Fire in the SkyS


Sun

Stunning Views of the Sun...and Discovery?!

Jonathan Woods
MSNBC.com
Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:27 UTC
Amateur astrophotographer Alan Friedman has done it again. Adding to an already impressive collection of outer space images, he just published two more magnificent photos of the sun. First, here's a view of a gassy prominence flaring off the sun like a cloud:

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© Alan FriedmanThis section of the solar disk was imaged at the Winter Star Party on West Summerland Key in Florida, in the midst of 30 mph winds. The massive detached solar prominence was visible for hours. Skies were quite steady, despite the wind.
To add some perspective on the sheer magnitude of what Friedman is documenting, look at the dark spot below the prominence. That spot is roughly twice the size of the Earth.

Using the same specialized equipment he used in October 2010 to produce the last set of breathtaking images, Friedman looks at the deep red end of the light spectrum to capture the emissions given off by hydrogen gas in the sun's atmosphere.

He also came away with a historic glimpse of Discovery as it was docked to the International Space Station, during the space shuttle's final mission.

Friedman said he captured the event, lasting just a fifth of a second, after making an 1,800-mile drive from Buffalo, N.Y., to the Winter Star Party in West Summerland Key, Fla.
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Question

Ohio, US: Newark Police Puzzled By Mystery 'Boom'


WBNS-10TV
Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:33 UTC
Image
© Unknown

Police were investigating the cause of a mysterious noise on Monday after multiple people reported hearing it and feeling it.

Residents living in the area of Idlewilde and Weiant avenues called police on Sunday afternoon to report what sounded and felt like a loud explosion.
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Meteor

'Mushroom-shaped light and loud boom' rocks remote Siberia


YouTube
Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:55 UTC
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Meteor

SOTT Focus: Spectacular Russian rocket launch - more evidence of comet dust loading our atmosphere

Niall Bradley
Sott.net
Mon, 07 Mar 2011 04:28 UTC
Image
Earlier today SOTT posted this video of a rocket launch cum 'UFO spiral'. The person who uploaded it to YouTube managed to convince him or herself that the spectacular display was the result of UFOs "taking over control of the rocket" once it reached a certain altitude. Well I've since located other videos of the launch minus the misleading text and the "blinking lights" (which appear to have been added later for effect, if not for outright disinformation purposes). Here is a YouTube video entitled 'Launch of the Soyuz 2 rocket carrying Glonass-K satellite':


No blinking lights surrounding the rocket and no text to tell you it's aliens from another planet taking remote control of it either.
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Meteor

Drip, drip disclosure! NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite

Garrett Tenney
FoxNews.com
Sun, 06 Mar 2011 12:46 UTC
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© Journal of Cosmology / Riccardo Guerrero / Richard B. HooverA photograph taken through a scanning electron microscope of a CI1 meteorite (right) is similar in size and overall structure to the giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox (left), an organism found here on planet Earth, a NASA scientist said.
We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.

That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies -- comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.
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Meteor

In Case You Thought We Were Safe: Earth Under Threat From Dark Comets

Heather Catchpole
Cosmos Online
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:42 UTC
Comets could be the most significant impact hazard to Earth, with sky surveys underestimating the number that are potentially devastating by a factor of between 10 and 100, British astrophysicists say.

Astronomers may be missing these so-called 'dark comets' because their icy and reflective surfaces have become hidden under an obscuring layer of dust.


Comment: We recommend reading the works of James McCanney, especially his Plasma Theory of Comets, to understand that comets are not "dirty snowballs" after all.


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© NASAUnrecognised risk: Earth may lie in the path of many thousands of unseen 'dark' comets.
Near Earth objects (NEOs) are comets or asteroids that have been nudged into a possible collision path with the Earth. The international program to discover NEOs; Spaceguard, which includes NASA's NEO program, has identified around 6,000 NEOs so far, most of which are asteroids.
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Meteor

Beautiful Time-Lapse of Milky Way over Lake Tahoe

Edw Lynch
Laughingsquid
Sat, 26 Feb 2011 02:28 UTC
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Meteor

What's Hitting Earth?

Dauna Coulter
Science NASA
Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:51 UTC
Delta Aquarid Fireball
© NASAA Southern Delta Aquarid fireball streaks over one of the network cameras in July 2010: movie.

Every day about 100 tons of meteoroids -- fragments of dust and gravel and sometimes even big rocks - enter the Earth's atmosphere. Stand out under the stars for more than a half an hour on a clear night and you'll likely see a few of the meteors produced by the onslaught. But where does all this stuff come from? Surprisingly, the answer is not well known.

Now NASA is deploying a network of smart cameras across the United States to answer the question, What's Hitting Earth?

Did that meteor you saw blazing through the sky last night come from the asteroid belt? Was it created in a comet's death throes? Or was it a piece of space junk meeting a fiery demise?

"When I get to work each morning and power up my computer, there's an email waiting with answers," says William Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "And I don't have to lift a finger, except to click my mouse button."
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Meteor

Just another asteroid hurtling toward Earth ...

Carolyn Y. Johnson
The Boston Globe
Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:20 UTC
Hollywood hype aside, close encounters of a rocky kind are fairly common. But they're fascinating to local scientists who want to learn how it all began, and maybe fend off armageddon.

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© Dina Rudick/Globe StaffFrancesca DeMeo, an MIT postdoctoral researcher, records asteroid movements from her lab in Cambridge.
At 4:33 a.m. on a recent Friday, Timothy Spahr was startled awake by a beep from his cellphone: A text message alerted him that a rocky object was hurtling toward Earth. He told his wife it was "some asteroid thing'' and went to check his computer.

In Hollywood, this would be the opening scene to a doomsday movie. But for Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, it is just another day. About once a month, an object on a potential crash course with Earth disturbs his slumber.

They almost always miss - and this time was no different. The asteroid was just a few feet across and on track to miss by about 11,000 miles. He sent a note to contacts at NASA and posted information about it online.

People have long been fascinated by the threat of apocalypse by asteroid, as depicted in movies such as the 1998 film Armageddon and 1979's Meteor, which was inspired by an MIT student project to create a plan to avoid a theoretical collision.
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Meteor

Top Ten Meteor Video Captures


Nortonroad
Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:08 UTC
Fires from beneath, and meteors from above,
Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,
Have kindled beacons in the skies; and the old
And crazy earth has had her shaking fits
More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.
Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And nature, with a dim and sickly eye,
To wait the close of all?

~ 'The Time-Piece,' Task, Book ii, lines 58-66. William Cowper
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