Vendee Globe: More carnage

The 20-strong fleet that started the Vendée Globe has already been reduced to 16 and the trauma of this toughest of sailing races continued on the eighth day, with the news that Jérémie Beyou (Maître CoQ) had suffered a broken hydraulic jack in his keel. With a sudden clean break causing his boat to lurch his canting keel was left swinging loose beneath the boat. He immobilised it with ropes but was taking in water where the keel is attached to the boat and and is headed to Santo Vincente, Mindelo, in the Cape Verde islands, 40 miles away, at a speed of 5-6 knots. He should arrive on Sunday night.

“I heard a noise,” Beyou, who had been in seventh and was part of the lead group, said. “I had been sailing without a problem all day long, the boat was going at a speed of 21 knots, and suddenly I felt the direction change. The hydraulic jack is broken, it’s a very clean break, the attachment between the keel head and the jack is gone. The pumps are pumping the water out of the boat. The damaged parts are very sensitive ones, key ones. I turned downwind to limit the damage but water was coming in anyway. I need to find a quieter place to think about what to do. I can’t go faster than 5-6 knots so it should take me 6-7 hours to reach a calmer area off Cape Verde.What a tough blow for the Maître CoQ skipper. Since then, Jérémie Beyou has been forced to divert to Cape Verde to seek shelter and try to find a solution to this major technical issue.

Everything was going perfectly last night on Maître CoQ, as the monohull was effortlessly sailing downwind at a speed of 21 knots. Beyou was resting in the cockpit when he heard a huge muffled noise. The boat then luffed up and the keel lurched to 10 degrees.

The Maître CoQ skipper soon realised the head of his keel hydraulic jack – which allows it to move laterally and makes it more efficient - had broken. Beyou managed to secure it with ropes but the repairing will not resist the thousands and thousands of miles still ahead in this round-the-world race. Today, with a 25-knot wind and a rough sea, Beyou has already had to restrain his Maître CoQ in order to preserve his repairing.

Luckily enough, the Cape Verde islands are relatively close and provide a welcome shelter while thinking hard to find a possible solution to this tricky technical problem.

Vendée Globe

Missing something..

Sam Davies is safe but out of the race after dismasting on Thursday night. She has switched on her engine and is heading to Madeira, 100 miles away, at about five knots. The weather is being kinder her and she was expected arrive on Saturday morning. She will be met there by Romain Attanasio, her partner and Erwan Lemeilleur, Savéol’s boat captain, who are arriving on Friday night. Davies will soon be back with her 13-month-old son, Ruben, but must have wished it would be under different circumstances and at least 74 days later.

She was near the centre of a depression with a 35 knots of wind and treacherous cross seas and was preparing to put a third reef in the mainsail, when she heard and felt the mast go.

"It was quite difficult conditions because I had just gone through the cold front and I had a really cross sea,” Davies said. “I was getting ready to my foul weather gear on and that’s when the squall was just finishing and the wind was dropping and the boat jumped off the top of the top of a wave and that’s when I had the impact.

"I could hear the mast rubbing against the hull and down the whole side of the hull and under the boat, so I knew that it could damage the hull if I was unlucky, so the main thing was to close all the watertight bulkheads in case it did get pierced.”

Davies, who finished fourth in the last Vendée Globe, waited until the wind had eased before cutting away the mast and rigging and with them any chance of finishing her second Vendée Globe.

MACS0647-JD The farthest galaxy

The farthest galaxy appears as a diminutive blob that is only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way galaxy. But it offers a peek back into a time when the universe was 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years.The newly discovered galaxy, named MACS0647-JD, was observed 420 million years after the big bang, the theorized beginning of the universe. Its light has traveled 13.3 billion years to reach Earth.

This find is the latest discovery from a program that uses natural zoom lenses to reveal distant galaxies in the early universe. The Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH),an international group led by Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is using massive galaxy clusters as cosmic telescopes to magnify distant galaxies behind them. This effect is called gravitational lensing.

Along the way, 8 billion years into its journey, light from MACS0647-JD took a detour along multiple paths around the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0647+7015. Without the cluster's magnification powers, astronomers would not have seen this remote galaxy.Because of gravitational lensing, the CLASH research team was able to observe three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with the Hubble telescope. The cluster's gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making the images appear about eight, seven, and two times brighter than they otherwise would that enabled astronomers to detect the galaxy more efficiently and with greater confidence.

"This cluster does what no manmade telescope can do," said Postman. "Without the magnification, it would require a Herculean effort to observe this galaxy."

MACS0647-JD is so small it may be in the first steps of forming a larger galaxy. An analysis shows the galaxy is less than 600 light-years wide. Based on observations of somewhat closer galaxies, astronomers estimate that a typical galaxy of a similar age should be about 2,000 light-years wide. For comparison, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy companion to the Milky Way, is 14,000 light-years wide. Our Milky Way is 150,000 light-years across.

"This object may be one of many building blocks of a galaxy,"said the study's lead author, Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "Over the next 13 billion years, it may have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of merging events with other galaxies and galaxy fragments."

The galaxy was observed with 17 filters,spanning near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths, using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Coe, a CLASH team member, discovered the galaxy in February while poring over a catalogue of thousands of gravitationally lensed objects found in Hubble observations of 17 clusters in the CLASH survey.But the galaxy appeared only in the two reddest filters.

AC 72's Artemis and Prada

Artemis out sailing and looking good.

 Artimis was out getting a little practice on a nice winter day. No foil but still looks good on one amma.

Prada... I think you are missing some of your sail.....

A crane accident tore a section of Prada's wing while lifting to mount, I assume they have replacement parts available for a quick repair.

W44

Supernova remnant W44 is the focus of this new image created by combining data from the European Space Agency's Herschel and XMM-Newton space observatories. W44 is the vast purple sphere that dominates the left hand side of this image, and measures about 100 light-years across. XMM-Newton data reveal that the remnant is filled with X-ray emission from extremely hot gas.

Herschel's three-colour infrared view comprises PACS 70 and 160 micron and SPIRE 250 micron images. X-ray data from XMM-Newton's EPIC instrument for W44 only has been added in light and dark blue to represent high- (2–8 keV) and low-energy (1.2–2 keV) X-ray emission, respectively. The field of view is about one degree across.

Greek landscapes

A friend in Greece sent these pictures of northern Greece. I loved Greece and am hoping to return and visit. There are so many places and so much to see, it is a wonderful country. It is hard to see all that is happening now with the economic crisis, the people of Greece are made out to be lazy and cheats, but most people earn very little and have to work several jobs and work long hours. The tax code is set up so that it is cheaper to earn less than more, unless you earn way more. My friends all have college degrees and work in professional careers, but earn about 75% less than I do for the same job.

Just a cool image of Saturn...

False color of Saturn, interesting...

Eclispe

The Total Solar Eclipse the other day was caught on video from Oz (Australia). This is a NASA video of totality.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=155578101

Vendee Globe

The Vendee Globe around the world fleet sails away from Les Sables, but not without some early damage. Betrand De Broc had to return due to a small hole in the hull of his boat, after a collision with one of his rigid inflatable support boats 25 minutes before the start. He will be re-starting soon. The more significant report comes from early race leader Marc Guillemot onboard Safran, who had to turn around and head back to Les Sables after hearing a loud "bang". He has now been forced to retire from the race - the keel had broken off !

The Vendee Globe is the single most compelling event in our sport. Yes, it’s too French. And yes, until now the organizers didn’t seem to care if anyone outside France noticed. But that is all changing, and very, very quickly, and we’re extremely excited that this move comes just as the deepest and most equal fleet ever sets off into the stormy Atlantic.

Artemis 72

Artemis 72 goes out for an easy sail in light San Francisco air. Since the weather is still so nice I am sure they had a good time, but once the winter storms come, I am sure it will be different. Lets hope this one stays up-right and in one piece.