Hampton VA (SPX) Jul 22, 2008 - NASA completed a full-scale rocket motor test on Thursday, July 17, to further development of the Orion jettison motor, which will separate the spacecraft's launch abort system from the crew module during launch.

Former NASA manager O. Glenn Smith backs space based solar power in a NY Times op-ed: Satellites With Solar Panels Can Beam the Sun's Energy to Earth - Op-Ed/NYTimes.com

Jeff Fousts points out some problems that Smith "glosses over": Editorial trifecta - Space Politics
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The motor for the Orion launch escape system has been successfully tested: Well, the Escape Engine Works at Least... - Parabolic Arc - July.21.08 . But Rand Simberg notes that the LES contributes to Orion's weight problems : The Cause Of The Ares 1 Problem - Transterrestrial Musings.
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A report on the recent Space Elevator conference: Redmond Space Elevator Conference: Not a joke - PNWLocalNews

Space scientists are developing a new satnav system for the Moon to stop astronauts getting lost. The new global positioning system will help keep them from driving their lunar buggies to the wrong craters. It will look and operate a lot like the GPS device used by millions of motorists back home on planet Earth. But instead of using satellites, the new system will rely on photos from orbit plus a network of sensors including lunar beacons and motion detectors on the buggies themselves. It...

Click headline to read the full story fromSpaceStories.com.

The Messenger spacecraft spotted a volcano on Mercury during the flyby back in January. You can see it in the upper part of the image.  Even the vent is visible.

Here’s part of the caption from the Messenger site:

This image shows the largest feature identified as a volcano in the upper center of the scene. The volcano has a central kidney-shaped depression, which is the vent, and a broad smooth dome surrounding the vent. The volcano is located just inside the rim of the Caloris impact basin. The rim of the basin is marked with hills and mountains, as visible in this image. The role of volcanism in Mercury’s history had been previously debated, but MESSENGER’s discovery of the first identified volcanoes on Mercury’s surface shows that volcanism was active in the distant past on the innermost planet.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

A few days ago, I received this news from Brian Turner, captain of the Kansas City Space Pirates: More good news. We added another major sponsor. We are happy to announce that Barr Associates will be coating mirrors for us. The steering mirror is a critical part of our system and regular mirrors just can’t cut it [...]

Rob Coppinger interviews Robert Frisbee of JPL "about his design for an antimatter powered interstellar rocket that could reach solar systems up to 40-light years away within a human lifetime" : AUDIO: NASA's advanced propulsion technology leader talks antimatter - Hyperbola - July.22.08

I’m off to ComiCon! I’ll be arriving around 1-ish, but I have to hit the ground running. My schedule has changed…

Here’s the deal: Steven Moffat (the new show runner for Doctor Who) as well as Julie Gardner (DW Producer) and Naoko Mori (Toshiko on Torchwood) will be doing interviews today, Wednesday, at ComiCon. I’ve signed up for this, and evidently there are too many journalists to do individual interviews, so they’re putting us at tables to do round-robins. Moffat is from 4:00 - 4:30, and Mori and Gardner are from 4:30 - 5:00; all times are Pacific time (add seven hours for UT).

So I get to ask all three of them questions, and I’m still brewing that in my head (suggestions are welcome; leave them in the comments!).

But what I’m going to try to do is do this live, streaming on my UStream channel. That means that if you tune in you can watch it live!

However, many things have to work: the connection must be good, the stream must not lag or be impossible to set up due to software glitches, and of course the BBC has to agree to this. They may not.

But I’ll try! And just in case I don’t have time to write a new page, I’ve embedded the player below.

Stream videos at Ustream

I went over to Melbourne to meet up with the Bettdeckererschnapenderweisle and the boys, who had gone over earlier for her sisters’ multidecade birthday celebration. I got to have my choice of Melbourne outing, as everyone else had been enjoying themselves while I organised exam results, so I chose to go to the museum. This was also a popular choice for the boys as there is a children’s centre in the Museum. SurferDad and Sistersson also came along.

We had a bit of trouble parking, as the museum car park was full, unusual; we thought, as this was a week day and the school holidays were over in Victoria. Then as we tramped up to the entrance, we saw an ABC camera crew setting up. Interesting, we thought. After purchasing our tickets (should we go for the IMAX 3D dinosaur presentation, or the special exhibition on dinosaur eggs and babies, we chose the latter after some indecision), the lady who handed us our tickets casually mentioned, “Oh, and if you go around the corner, they are just about to start the giant squid dissection”. Er, what?

Fishermen had pulled up a recently deceased giant squid off the coast of southern Victoria. The museum was going to do a public dissection of this giant beast, and webcasting the entire event (you can see the webcast here). This was big news in Melbourne (Sydney had the Pope, but Melbourne had a giant Squid, take that Sydney. PZ Myers would be pleased.) but of course I and my family, blithe Adeliadeans who ignore the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry thing, had no idea, and had walked into a big event by accident.

Unfortunately, around half of Melbourne was there as well, even though it was a school day (okay, I exaggerate; it was only about a quarter). I didn’t know there was so much interest in oversized calamari. We could just see the big screen the heads of the crowd, over in corner I could see the Catalyst crew setting up. Still, despite the crowds, we could hear what was going on and see a fair bit. SurferDad and I stayed the longest, the rest wandered off in a parallel exhibit. They were a bit bothered by the overpowering smell of calamari. I did learn that you can tell the age of a squid by the growth bands in its beak, and that Giant squid have a most impressive radula, the rasp like tongue they use to grind down their food. Then we had to go and see the Dinosaur eggs and missed the main part of the dissection.

By the time we came back the dissection was almost over, and they were sewing the squid up for preservation, the crowd had thinned and we could get a good look. SmallestOne and Sisterson were pretty curious, but EldestOne was not really turned on by a mass of tentacles (why I have no idea).

We complemented this completely unexpected event by a quick trip to the marine section, where there was an exhibit on giant squid to learn more. All in all, a most exciting day.

I love crocodiles. They scare the crap out of me on a visceral level, so I’m fascinated by them. I mean, c’mon: they fit the definition of "monster".

In Africa, it’s been known that a croc can take down a leopard — even a leopard can’t outrun the blinding speed of a croc’s jaws — but now, for the first time, evidently, photos have been taken of a leopard taking down a croc!

Photographer Hal Brindley got the shots, and they are very, very cool… well worth a look. He even put up a video:

Whoa. But the picture sequence is more complete. It gave me chills.

I find politically-based interpretation of science fascinating. Why would party affiliation have anything to do with how you view science?

Maybe if the top politicians in your party lie constantly about the science, that plays a part.

A recent survey indicates belief in global warming is slightly lower than last year, due almost entirely to Republicans denying it. Incredible. With Inhofe claiming it’s a hoax, and with Bush and Cheney doing what they can to suppress real research and public release of information on the effects of GW, I’m not surprised.

I hope people don’t get their science from Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, but I do a lot of hoping.

And speaking of which, you also have the right-wing machine which takes any little thing, spins it madly, and totally destroys reality in the process. The American Physical Society — a professional society representing tens of thousands of scientists — has long been vocal about the reality of global warming. However, in one of their newsletters, a single editor posted a ridiculous assertion from a long-debunked GW denier. That was from one editor, who does not speak for the APS as a whole at all… and mind you, this was in a newsletter, and not a peer-reviewed journal.

However, Drudge picked it up, and then so did many neocon blogs. A lot of them, including Drudge, claimed that this was coming from the APS itself. That is clearly and obviously false, but the pressure got so high that the APS had to issue a followup restating their support for the reality of global warming.

Incredible. The influence of smear tactics on science is truly terrifying; we have an election coming up in November where the future of this country and the people in it are profoundly affected by how well the voters understand reality. That’s why I’m so vocal about this; there are very bad people doing very bad things, and if those of us who like reality the way it is — real — don’t speak up, then things will get very bad indeed.

I’ll add that Jennifer Ouellette has an excellent blog post on this topic as well.

It starts Saturday! I plan on being there Saturday and the following Friday. Other appearances are TBD.

I see NARAM live is primed for this year's daily coverage.

My planned flights include but are not limited to:

1. Hat of Death on a G77
2. Fireball XL5 on a G77-4
3. Ringer on a G76-5
4. Art Applewhite Stealth D5 on, of course, a D5-P
5. Art Applewhite Helix D5 on a D5-P
6. Art Applewhite Helix 24mm on an E9-4
7. Art Applewhite Double Helix 24mm on two E9-4's
8. SpaceShipSqrt(-1) on a D12-5
9. SpaceShipY on a C11-3
10. Shrox SHX-15 on a C11-3
11. Mirror Image on an E18-4
12. Golden Scout on an A8-3

Do you think it’s just fundamentalist Americans who see signs of God in every stain, wood grain, rock, and piece of baked goods?

Nope. Muslims see them too. We knew this already, but I think this one is marginally better, if by better you mean "you don’t have to squint quite as much to see it."

A Nigerian restaurant has been serving pieces of meat that appear to have the word Allah inscribed in them in Arabic. And by inscribed, I mean written out in the gristle.

OK, first: ewwwwww.

Second, sigh. Here’s a picture of the meat with the word Allah next to it in Arabic:

There is a resemblance, if you ignore the misplacement of the vertical stroke, and the strong diminution of the tail on the left of the chewy apparition. Also, if you’re predisposed to seeing God in pieces of torn, boiled, and fried animal flesh.

Third, sigh again. Guess what was said about the meat? "This was just a funny coincidence, and we all had a good laugh and then ate the meat"?

HAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha! No.

“When the writings were discovered there were some Islamic scholars who come and eat here and they all commented that it was a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind,” he said.

That’s not terribly convincing under any circumstances, and less when you take in all the wacky pareidolia seen in the United States. Whose God is the right one? Scholars and laymen have wrestled with that for millennia, and I have a fleeting suspicion that a chunk of animal muscle isn’t the right piece of evidence on which to bet a whole lot of epistemological credit.

The contact finius via this TRF thread. Send $50 and he'll make you one.

Moller International's M200G Jetson flying vehicle goes on sale in 2009

Clark Lindsey lets us know that the Popular Mechanics article on the Mojave Air and Space Port is on-line - New Area 51: Mojave's Desert Outpost Holds Space Flight's Future.

I’ve seen the Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as Messier 101, numerous times, but never quite like this.  Clicking on the image above may help show its great structure.

The Pinwheel is pretty easy to find and at a Magnitude 7.9 it is close to being a binocular object if you have dark skies.

The galaxy is in the constellation of Ursa Major, or the Great Bear; it is also known as the Plough and probably best known as The Big Dipper around these parts.

Want to try and see it?  Ok here’s how: find the handle of the dipper and follow it, going away from the dipper part, there is a crook in the handle at the next to the last star in the handle, Before moving on look at this star, oops it’s a double star Mizar and Alcor, easy to see in binoculars, and if you have good eyes you can see both stars with no assistance.  Truth is this is more than a double star.  Click here to find out more about the complex star system.

Anyway, from Mizar continue in a straight line from the line made by the handle away from the dipper, the galaxy is about even with the last star in the handle (Alkaid), the one after Mizar/Alcor.

If you have even a small telescope or possibly a good set of binoculars spend some time looking around  The Great Bear; there is lots to see and it never sets.  I spent hours and hours last autumn checking it out, a very rich area.

Here’s the press release at the Spitzer site.  Heh, I’ll be thinking about this post later this week when I BBQ, read the release to find out why.

I mean, literally: how cool is the Large Hadron Collider?

Now you can find out. The LHC page has a map showing the temperatures of various aspects of the giant collider. As I write this, sectors 7-8 and 8-1 are the warmest at a balmy 20 - 60. But that’s not Fahrenheit, or even Celsius: it’s Kelvin, baby, and that’s cold. 60 Kelvin is -213 Celsius, and -350 F. Yikes.

But it’ll get colder still. Soon the whole ring will be chilled to operating temperatures, and then away we go, smacking protons together at a whisper slower than light itself. What new physics will they find?

The 64th Carnival of Space will be running later this week over at Music of the Spheres. Wait, that's here! Send in a suitably spacey post to carnivalofspace@gmail.com. Hope to see you there, I mean here.

I took some time off of from my yet unnamed ('nonami') project to re-build the Ringer and some Art Applewhite stuff. Last night it came to me - grid fins! I just grabbed a plastic grid intended for fluorescent lights. But how to mount them? They don't need to fold for launching, but the plastic seems brittle and they might survive better if they swung upwards. I'm also thinking that they will sit below the bottom of the main tube.

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day certainly takes a broad view of "astronomy," and today's APOD is a case in point. Titled "Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth," it's the popular and smile-inducing video by Matt Harding, a guy who records himself (and sometimes many local helpers) doing a rather goofy little dance in scenic locations all around the world. There's even an underwater dance

I’ve added three more translations on my Translation Project page; Estonian, Esperanto and Pig Latin The Estonian translation (and it’s English pronunciation) was kindly sent to me by Marko Mänd - thanks Marko! The Esperanto and Pig Latin translations came from some translator programs on the web… Tom Nugent, of LaserMotive fame, suggested that I get [...]

The 2008 Perseid meteor shower peaks during the dark hours before dawn on Tuesday, August 12th, and forecasters say it should be a good show.

Please vote for this podcast at PodcastAlley!

Get this podcast story.

At the end of one of my favorite movies of all time, The War of the Worlds (the 1953 version, the only version, there was no remake, I can’t hear you, lalalalalalalala), the narrator says that it’s the littlest things that are important, alluding to the microbes that (spoiler alert) wipe out the aliens.

I always hated that voice-over at the end, actually. But he’s right. In this case, big things might be stars, and little things are black holes.

OK, so what does this have to do with anything? Well, in my live video chat, Cate Mato asked, "Why is the gravity from a black hole so much stronger than the star from which it forms?"

That’s a good question. I have a good answer. Maybe you’ve already figured it out, but just in case, here’s my response. And I get to plug my book! Bonus.

Just ran across the video on YouTube, courtesy of Chuck and VooDooRocketry:



The 15, 38mm EX, multicolored motors all lit as planned. Around burnout, the Medusa exceeds the speed of plywood.

I am no fan of Larry King. I really don’t see his appeal; he tends to ask facile questions, throw softballs, probe about 1 nanometer deep, and have a lot of guests with extremely questionable credentials.

The latter is the stuff of which blog posts are written.

My friend and fellow skeptic Scott Hurst pointed me to a video on CNN’s site from Larry King’s show on July 20. Why he would pick the anniversary of the day we walked on the Moon for the first time for this particular topic is beyond me, but then, so are the claims of his guests. They are UFO believers. They all appear to have good credentials: military men, engineers, and so on. But credentials mean little to me; I prefer evidence.

Did they have any?

Guess.

The best part: they show a video of a crop circle obviously taken from some distance away and using a telephoto. There are people walking around in it, and a white unresolved object apparently flying over it. Given that the videographer followed this object as it flew around and then off to the side, it’s clear we are to think this is some sort of flying saucer or UFO or perhaps the TARDIS.

But notice anything funny about it? Like, how no one walking around seems to notice it? What can we surmise from this?

I surmise it was a bird. That would fit all the facts in hand. Now, it appears to accelerate rapidly, but then, we don’t know where the bird is. It looks like it’s over the circle, but it might be much closer to the person taking the footage. With a big telephoto there is little depth perception, and so it could have been much closer to the camera than the circle, and just appeared between them. That’s why no one noticed it, and why it appeared to move so rapidly.

Does that explanation make more sense than it being a UFO?

And these guys talk a good game, I’ll give them that, but they all have the same story: I had great footage, but the government took it away! Yeah, OK, sure. So why are you on national TV then?

Oh, right. The gatekeepers on the news stations don’t give a fig about reality. Larry King has had all sorts of fraudulent "psychics " on his show, and UFO people, and and and. To his credit, he had Randi on once, but he still promotes all manners of irrational garbage.

So, Larry King: feh. And CNN: shame on you.

Somewhat like 2008, 1973 was a pretty crappy year. Nixon was president. We were still in Vietnam. Arab-Israeli War. OPEC oil embargo. Gas lines (gas went from 38 cents a gallon in May 1973 to 55 cents in June 1974, oil quadrupled to $12 a barrel in 1974). Recession. Apollo was over. I was still in college but spending most of my time with music - listening, writing, singing, recording. That was

From Quest, via TRF:

We got a few emails from folks who flew their D5's this past weekend.

Note: The Q2G2 igniter is a 6V igniter designed to work on the Quest 9V and Estes 6V "weenie" launch controllers.

When you hook these up to a higher current launch system - it is possible they will go when you insert your safety key.

Please do a test firing with your launch system FIRST.

We've included two igniters with every motor.

Thanks!

This image is amazing as is all those coming from the HiRise imager aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  The false color helps show some of the details the layman, like me would otherwise overlook.

It’s really quite remarkable, Mars having water and apparently a lot of it, in its past.  I am mulling over the idea in the context of the current barometric pressure, and what it means for the Martian atmosphere of the past.  Canada has a weather station on Mars and it’s pretty cool, the barometric pressure is fairly steady at 8.0 to 8.5 millibars, compare that to a “normal sea-level” Earth pressure of 760 mb.  Is there a pressure below which liquid water disappears?

Visit the MRO site for more information and full res images.

The NASA caption:

A color-enhanced image of the delta in Jezero Crater, which once held a lake. Researchers led by CRISM team member and Brown graduate student Bethany Ehlmann report that ancient rivers ferried clay-like minerals (shown in green) into the lake, forming the delta. Clays tend to trap and preserve organic matter, making the delta a good place to look for signs of ancient life.

I can't believe I missed blogging about the 39th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon yesterday! Next year I'll pay closer attention, but it will be the 40th and it will probably be more widely noticed anyway. So I will commemorate something that did happen 39 years ago today: the liftoff of Apollo 11 from the Moon at 17:54 UTC on July 21, 1969. This Orbiter screen shot (with the AMSO

Before and during the conference, I learned several bits of new information about the upcoming Space Elevator Games.  Some has been related previously, but I’m going to try and sum it up here. The Climber-Power/Beaming rules are still the same (the racetrack is a steel rope, 1 kilometer tall), but the device holding the racetrack “up” [...]

In the night of July 13th/14th 2008 I had a short observing session with the 300mm Dob. I took a quick peek at a few old friends (M27, M29, the Blinking Planetary and 16 Cygni) trying out my new 35mm Panoptic. While sweeping through Cygnus, I noticed a bright, small clump of stars North-Northeast of Gamma Cygni. It was very easy to spot with the 35mm Panoptic. I increased the power to 230x with the 7mm Pentax XW, and I was looking at a wonderful little asterism of stars that, as a group looked like a little dog or horse. I made a rough sketch of this object, and when I later checked the sketch with my planetarium program (Voyager), it proved to be NGC 6910, an open cluster from the Herschel 400 list. According to some sources on the Internet, NGC 6910 is also called the Rocking Horse cluster. I had never heard about it or observed it before, so my first impression that it looked like a dog or horse, was not that strange. Others thought of it as a little horse as well.

Where can you find NGC 6910? The map below should give you a rough idea. Just center your telescope on Gamma Cyngi and move just about half a degree north-northeast. There you will find this nice clump of stars.




(Image from Voyager 4.5, http://www.carinasoft.com)

When you start looking for NGC 6910, bear in mind that it is a small cluster, only 7' in diameter, but then again, at lowest magnification it jumped out at me in my 12-inch scope. With the 22mm Nagler (fov 68') I already saw the complete outline of the little horse, and with the 7mm at 230x I could see a few dimmer, magnitude 12 stars. NGC 6910 is a Y-shaped cluster oriented northwest southeast. I counted between 20 and 25 stars but its always difficult to tell which do belong to the cluster and which are not included. The two brightest stars looked definitely yellow and are from the 7th magnitude.
There is however something that riddles me about these two yellow suns. According to all planetary programs and Internet databases, the Northernmost of the two stars is SAO 49556, a spectral type K1III, which explains the yellowish color. The southernmost of the two is SAO 49563 (or V2118 Cygni), a variable star of spectral type B1.5Ia. Normally I would think that a B1 star shines Bluish or at least mainly white, and not yellow. I checked other observing reports and I found that Sue French's (Celestial Sampler, page 132) reports:

At 87x, two yellowish stars of 7th magnitude and a pearly, split chain of eight 10th magnitude stars unite in a Y-shaped pattern about 5' long.

Sue sees two yellow stars as well, so I'm very curious why this B1 star seems to appear yellow instead of white. Does it have something to do with the Variable character of the star? Maybe one of you out there can help on this one.

Anyway, visually it is a very interesting group, so I made a sketch. The sketch below was made with the 300mm dob, a 7mm eyepiece (fov 18') giving a magnification of 230x. South is up and west is to the left. The next time when you're in the area observing, check out on NGC 6910 and let me know which colors you could see.

Art has the best shipping in the hobby; my order arrived in 2 days. I got a D5 Stealth, sized for the motor of the same name. I also got a D5 Helix, a 24mm Helix, and a 24mm Double Helix.

The D5 Stealth built itself when I wasn't looking (well, almost). I painted the top flat black and underside day-glo orange (both Rustoleum). Quick and dirty with no primer.



Then we went and listened to Gary and the Groove. Then I set up an assembly line. Finished all three Helices quickly, less one round of fillets and painting.

Not that all my paint jobs don't lean that direction, these really were quick and dirty. I mostly have been leaving my monocopters nekkid, but decided to paint these in honor of NARAM. No priming, no sanding and no masking.

On May 25, 1961, President John F

No, this is not going to be my last post on events at this year’s Space Elevator Conference, but I wanted to let people know that the conference has ended and to summarize it a bit… I will be doing additional posts about presentations and goings-on at the Conference over the next few weeks, interspersed with other Space Elevator-related [...]

Alas, the SPS issue I talked about in the last post may still be intractible - the problem I’m running into now is just the range of data on the US Department of Energy website, and the seemingly contradictary nature of some of it.  Some graphs show energy usage in “Trillions of kilowatt hours”, others [...]

Carnival of Space #63 is now up at the Angry Astronomer. There's water on the Moon, more on the Phoenix lander, the difficulty of anagrams and a whole lot more space goodness, zoom on over for a look.

The latest Cassini image really does make Saturn look majestic; there are two moons transiting too: Janus and Pandora.

Janus shows up as a small dot, being only 111 miles in diameter; it is just above the rings and about centered.

Pandora on the other hand, at a whopping 50 miles in diameter, is all but invisible, at least to me anyways.  If you have trouble finding it too, clicking the image will open a larger version, look to the left of Janus.  Still having trouble?  Click here.

Read the Cassini press release.

I hate it when I’m wrong, and I think I might have been wrong about the Space Elevator and Solar Power Satellites (SPS).  I’ve had some ‘really smart people’ look over the calculations I put on my blog last year, and I think they’ve found a significant mistake.  I’ve got some more checking to do, [...]

It’s now nearly 5:00pm here in Redmond, Washington and this is the first real break I’ve had all day (I’m not complaining).  There was just a couple of presentations this morning, concentrating on the legal issues perhaps facing a future space elevator.  Then we began the Four Pillar workshops.  There will be much more about these [...]

I've been working in Belgium for the past three weeks and have been kept very busy. Hence the lack of posts here. The weather has been pretty overcast too, so I have only managed a few glimpses of the summer triangle, Jupiter and the Moon.

Tonight the sky was clear and the just-past-full Moon was particularly striking. I wanted a photograph but I only had my cheap and cheerful digital camera with me. It has no manual exposure settings so totally over-exposed the Moon on my first attempt. However, I managed to fool the auto exposure by pointing the camera at a bright security light, half pressing the shutter then turning around and fully pressing the button. The result isn't too bad and it is possible to make out some of the mare. I was taking the picture over the tops of the trees so the Moon is slightly eclipsed by a branch which blew into the shot.

Seeing the full Moon made me realise there are less than two weeks to go until the total solar eclipse. The solar eclipse will be visible from Greenland, Russia, Mongolia and China and a partial eclipse will be seen from parts of Europe, the Middle East, and India. I wish I was going to a point that can see totality but I'll just have to make do with a partial eclipse. If you watch the eclipse remember to view it safely and not to look directly at the Sun. - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)

Summary of what I did:

• Scraped out the sod plug, removed cone with a large dowel.
• Cut off top 1.5" of body.
• Sanded spots where the bottom fins sheared off. Replacement idea fell through. Covered spots with gold holographic stickers.
• Made replacement yarn-wrapped cone. Topped it off with wooded bead and two centering rings.
• Painted body with Dupli-Color Metalcast Purple. Doesn't quite match the Krylon X-Metals purple. No matter, I wasn't taking it back. Left a ring of the silver base coat.
• Swapped the black rail buttons for purple ones.
  

What's left:

• Permanently attach the NC shoulder section.
• Tape the shoulder for a better fit.
• Hope the yarn cone darkens a bit more ans the many layers of Polycrylic fully dry.
  

Darrell Mobley asks, "Where in the world is Reginald Walton"? In doing so, he provides a bio of Judge Reggie and he recaps the status of our suit against the BATFE. He concludes by saying how he's dealing with over-regulation - he's emphasizing building. He also believes that, if you build it, there will be a way to fly it.

As for me, I've happily regressed to mid-power and below. I've been loving my odd-rocs, most notably Art Applewhite's monocopters and, of course, my venererable Sweat Stained Clifton Tracking Station Hat of Death (42 flights and counting). OK, maybe I'm a rocket wimp, but I'm even excited about the new Quest D5 and the promise of high impulse D's in the same form factor.

Woohoo! One week turnaround is pretty good for motors. My thanks to Quest for the prompt and courteous service. I actually could have gone to the NARHAMS launch and tried them in my new Art Applewhite creations. But it's hot and I decided to paint said creations, go by the Beer Fest at my local beer and wine shop, and maybe the Re-Store to see what scrap junk motivates me.

A new set of scales to weigh supermassive black holes, pretty cool.

The Chandra press release:

This is a composite image of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (shown in purple) and Hubble Space Telescope (blue) of the giant elliptical galaxy, NGC 4649, located about 51 million light years from Earth. Although NGC 4649 contains one of the biggest black holes in the local Universe, there are no overt signs of its presence because the black hole is in a dormant state. The lack of a bright central point in either the X-ray or optical images shows that the supermassive black hole does not appear to be rapidly pulling in material towards its event horizon, nor generating copious amounts of light as it grows. Also, the very smooth appearance of the Chandra image shows that the hot gas producing the X-rays has not been disturbed recently by outbursts from a growing black hole.

So, the presence and mass of the black hole in NGC 4649, and other galaxies like it, has to be studied more indirectly by tracking its effects on stars and gas surrounding it. By applying a clever technique for the first time, scientists used Chandra data to measure a mass for the black hole of about 3.4 billion times that of the Sun. The new technique takes advantage of the gravitational influence the black hole has on the hot gas near the center of the galaxy. As gas slowly settles towards the black hole, it gets compressed and heated. This causes a peak in the temperature of the gas right near the center of the galaxy. The more massive the black hole, the bigger the temperature peak detected by Chandra.

Reassuringly, the estimate of the black hole’s mass using this X-ray technique is consistent with a more traditional technique using the motions of stars near the black hole. NGC 4649 is now one of only a handful of galaxies for which the mass of a supermassive black hole has been measured with two different methods.

We have a large Japanese presence at the conference this year, and they have made a tremendous contribution to the proceedings.  In addition, to making several presentations (and some very exciting announcements), they have brought an exhibit, a DVD we all watched during the “Mixer” hour this evening and probably a few other things I’m forgetting [...]

I’ve given up trying to chronicle everything as it is happening at the conference - there’s just too much going on.  If you’re a fan of the Space Elevator, this conference is truly “red meat” (unless you’re a vegetarian, of course, in which this conference is truly “red beans” )… Seriously, the quantity and quality [...]

The night sky is a big place. It is so big in fact that it is difficult to monitor all of it all the time. Sometimes, despite the many amateur and professional astronomers looking skywards, something goes bang and we miss it. That happened back in June 2007 when the star USNO-A2.0 0450-03360039 exploded and became a naked eye novae. Nobody on Earth saw it. Luckily, during October 2007, ESA's XMM-Newton accidentally spotted the novae as it was slewing from one target to another and alerted everyone else. It is pretty amazing that between six billion people we failed to spot one of the brightest novae for almost a decade.

There are plans such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to map the entire sky on a daily basis but they are have not yet been built. In the mean time we will continue to rely on the amateur astronomers of the world and serendipitous discoveries such as this one. - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)

Russell Blink has some cool new videos of engine tests. Move over Mojave Green and Green Gorilla, check out their 'green plum seed':

(Mojave Green is a trademark of AeroTech and Green Gorilla is a trademark of Animal Motor Works)

Yesterday, a tractor trailer dumped 5,000 gallons of molasses on Highway 6 in Sugarland, Texas. (via chron.com)

That Highway 3-SW Freeway intersection is a magnet for drama. Car chases, shootings, wrecks and combinations of the above. And that's just what I noticed as a non-resident (but occasional visitor).

During the lunch break today, Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation talked to the crowd about the Space Elevator Games, both Power-Beaming / Climber and Tether competitions. In this picture, however, Ben is responding to a presentaton given earlier by Ivan Bekey, highlighting potential problems to the Space Elevator, this case space debris.  Ben is pointing out [...]

I just watched the ISS sailing over for about 5 minutes. We had thunderstorms earlier and there were still clouds around, but the station's path from southwest to east-north-east was clear. There are good mid-evening passes over the northeastern US the next few nights - check this web site with your zip code to find the times and directions. The ground track map is from Heavens Above which

Carnival of Space #63 is running this week at Angry Astronomer, a new blog for me. I looked at Jon's profile, and it doesn't explain why he's angry (I actually once explained Flying Singer), but he sure has an interesting animated gif "avatar" on his sidebar. I thought it must be his picture until I saw the name of the file, dawkinsthrust.gif. I looked closely, and sure enough, it's my godless

Now this is a scary essay by an Israeli professor of history. He says that Israel is likely to launch a military strike to try to destroy Iran's "peaceful" nuclear development program before Iran actually builds their own nuclear weapons. Some in Israel believe this could be achieved by late 2009, and that once Iran has the bomb, they will use it to destroy Israel, so someone must act - if the US

It appears “Baby Red Spot” is in the process of being absorbed by the Great Red Spot. In the last (right-most) frame you can still see part of it. I was thinking “great it will live to fight another day”. Apparently not, according to the press release and reproduced below, the Baby Red Spot is just about to be drawn into the GRS — it’s toast. The red spots are cyclonic storms akin to hurricanes here on Earth, and are given names to distinguish them. Click the image above for a larger version.

It is good to see Red Spot Jr. (the bottom one) making it through intact. Amazingly all three spots converged at the same time and in view of Hubble.

Another thing about this image that strikes me is the banding. The dark clouds (the belts) are areas of high pressure in the atmosphere, the color is thought to come from organics and polysulfides. The whitish clouds (the zones) are much lower in pressure and higher in altitude. So we are looking down into the Jovian atmosphere through gaps in the white clouds. These images capture that very nicely.

The press release is below, but if you want to see more images, including each individual panel click here.

The press release from Hubblesite:

This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images offers an unprecedented view of a planetary game of Pac-Man among three red spots clustered together in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The time series shows the passage of the “Red Spot Jr.” in a band of clouds below (south) of the Great Red Spot (GRS). “Red Spot Jr.” first appeared on Jupiter in early 2006 when a previously white storm turned red. This is the second time, since turning red, it has skirted past its big brother apparently unscathed.

But this is not the fate of “baby red spot,” which is in the same latitudinal band as the GRS. This new red spot first appeared earlier this year. The baby red spot gets ever closer to the GRS in this picture sequence until it is caught up in the anticyclonic spin of the GRS. In the final image the baby spot is deformed and pale in color and has been spun to the right (east) of the GRS. These three natural-color Jupiter images were made from data acquired on May 15, June 28, and July 8, 2008, by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).