Archives for September 2008
Update on JSC
Published on 13 Sep 2008 at 6:10 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under NASA.
This will be a short posting today. Hurricane Ike has moved on past Houston. The storm surge is draining. There are plenty of news sources out there reporting on the conditions in the Houston/Galveston area after the hurricane, and I’ll let them tell the story. However, many of my readers would be interested in what […]
Houston, you have a problem
Published on 12 Sep 2008 at 10:21 am.
4 Comments.
Filed under NASA, Uncategorized, atmosphere, space station.
When an explosion blew out the side of the Apollo 13 Service Module and threatened the lives of three astronauts on the way to the Moon, they radioed back to Earth that they had a problem. Scientists and engineers in the Johnson Space Center’s Mission Control worked tirelessly to come up with a […]
Read ‘Houston, you have a problem’
Carnival of Space #70
Published on 11 Sep 2008 at 6:20 pm.
No Comments.
Filed under blogging.
This week the Carnival of Space is being hosted at OrbitalHub. So, go check it out to find a great collection of some of the best space related blog entries of the past week. If you write a blog (or even a blog entry) related to space, feel free to submit entries to the carnival.
-Astroprof
Hadrons
Published on 10 Sep 2008 at 1:23 pm.
4 Comments.
Filed under physics.
Despite what some of the doomsayers had been predicting, the world did not end this morning. Sometimes I wonder about people who seem to always believe that the world is coming to an end soon due to some catastrophe that only they and their friends know about. If I had a dollar for every time […]
A burst of bolides
Published on 9 Sep 2008 at 4:31 pm.
No Comments.
Filed under meteors.
Dr. Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office has reported an unusual burst of meteor activity for this past morning. Over a period of four hours, over two dozen bright meteors were recorded appearing to come from about the same part of the sky. These meteors were quite bright, as bright as Jupiter or Venus, […]
Months
Published on 8 Sep 2008 at 6:08 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under calendars.
Early in the semester, I cover a lot of background topics. Among those topics is time keeping: calendars and such. A lot of people don’t think of the calendar as having any astronomical connections, but it does. The basic unit of the calendar, the day, is clearly related to the rotation […]
A trio of planets
Published on 6 Sep 2008 at 2:22 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under astronomy, skywatching.
This past Thursday night, I took some students out to observe a grouping of three planets. Those planets are still grouped low in the western sky in the early evenings, so you can go look at them yourself. They’ll be in a slightly different arrangement than shown in this image. I created this image using […]
