Inauguration seen from 423 miles up.

Clear skies over Washington DC today. Here is a view just released of Obama's inauguration seen from the GeoEye-1 satellite. This bird orbits at an altitude of 423 miles above the Earth and has been used for Google Earth images.
The 'dirty' looking smudges that look like the ants that came out my driveway cracks, crawled into the house - and later in my cat food bowls in my kitchen - are humans! Click on the images for a closer view and you can make out the individual ants people.
Oh the humanity!

| See full size images |

Revenge of the "Dwarf Planet"

Track satellites on your iPhone/iPod Touch

I just came across a program for Apple's iPhone/iPod for tracking satellites (thanks Robert!). I often make attempts to image the ISS as it passes over my house in Renton, but I check on Heavens-above website for the best info on the passes. This program does all that too, and had a sky diagram showing where it will show up. It is $9.99 for the download (amazing how rich some programmers are getting with these little applications that are popular.) and just takes a few moments before it's ready to run.
It does all the same things that the Heaven-above tracking does, but simpler. The only thing I see missing is the star chart on the sky passes, that is a handy thing to have so you can get a quick idea of where it will pass in reference to the stars. That could be in a future update I think, these little devices are amazing with the amount of power they have in such a small package!
As a bonus, there is also tracking for Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper's tool bag that she dropped while working on the ISS! Must be embarrassing, but possibly kind of a proud feeling to know that your lost bag with an expensive grease gun is tracked by many amatuer astronomers now.

| Download GoSatWatch |

Change is here tomorrow!

Tomorrow Barack Obama becomes our new President and hopefully can carry out his plan to get us out of our current state of affairs.
Ok, to keep the space theme going on this posting, I have to mention that NASA will be participating in the inauguration parade also. The crew of STS-126 will be in the parade as well as a prototype of a possible next generation lunar rover. This rover has living quarters, and could potentially house astronauts for up to 14 days on the moon.
We plan on having a TV set up at work so we can watch the inauguration. I think it will be a happy day for us all!

| See more about NASA participation - CollectSpace.com |
| 3D interactive rover model |

Foggy night backyard astronomy.

Finally a fairly clear night despite fairly lousy seeing (the stars were all twinkling even straight up!). Humidity was about 94%, and temperature near freezing, but the observatory does have a warm room with a heater. One of my 2 monitors finally blew up, probably from all the cold and damp weather lately, but I can get a new one for maybe $10. To top it off, I've been having problems with my dew heaters also.
Anyway, here is the first image of 2009 and probably the first in about 3 months.
The gory details for the techie types -

• Camera: Canon 350D (modified - no red blocking IR filter)
• Scope: Orion 80ED piggybacked on 12" Meade LX200
• Autoguiding: Meade DSI on the 12" with MaxDLSR
• Exposures: 24 at ISO 800. Between 10 seconds up to 3 minutes
• Extra exposures: 10 with the H-Alpha filter used for the red channel of the RGB (bring out more of the whispy stuff normally lost in the light pollution)
• Software: stacked, processed and aligned with ImagesPlus

Oh, guess I should mention this is M42 in Orion if you didn't recognize it already! (click for full sized image)

Another item for the 40th anniversary of the moon landings.

I was just wandering around YouTube searching for silly commercials and came across this beauty. Remember eating food sticks when you were a kid in the 70s when Apollo was landing on the moon? (If you were born in the late 60s at least).
They were those tasty sticks that had that space age paper with plastic and strange foil wrapping. Mom didn't have any trouble getting you to eat these since it was the same thing Neil and Buzz ate on the moon while drinking a tube of Tang (at least that is what they wanted us to believe). Of course, the sticks were so chewy and pasty, they were almost as much fun as silly putty. Roll it up into a ball, play with it a while, then finally eat it. Later you would find some of it stuck to the butt of your pajamas since you were sitting on it during a full 3 episodes of Saturday morning cartoons - Speed Racer, Marine Boy and Star Blazers. When New Zoo Review came on, it was time to quit and go ride Big Wheels with the boys up the hill - that pink hippo was just wrong.

KHAAAAAAANNNN!!!!!!

Richardo Montalbán 1920 - 2009

Fire and ice to land on the moon.

NASA has been testing the next engine to land the Altair spacecraft on the moon. This is a test-firing of the engine which produces 13,000lbs of thrust as the exhaust heats up to 5,000 F. But....look at the rim of the engine bell, there are icicles forming on the edge.
The reason, the fuel for the engine is Cryogenic - which means it's very cold. -297 F liquid oxygen and -423 F liquid hydrogen. The nozzle is cooled by fuel running through the pipes which then cools the steam from the exhaust (at least on the outer parts) to freeze in to ice on the edge of the engine. Cool - really!

| See a movie of the engine firing |
| More from NASA |

Stardust seen during flyby yesterday.

Yep, I knew someone would get a shot of this thing. It wasn't me, I don't have a fog filter, don't live 2,000 feet up above this inversion layer and haven't seen the sky in months now!
Anyway, this shot was taken with a 14 inch Celestron by Patrick Wiggins of Utah. I think skies are better down there than here in Seattle. Complain, gripe, moan.....

| Read all the details about Patrick's image on Spaceweather.com |

Another good photo essay from orbit.

Boston.com website has another good photo essay. This week it's a bunch of cool photos of the Earth taken from orbit. Here is one example, a great image of our favorite volcano.

| Earth Observed - Boston.com |

Stardust passing by - start collecting your bets.

The Stardust-NExt spacecraft did a swing-by of the Earth today (miss us by 10,000 km) to line itself up for a pass of Comet Temple-1 on Feb. 14, 2011. This spacecraft is the one that passed through Comet Wild-2's tail and collected dust on it's aero-gel paddle. It then dropped off the samples which returned to Earth. The paddle and capsule are now in the Smithsonian with the other milestones of flight including the Wright Brother's flyer.
The Deep Impact probe crashed into (yes, on purpose!) Comet Temple-1 on July 3, 2005 and blasted a big hole in it. So now Stardust has been send back to check it out. The question is, how big is the hole? Could you fit a stadium in it? A mountain? Or will there be enough dirt from the $4 billion Seattle Viaduct tunnel plan to fill the hole?
Time to start an office betting pool to see who comes the closest. But when you ask your coworkers of your plan, they will probably look at you funny and say "Wha? Comet? Huh? What the heck are you talking about? Is the mothership behind the comet?" Never mind.... just crawl back to your cubicle, they will forget about it soon enough.

| Stardust-NExT site |

School buses in space!

The next generation heavy lift rocket - Ares V - which will be similar to the Saturn V, will be quite a bit more powerful. This monster will have the volume to lift a cluster of 8 school buses, and the equivalent weight of 16 or 17 buses. Why? Just because it can!
Either sell and old bus to a group of artistic hippies dressed in paperclips for a pilgrimage to "Burning Man" or launch them into space. I guess either use would be just as strange...
Seriously, this thing will be able to launch some pretty big space telescopes in the future, spacecraft for the moon or Mars, modules for the space station...or a spare bus.
Unlike the shuttle cargo would be going on a one-way trip since it can't bring anything down - but how often did the shuttle bring stuff back? Not very often.

| Ares V lifting power |