desert but on the coast with fog and clouds. If you ever pass this area, stop and have a look.  There are several places to rent buggies or just hike out on the sand.

Nice beach near Florence

The town of Reedsport is nothing really but further up is Florence. This town has a nice harbor and old town, kind of touristy but it is nice to walk around in, plus a few good restaurants. At Florence you can take the highway on north to Newport or turn east and go in land, following the Siuslaw River. This is a nice drive and it takes about one hour to get to Eugene. If you stay on the 101 highway going north, the road will be mostly on the ocean, it will be slower but a great view of the ocean.

Moving slow.....

Had to add a few more of the move of the Shuttle. Hard to see it being put away, but it was a sight to see. If you ever wanted to get up close, this was it...

Endeavour on the road again..

The space shuttle Endeavour on the streets of Los Angeles as it heads to its new home at the California Science Center, Friday, Oct. 12, 2012. Endeavour, built as a replacement for space shuttle Challenger, completed 25 missions, spent 299 days in orbit, and orbited Earth 4,671 times while traveling 122,883,151 miles. Beginning Oct. 30, the shuttle will be on display in the CSC’s Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, embarking on its new mission to commemorate past achievements in space and educate and inspire future generations of explorers.

This is the normal NASA talk, but I am sad to see the shuttle fleet be put in museums rather than put into space. This is another short-sighted move on the US Government. And of course NASA will always swing from one direction to the other at the whim of the current administrations wishes.... We would never have gone to the moon the way we did, when we did today, to much crap goes on and too many fingers it in the way.

Dragon on station

These images are from the NASA video of the Dragon craft docking with the ISS this morning. The craft is carrying 885 pounds of supplies and will take 1600 pounds back to Earth in about three weeks.

This is the first commercial resupply mission and it follows a test mission over the summer. There will be eleven more trips up by Dragon craft in the contract.

It is amazing that the company could build a ship and start to run martial up in such a short time. The US spent billions on the space program.

Planetary Nebulas

This gallery shows four planetary nebulas from the first systematic survey of such objects in the solar neighborhood made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The planetary nebulas shown here are NGC 6543, also known as the Cat's Eye, NGC 7662, NGC 7009 and NGC 6826. In each case, X-ray emission from Chandra is colored purple and optical emission from the Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue.

A planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that the Sun should experience several billion years from now. When a star like the Sun uses up all of the hydrogen in its core, it expands into a red giant, with a radius that increases by tens to hundreds of times. In this phase, a star sheds most of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that will soon contract to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful, shell-like filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.

Washing Machine...

IMOCA Open 60 Alex Thomson Racing Hugo Boss during a training session before the Vendée Globe in the English Channel..The Vendée Globe is a round-the-world single-handed yacht race, sailed non-stop and without assistance.

X-ray nova: Swift J1745-26

NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole.

"Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they're essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one Swift has seen," said Neil Gehrels, the mission's principal investigator, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "This is really something we've been waiting for."

An X-ray nova is a short-lived X-ray source that appears suddenly, reaches its emission peak in a few days and then fades out over a period of months. The outburst arises when a torrent of stored gas suddenly rushes toward one of the most compact objects known, either a neutron star or a black hole.

The rapidly brightening source triggered Swift's Burst Alert Telescope twice on the morning of Sept. 16, and once again the next day.

Named Swift J1745-26 after the coordinates of its sky position, the nova is located a few degrees from the center of our galaxy toward the constellation Sagittarius. While astronomers do not know its precise distance, they think the object resides about 20,000 to 30,000 light-years away in the galaxy's inner region.

Ground-based observatories detected infrared and radio emissions, but thick clouds of obscuring dust have prevented astronomers from catching Swift J1745-26 in visible light.

The nova peaked in hard X-rays -- energies above 10,000 electron volts, or several thousand times that of visible light -- on Sept. 18, when it reached an intensity equivalent to that of the famous Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant that serves as a calibration target for high-energy observatories and is considered one of the brightest sources beyond the solar system at these energies.

Even as it dimmed at higher energies, the nova brightened in the lower-energy, or softer, emissions detected by Swift's X-ray Telescope, a behavior typical of X-ray novae. By Wednesday, Swift J1745-26 was 30 times brighter in soft X-rays than when it was discovered and it continued to brighten.

"The pattern we're seeing is observed in X-ray novae where the central object is a black hole. Once the X-rays fade away, we hope to measure its mass and confirm its black hole status," said Boris Sbarufatti, an astrophysicist at Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy, who currently is working with other Swift team members at Penn State in University Park, Pa.

The black hole must be a member of a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) system, which includes a normal, sun-like star. A stream of gas flows from the normal star and enters into a storage disk around the black hole. In most LMXBs, the gas in the disk spirals inward, heats up as it heads toward the black hole, and produces a steady stream of X-rays.

But under certain conditions, stable flow within the disk depends on the rate of matter flowing into it from the companion star. At certain rates, the disk fails to maintain a steady internal flow and instead flips between two dramatically different conditions -- a cooler, less ionized state where gas simply collects in the outer portion of the disk like water behind a dam, and a hotter, more ionized state that sends a tidal wave of gas surging toward the center.

Craziness.....

U.S. Air Force, Col. Joe Kittinger steps off a balloon-supported gondola at an altitude of 102,800 feet. In freefall for 4.5 minutes at speeds up to 614 mph and temperatures as low as -94 degrees Fahrenheit, he opened his parachute at 18,000 feet. This was a 1960 test of high altitude ejection from aircraft. The airforce wanted to know if a pilot could survive ejection at extreme altitudes.



Col. Joe Kittinger, 1960



Felix Baumgartner is aiming for an altitude of 23 miles, just over three miles higher than Kittinger attained in 1960. And he hopes to break the sound barrier; Kittinger fell just shy of that.

Baumgartner is aiming to jump from 120,000 feet, or 23 miles. Kittinger plunged from 102,800 feet, or 19.5 miles.

Baumgartner expects to accelerate to 690 mph in order to break the sound barrier, or Mach 1, somewhere between 102,000 feet and 107,000 feet up. Kittinger was clocked at a maximum 614 mph, equivalent at that altitude to Mach 0.9.

Baumgartner will ascend in a pressurized capsule hoisted by a 30 million-cubic-foot helium balloon, 335 feet tall when inflated. Kittinger rode an open, unpressurized gondola that was lifted by a 3 million-cubic-foot balloon, 184 feet tall when inflated.



Felix Baumgartner, 2012



Baumgartner will wear a custom-made full-pressure suit. Kittinger wore an Air Force standard partial-pressure suit. He was initially claustrophobic in his suit and had counseling to overcome his anxiety.

Even though I am a pilot, I find skydiving boring. It is just falling, there is no skill, just controlling the shut once it is open. I know a lot of people do it for the thrill, but I can care less, but each is to their own.....

Joe Kittinger did have balls to do this in 1960. It was for a purpose and showed that a pilot could survive the free fall if the pressure suit worked. Of course Kittinger nearly died in a jump and two others have died attempting to break this record.

Mariquita

Mariquita last Friday near Saint Tropez, nothing else needs to be said.

SpaceX New Dragon



Dragon's tail



SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket attached to the cargo-only capsule called Dragon lifts off from the launch pad for the first pay cargo run to the ISS. This is a long awaited flight of a commercial private launch of a rocket into space. Once only a government could afford to spend the money to launch a craft into space, now private companies are stepping into that field.

The capsule will attach to the ISS in about three days and spend about three weeks at the station. During this time the 1000 pounds of cargo will be removed and about 2000 pounds of cargo packed into the ship. Unlike other cargo ships, the Dragon will splash down with the material. Other cargo ships burn up on re-entry. The Soyuz craft are too small to return the crew and cargo, so this is the first chance to return a load of experiments and supplies.