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Strange SkiesS
© Wikipedia Commons
Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world's very earliest and most mysterious art.
Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman's initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world's first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.
Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth's precession.
(Don't you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)
It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).
© Bob Bowles
"It was a horizontal rainbow, never seen anything like it. It hung out in the sky to the east of us and changed colors for about an hour," he said. "I don't know if we were the only ones that got to enjoy this; didn't hear anything."
At around the same time, Teri Hunter tweeted a similar image of a weird rainbow from Nipomo High School.
Looking at Bowles' photo, I was astonished by its mother-of-pearl-like iridescence; it was almost like looking at the inside of an abalone shell.
© Vasin Lee/Shutterstock
Lightning strikes twice in the same place surprisingly often and now, thanks to a Dutch radio telescope network called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), scientists have a better idea why.
An international team used the array to study the development of lightning flashes in unprecedented detail, and discovered that the negative charges inside a thundercloud are not discharged in a single flash.
Some are stored inside structures the researchers have called needles, making a repeated discharge to the ground quite possible.
"This finding is in sharp contrast to the present picture, in which the charge flows along plasma channels directly from one part of the cloud to another, or to the ground", says Olaf Scholten, from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.
And it hasn't been noticed before because there wasn't equipment powerful enough to do so.
"These needles can have a length of 100 metres and a diameter of less than five metres, and are too small and too short-lived for other lightning detections systems," says Brian Hare, also from the University of Groningen.
© ESO/S.Brunier
But this one image (below) just really brings it home. Space is super, duper big, and humanity's reach into it? It's super, duper small.
The galaxy in the image is a reconstruction of the Milky Way, if it were about 110,000 light-years in diameter (more recent research suggests it's even bigger than that).
The itsy bitsy blue dot is how far our radio signals have travelled from Earth - a diameter of about 200 light-years.
© Angela Cole
Angela Cole, of Cromer, saw a strange circle around the sun around 12.15pm on Tuesday, April 16 when she was visiting her mum in Beeston Regis. Her husband, who was in nearby Sheringham, also snapped a photo of the heavenly halo.
After a spot of online research they believe they identified the outlandish aura: a -22 degree halo.
Mrs Cole said: "Anyone who looked up at the sky would have seen it. Rainbows come and go, but this was there for quite a while. It must have been there for half-an-hour. I've never seen anything like it before."
© Pixabay
Despite an admission last year that it may be impossible to stop the 8.8 ton asteroid Bennu from annihilating life on Earth, the perennial optimists at NASA have nevertheless granted SpaceX a $69 million contract to assist in the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), intended to save Earth from interstellar armageddon. The test, tentatively scheduled for June 2021, will have Elon's Musketeers crashing a kinetic impactor - in this case, a spacecraft equipped with cameras and solar panels - into a small moonlet accompanying Didymos, an 800-meter-long near-Earth asteroid. NASA notes that the moonlet, dubbed "Didymoon" by scientists, "is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose a more common hazard to Earth" than its massive chaperone.
The goal, NASA says, is to launch the DART spacecraft atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will then make its way to Didymos and Didymoon to attempt to alter the latter's trajectory in a rehearsal for what could one day be a high-stakes game of cosmic bumper cars. "By using solar electric propulsion," NASA says, "DART will intercept the asteroid Didymos' small moon in October 2022, when the asteroid will be within 11 million kilometers of Earth." Meanwhile, Earthlings will watch with bated breath.
"The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent," NASA promises, "enough to be measured using telescopes on Earth."
© KIMSPICSBBC Weather Watcher Kimspics captured the rare coloured moonbow in Alston, Cumbria
It was captured late on Wednesday above Alston by BBC Weather Watcher Andrew Hewison, who posts as Kimspics.
BBC weather presenter Simon King described it as a "rare and amazing colourful moonbow".
He said normally moonbows are much fainter and seen as white but the extra brightness of Wednesday's moon meant colours could be seen.
The super worm moon coincided with the spring equinox, the midway point between mid-winter and mid-summer.
During a full moon, Mr King said, there can be enough light to produce a moonbow.
© Flickr/L.E Daniel LarssonNorthern Lights as seen in Lofoten, Norway, in January 2014.
A giant cloud of charged particles from the solar corona - the layer of gas surrounding the sun - known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) is expected to arrive on Saturday.
This in turn could increase the reach and intensity of the aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, to parts of the northern US over the weekend, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.
Meteorologist Joe Charlevoix tweeted that the Northern Lights would likely be visible on Saturday night. "This is not a guarantee but conditions are favorable," he said.
© Directorate General of Meteorology in OmanAlso known as a hole punch cloud, the fallstreak hole is a large gap that can appear in cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds.
Also known as a hole punch cloud, it is often attributed to UFOs
A rare cloud sometimes mistaken for an alien invasion was spotted over Al Ain on Sunday.
The fallstreak hole, also known as a hole punch cloud, is a large circular gap that forms in cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds.
The unusual phenomenon happens when supercool droplets that have not yet frozen mix with ice crystals caused by airplanes passing through the cloud.
The ice crystals then start to fall, causing water droplets around them to evaporate. This process leaves a large hole in the cloud.
Although science has already answered the question of what a fallstreak hole is, because of their rarity and unusual appearance, they are often attributed to unidentified flying objects.
Comment: In recent times this rare cloud phenomena has appeared over Canada, Southern California, UK, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Other strange cloud anomalies seem to be appearing globally with higher frequency and intensity. Factors which may contribute to these 'strange skies' are atmospheric dust loading from increased comet and volcanic activity and changes in the layers of the atmosphere. See also:
- Spectacular Sun Halo Seen by Skiers in Sweden
- Rainbow appears in Taiwan for 9 continuous hours as experts claim it has broken record
The increase in noctilucent clouds is one of the effects - among others - of increased dust concentration in the atmosphere in general, and in the upper atmosphere in particular. We suspect that most of this atmospheric dust is of cometary origin, while some of it may be due to the recent increase in volcanic activity.See also: Chemtrails? Contrails? Strange skies
Comment: NASA's new aurora experiment colors the sky in Norway