Tag: meteor shower

Now It Can Be Told: My Stuff For Slooh

As some of you may know, I’ve been doing some work for slooh.com. Slooh is an astronomy community. Its three telescopes are available to the members. Two of the scopes are in the Canary Islands. One is in Chile. Each is in a superb location to clearly view the nighttime sky.

My job is to produce videos and host webcasts for Slooh.

Sequence 01.Still003

As some of you may know, I’ve been doing some work for slooh.com. Slooh is an astronomy community. Its three telescopes are available to the members. Two of the scopes are in the Canary Islands. One is in Chile. Each is in a superb location to clearly view the nighttime sky.

My job is to produce videos and host webcasts for Slooh. We’ve got one coming up Friday at 6p EDT/3p PDT about Comet 209P/Linear. It’s the object responsible for what could be an amazing meteor shower Friday night.

Slooh has also just announced a partnership with NASA in their Grand Asteroid Challenge. I produced a 2 1/2 minute video for that (below).

Screenshot-2014-05-16-19.59.36If you would have stopped me when I got into broadcasting and told me I’d be able to edit something like this without leaving my home office I’d have thought you nuts! These capabilities are beyond amazing.

I designed this PC specifically for editing It’s equal to the task. I couldn’t be happier.

I’m pretty happy with how the video came out too.

The Explosion On The Moon

moon impact frames

NASA scientists have just seen the largest explosion on the Moon since they started looking for them eight years ago! At 4th magnitude brightness, an explosion earlier today (UTC) would have been visible to the naked eye.

It’s obvious the Moon has been pelted with meteorites and other space junk over the uncounted millenium. Most of us think of those events in the past, not present. That’s wrong.

More objects hit the Earth than Moon because of our much greater size and gravity. Most burn up in our atmosphere. The Moon has no atmosphere. Anything plunging to its surface will make it down intact.

Ron Suggs, an analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center, was the first to notice the impact in a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring program’s 14-inch telescopes. “It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” he recalls.

The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide hit the Moon traveling 56,000 mph. The resulting explosion packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT.

For the metrically challenged, that around 90 pounds and a foot wide. In other words, a good sized rock. NASA will now look closely at the impact site, hoping to see a new crater 50 or 60 feet across.

At the same time the Moon was getting hit, an ‘all-sky’ camera in Ontario noted a cluster a deep-penetrating atmospheric hits here on Earth. The paths line up. They are all most likely from the same source.

IDL TIFF fileThat’s not unexpected. Meteor showers, like Perseids or Orionids, which never make it to the Earth’s surface, often hit the Moon too. The image on the left shows impacts from the last eight yeas.

This is another impediment to sending men back to the Moon. Space is incredibly perilous.

It’s Meteor Time

The comet is gone, but little specks of dust and debris are in the orbital track and get sucked up in our gravitational field. Because of the makeup of meteor showers, all their meteors burn up harmlessly before getting close to the ground.

Moon sets around midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning. That means darker skies! All indications say they’ll be clear.

This is as close to perfect as we get in Connecticut!

I got to say “bolide” on the air tonight. It’s not commonly used, but very descriptive. A bolide is a meteor that burns brightly as a fireball, often splits into pieces and is accompanied by a sonic boom.

A bolide was widely seen in Nevada and Central California Wednesday night. Welcome to the Internet age, there are reports.

Cale – San Ramon, CA – Brightness equal to Full Moon, initial flash may have been brighter as it caught my attention

Ed Silvius – Sunnyvale, CA – yes split into 3 to more chunks as it changed from green to orange and the trail appeared

Laura – Tulare, CA – it looked like a shooting star at first, it kept getting bigger and it turned wgite, and then green with a firey tail behind it, it was a circle shape, as far as i could tell it did’nt burn up, no sound that i could here.

Meteors like this happen all the time. The Earth is constantly gaining weight from incoming!

This meteor had nothing to do with the Orionids meteor shower which comes Early Sunday morning. I am excited about Orionids and hope to photograph it.

This meteor shower of 30 meteors per hour (give or take) happens when the Earth passes through the orbit of Halley’s Comet. The comet is gone, but little specks of dust and debris are in the orbital track and get sucked up in our gravitational field. Because of the makeup of meteor showers, all their meteors burn up harmlessly before getting close to the ground.

Moon sets around midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning. That means darker skies! All indications say they’ll be clear.

This is as close to perfect as we get in Connecticut!

Though all the meteors can be traced back to the part of the sky occupied by the constellation Orion, they’re seen everywhere! All you need do is go outside in a dark spot and look at the sky. No telescope, binoculars or equipment is necessary.

Clicky and I are excited.