Billions and billions.....

When talking about large numbers - national debt, cost of the Iraq war, economic bailouts, or just the distance to stars we have to use some very large numbers. Unless the numbers are shortened a bit to a more readable format, the decimal point is just so far to the right of the long line of numbers that it's just totally pointless.
So, astronomers and other scientists like to abbreviate numbers using scientific notation, avagadro's number or mole, light year, parsec or simply 1 mile is the same as 5,280 feet.
We wouldn't want to write out light years in feet, since that would be:
1 Light Year = 3.10383858E+16 Feet -- to hard to write, so we use light years for distances to the stars....etc.
Anyway, the point of this blog entry is leading to a site that I came across that shows large numbers in an interesting format. It shows how large numbers of pennies would look. An interesting way to get a clue about how big numbers would look if shown as something familiar.

| The Mega Penny Project |

Did you hear that? They've shut down the main reactor. We'll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is now vertical at Cape Canaveral and should launch in the next month or so on it's maiden flight. After a few tries their Falcon 1 rocket was the first private rocket to reach orbit successfully (see the video).
Elon Musk is the CEO of the company. Even if you don't know his name, you know what he did - he co-founded PayPal. Seems that a lot of these computer guys are going into rocketry. John Carmack from ID Software (Remember Doom and Quake?) wih Armadillo Aerospace, Paul Allen with his funding for Scaled Composites, and even Jeff Bezos of Amazon is getting into the space business with Blue Origin.
Anyway, I just liked the comment that "Olaf" made on Universe Today about the Falcon 9, saying how it resembled the back end of Princess Lea's ship with all those engines, so I had to find some comparison photos. I just had to throw in some more information about this since there is so much more behind the photo!

| Space X |

Bright winter comet - Comet Lulin

If it ever clears up around here, there is a comet in the sky right now and for the next couple months that should be visible. It's up in the morning sky right now, but will later be rising around midnight in February for those of us (like me) that are unable to wake up early.
The closest to Earth this will get is .42 AU or about 38,111,913 miles. (See why Astronomers us Astronomical Units for distance?)
This will be on February 24th, and it should be at the brightest also - about 5th magnitude. That is just a guess though, since comets could erupt or burp out a bunch of gas and dust brightening them. (Remember comet Holmes last year?) By this time it should be visible in late evening - good for us night owl types of observers.
I'll definitely try to get some images of this if possible, but I'm losing confidence in this hobby in the Seattle area over the last year and a half.

| All the details and maps at Sky and Telescope's site |

Japanese reinvent the space toilet

I don't know if I like this or not, but I guess it does have some advantages. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has been working on a wearable space toilet that they hope to have flushing in the next 5 years. This is kind of a techno diaper that will be worn at all times. When it detects the user has soiled themselves, a suction device will start up and draw the waste, sound and odors away. The plan is for it to even wash and dry the wearer.
Isn't this almost what mom did when you were just learning to use the ceramic chair?
The current ISS toilet uses a vacuum which requires a proper seal on the seat or the result can be unpleasant. It also requires extensive ground training in it's proper use.
I can imagine returning to Earth after a year or more in space with the trouser, there will be one more "movement" to re-adapt to under normal gravity!

| The Pink Tentacle site |

Indiana Jones in space

Not quite Indiana Jones, but this next shuttle mission's "fun crew photo" sure looks like it. NASA's Space Flight Awareness site is where you can find the mission posters. There is the official poster as well as the fun one.
I've always liked the ISS Expedition 16 poster. Peggy Whitson looks like she would rip you a new one if you messed with her!
Now where can I get paper and enough ink to print out a full sized poster? Oh yeah, there is always that place called "work".

| Space Flight Awareness Mission Posters |

After Hubble - the James Webb telescope

In 2013, hopefully before the Hubble is a bunch of melted wreckage at the bottom of the ocean, the next Hubble replacement telescope will be launched. Primarily, an IR telescope, it should be able to see as well as Hubble does with visible light. The base of he telescope will be about the size of a tennis court and the mirror is made of 18 smaller segments that are coated with 24 karat gold, making it 95 percent reflective. This beast will live out at the L2 (Lagrange point 2) which is a stable orbit well past the moon at 940,000 miles out. Unlike the Hubble, no upgrades will be possible - at least until we can get a manned flight of some sort out past the moon. We are out of practice since it's been 40 years since anyone has been even 250,000 miles away from home.

| Webb Space Telescope site |

Several photos from around the solar system today

Mars

• Where is Opportunity on sol 1742?

| See full size maps |
| Ground view |

• What is Spirit doing? Sitting pretty still, but sending back more images for the "Bonestell Panorama"

| See full size |

Jupiter

• I know I posted a blog earlier about this photo, but Astronomy Picture of the Day has a huge image of this photo that I had to share.

| APOD page with the big one |

Hubble and Spitzer

• Hubble and Spitzer have been playing together and have created a new image of the center of our galaxy. I'm sure this is the Sagittarius area, but would like to see what nebulae are in the image.
  

| Hubble site |

A year of splendor - Saturn

Just click on this photo, I don't need to say anything else.

| Ciclops Site |

Spirit - 5 years on Mars - January 3, 2004

It was the evening of January 3, five years ago. We were clustered in a little group on my couch, me and a few of my best space geek friends, anxiously watching NASA TV live from DirecTV. The path of the signal from Mars took about 20 minutes from Mars to Earth, then picked up by NASA, then beamed over to the ground station, shot up 23,000 miles to the satellite, then back down 23,000 miles to my pizza plate sized dish on my roof. So we were seeing it as 'live' as possible.
We were looking at a bunch of JPL guys sitting in a room of computers looking a bit more tense then we were obviously. Entry - *Whew!* no metric conversion errors for this one. Decent - they say the chute opened, thats a good thing. Landing - a signal indicating it was bouncing across the surface came down. Stronger, weaker, stronger....lost....back again!
Spirit had landed! We then watched the room of JPL engineers and scientists freaking out. There was some cheering on my couch too!
Hours went by, we watched the smiling guys get serious again and hope that the rover had urolled it's bags and opened up with the shiny side up. It was after midnight when the screaming started again in Pasadena. First pictures were coming in. Show us, show us......JPL guys were standing in front of a big projection TV while a bunch of images spilled all over the screen. Finally, a close up was shown on the screen in front of us. Cooool....

Five years later, Spirit has hiked across the Gusev plains, climbed a mountain, survived an early memory problem, limps along on 5 wheels now, nearly died from lack of sun - only to get cleaned off by dust devils that cleared it's solar panels, and nearly died a second time recently.

I still check on the rovers daily, they still wander, although Spirit is kind of weak and mostly sitting still, Opportunity is working it's way to a huge crater 7 miles away. The journey continues....(enlarge photo)

| MER site at JPL |

Dead but not yet frozen Phoenix lander.

The Mars MRO orbiter got a shot of the Phoenix lander on December 21. First look at the spacecraft since it died recently. Hopefully, the spacecraft can still get some images of it later but it's getting dark up on that part of Mars since winter is coming. Could be interesting to see the lander surrounded by ice eventually.

| MRO HiRISE image site |

2009 - International Year of Astronomy

Happy New Year!
Still looks like the same soggy, dark, cloudy crud (no snow right now at least!) as it was last year. It's always kind of a letdown when you look outside the next day and realize that it's just a number in our little human heads that changes and not much else, and we put up a fresh new calendar with 12 more kitty photos. But then again, the big change of 2009 won't come until January 20 when Obama takes the helm and steers us away from doom. I'll finally take the wrapper off my nice new US flag and hang that on the house proudly after waiting 8 years!
A new thing this year is that 2009 has been called the "International Year of Astronomy". This year was chosen since it's the 400th anniversary of the year that Galileo first pointed his telescope at the sky. Galileo's telescope was a pretty crappy thing, worse then even the cheapest Tasco found at Goodwill for $5.99 or the "450x Zoom Superscope" from Wallmart. But somehow he managed to discover moons of Jupiter, rings of Saturn, and craters on the moon before the church caught him and locked him up.
I'm still reading the details of what all this means, but basically, it seems to be a big push to get more people aware and interested in the coolest and most accessible (maybe not here in Seattle) science there is. A few of the web features....

• Cosmic Diary - a blog site featuring professional scientists.
• 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast - got an iPod for Christmas? You can sign up for a daily Podcast on astronomy to listen to. Differnet stories up there every day, and these are all put together and recorded by people all over the world. Got something you want to say? You can submit an entry if you like.
• Of course any organization can't be worth a darn unless they are on social networking sites - Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

What can you do to participate? Easy, go out at night and look up! Well, seriously....look for a local astronomy club and check out a few of their meetings, hopefully they have star parties (unless you are in Seattle), and other activities. I'll suggest one fine club to start with.
Should be an interesting year!

| International Year of Astronomy 2009 |