| Skies to offer triple pleasure | | Posted Tuesday, February 06, 2007 1:04:52 PM by Blog57 Team | | Little Mercury is making a nice evening appearance and is at its best early in the month. Look for Mercury in the west, to the lower right of brilliant Venus. Both of these planets will follow the sun below the horizon as the evening wanes. Mercury's orbit is carrying the planet closer to the sun day by day. Late in the month the planet disappears into the glow to reappear as a morning object in March. Saturn, however, rises as the sun sets and will be visible all night. The best views come near midnight when the planet and its rings are high in the south. Saturn's rings are easily visible through small telescopes as are the planets brightest moons. Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, is larger in diameter than our own moon and is one of two moons in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere of nitrogen and various hydrocarbons.... | |
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| | | Plan to expand Keck Observatory dropped | | Posted Tuesday, January 23, 2007 3:09:36 PM by Blog57 Team | | Plans for the Outriggers telescopes project on Mauna Kea are being abandoned, finally putting to rest the slim possibility that private funding might be found to complete the project estimated at $50 million to $70 million. The outlook for the project has been bleak since NASA cut funding last year for the Outriggers, which had been planned as an array of four to six smaller telescopes arranged around the much larger twin 33-foot telescopes of the W.M. Keck Observatory. The space agency has spent $15 million to $20 million on the Outriggers, which were supposed to sharpen images from Keck. The project was part of NASA's Origins Program, and one of the uses of the new telescopes would have been to accelerate the search for planets outside our solar system.... | |
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| | | Bird Club hosts show and tell | | Posted Friday, January 05, 2007 1:11:55 PM by Blog57 Team | | Members of the club are encouraged to bring items like photos, slides, videos, binoculars, telescopes, tripods, bird feeders and computer software related to birds. The club will also plan trips to South Dakota area bird feeders on Jan. 13 and a Jan. 27 trip to Belle Fourche. The results of Christmas bird counts by the club will be presented. For details, contact Vic Fondy at (605) 269-2553. - By The News-Record staff Proffit Sr. gets life in prison A man who ordered the murder of a Gillette teen will spend the rest of his life in prison, a District Court judge ruled Tuesday afternoon. Council considers no parking on parts of Boxelder Will eliminating on-street parking on Boxelder Road between Highway 59 and 4J Road and making the road three lanes help alleviate traffic? Mader will lead County Commission Craig Mader was elected chairman of the Campbell County Commission on Wednesday - the third time he has served in that capacity.... | |
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| | | Audi adds 2007 RS 4 as new performance compact sedan | | Posted Wednesday, December 27, 2006 3:08:39 PM by Blog57 Team | | German luxury carmaker Audi AG is cranking up its racy, sporty side in a surprising way -- by giving its smallest sedan a 420-horsepower V-8 and a manual transmission.The new-for-2007 RS 4 is faster than any other car in Audi's introductory A4 line of sedans and wagons, including the previous top sporty model, the Audi S4. In fact, the RS 4 is faster -- going from 0 to 60 miles an hour in just 4.8 seconds -- than even Audi's flagship large sedan, the A8, with its V-8 or 12-cylinder engine, according to Audi performance statistics.Turning a compact, four-door car into a stunning sports car puts Audi and its RS 4 performance experts at quattro GmbH in Germany in some rarefied company.German carmaker BMW sells a 2007 BMW M5, for example, that's a mid-size sedan with a 500-horsepower, V-10 engine.... | |
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| | | New telescopes let students see stars | | Posted Thursday, November 23, 2006 1:04:57 PM by Blog57 Team | | To the naked eye, the Dumbbell Nebula is invisible. At a distance of 815 light years, or roughly 4 quadrillion miles, the planetary nebula can only reveal its awesomeness to humans through the eyepiece of a telescope usually the type of telescope to which only astronomers and researchers have access. But now, thanks to funding from the universitys Instructional Equipment Program, the Department of Physics and Astronomy can provide students with access to the equipment necessary to turn the invisible nebula into a tangible image. The Dumbbell Nebula, from our perspective on Earth, looks like a dumbbell or a butterfly, with two clouds of gas expanding outward from a central waist, Paul Lewis, who leads the physics departments outreach programs, said to students watching him manipulate his telescope.... | |
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| | | Next Generation Imaging Detectors Could Enhance Space Missions | | Posted Tuesday, November 14, 2006 7:30:28 AM by Blog57 Team | | A new generation of imaging detectors with low-noise and high-speed capabilities may transform imaging applications on NASA space missions, impact biomedical imaging and aid in homeland defense. Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester recently won $847,000 from NASA's Astronomy Physics Research and Analysis program to build and test a detector that will capture sharper images and consume less power than technology currently in use. The new imaging sensor, which will function at wavelengths spanning from ultraviolet to mid-infrared, will be able to operate reliably in the harsh radiation environment of space. "These benefits will lead to lower mission cost and greater scientific productivity," says Donald Figer, director of the Rochester Imaging Detector Laboratory at RIT and lead scientist on the project.... | |
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| | | NASA Cassini Significant Events for 11/02/06 - 11/08/06 | | Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006 7:15:11 PM by Blog57 Team | | The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired on Wednesday, Nov. 8, from the Madrid tracking complex. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" web page at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present-position.cfm . Thursday, Nov. 2 (DOY 306): Last Friday it was reported that the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) instrument team wished to uplink a patch to its instrument flight software. The S25 sequence leads have received version 10.4 of the software with a test patch included. Execution of the patch is targeted for DOY 318-319. Friday, Nov. 3 (DOY 307): Today Cassini cruised past the satellites Enceladus and Calypso for a pair of non-targeted flybys.... | |
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| | | Mercury Passes Over Sun | | Posted Saturday, November 11, 2006 3:30:14 AM by Blog57 Team | | The planet Mercury made a cameo Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006, on telescopes across the world as it crossed between the sun and the Earth, an occurrence that only happens about 13 times a century. The solar transit was viewable on BYU's telescopes for five hours as the small planet passed, almost unnoticeably across the huge solar disc. "The fact that we can predict down to the second when it is going to cross is pretty amazing," said SummerDale Beckstrand, an undergraduate majoring in physics and astronomy. "It means our numbers are right on." Mercury is only slightly larger than the Earth's moon, but has a highly irregular orbit around the sun. Visible only on specially filtered telescopes during its transit, the planet appears roughly the size of a pinhead crossing over a basketball.... | |
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| | | Mercury to make rare planetary 'transit' | | Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 7:35:08 PM by Blog57 Team | | When Mercury passes between the Earth and sun today, the view in countless telescopes will be more than just the latest slow samba in the dance of planets. It will offer a hint of history, when the sight of planets moving across the sun helped confirm theories of the solar system and inspired massive expeditions to track it from every land. Today, planetary "transits" are less epoch-making but still eye-catching. "It's relatively rare," said Chris Taylor, a physics and astronomy professor at California State University, Sacramento. "What you'll see is a little black dot that creeps across the sun over the course of about five hours." Essentially, transits are like eclipses; an object is passing between the Earth and the sun. But the planets are so distant that the scale is far different -- a pinprick of darkness in a telescope for Mercury, and a tiny blob to the unaided (but sun-shielded) eye for Venus.... | |
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| | | Small solar eclipse in sky today | | Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 1:40:39 PM by Blog57 Team | | The planet Mercury will cross in front of the sun today, giving stargazers equipped with the right tools a tiny thrill. The eclipse will appear along the West Coast, from 11:12 a.m. to 4:10 p.m., as a small dot on the face of the sun, but astronomers say only look for it with the proper instruments because it can cause eye damage. This phenomena, known as Mercury Transit, happens about 13 times each century; there will not be another transit until 2016. The eclipse is very small because the disk of Mercury is about 200 times smaller than the diameter of the sun as seen from Earth. In fact, the shadow of Mercury will only cover 0.5 percent of the face of the sun. The eclipse is best seen with telescopes with a magnification of 50x to 100x, but can also be viewed with binoculars and a proper filter.... | |
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