Odd Crater on Mars
Orcus Patera, discovered in 1965 by the Mariner 4 spacecraft, is located near Mars’ equator, between the volcanoes Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons. At 236 miles long, it would stretch from New York to Boston on Earth. Its rim rises over a mile above the surrounding plains, and its floor lies 1,300 to 1,900 feet below its surroundings.
But in spite of lying between two volcanoes and its designation as a patera — the name for deep, complex or irregularly shaped volcanic craters — scientists aren’t at all sure that Orcus Patera has a volcanic origin story.
I love how exaggerated the features on Mars can be compared to Earth because of the relative differences in gravity.
Decay Is Not What It Used to Be
But what if a well-known — and apparently constant — characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?
I can see it now: the earthbirthers6,000 will find the workings of Glow-ry in the anomaly, without bothering to wait for scientific method to be applied.
what a difference a year makes
The planet Uranus was discovered more or less by accident in 1781 by Sir William Herschel, in the course of his search for deep sky objects. As time went by, Uranus’ position wasn’t quite what astronomer’s predicted, and mathematical astronomers began to suspect that there was another planet out there whose gravity was influencing Uranus’ motion.
Also, this week next year Neptune will complete its first orbit around the sun since 18461.
1If I am reading this correctly.
Where Yertle the Turtle Lives
“Ok, so what if Earth is just a dot in the picture? Well, it’s incredible to think that dot encompasses all the achievements, joys, fears, and tears of the 100 billion people who have occupied this celestial pebble since the dawn of our species.”
The Celestial Summit Meeting
For the next three nights, Venus, Saturn, and Mars (no word on Uranus) will be visible in the west-northwestern sky.
Technically, the ecliptic represents the extension or projection of the plane of the Earth’s orbit out towards the sky. But since the moon and planets move in orbits, whose planes do not differ greatly from that of the Earth’s orbit, these bodies, when visible in our sky, always stay relatively close to the ecliptic line.
Twelve of the constellations through which the ecliptic passes from the Zodiac; their names which can be readily identified on standard star charts, are familiar to millions of horoscope users who would be hard pressed to find them in the actual sky.
Preliminary analyses suggest that it happened sometime during the last 10,000 years, probably no more than 5,000 years ago
Google Earth helped researchers discover one of the most recent impact craters.
The rim of the Egyptian crater stands about 3 meters above the surrounding plain, which is partially covered with distinct swaths of light-colored material blasted from the crater by the impact. These rays, which emanate from the impact site like spokes from the hub of a wheel, are what drew researchers’ attention to the crater, says Folco. While such “rayed craters” are common on the moon and other airless bodies of the solar system, they are exceedingly rare on Earth because erosion and other geological processes quickly erase such evidence.
Many Worlds
The highly sensitive Kepler has now leveled the playing field, indicating that there are many more exoplanets twice the size of Earth and smaller.
This makes me wonder how many other worlds are noticing this at this moment.
bullshitartistrendering
My favorite tag at Wired Science.
Solar Plane Stays Aloft for 24 Hours
The team says it has now demonstrated that the single-seat plane can theoretically stay in the air indefinitely, recharging its depleted batteries using 12,000 solar cells and nothing but the rays of the sun during the day.
Okay, here’s the new retirement plan: sort of like a houseboat, but in the air.
BIG BANG BIG BOOM
Blu obviously took Creativity 101 and 201.
The Book of Enoch, a translation, Chapters 3 – 5
Okay, let’s break this down a little. There’s cryptic stuff about winter and summer, evergreens, the number 14. It’s possible these have local significance, or refer to stellar structures — constellations — that represent the times of year. I’ll chunk in a little bit about sin and redemption, lay the groundwork for future generations, the stories of the stars that became our gods, the world’s longest game of telephone. Y’all come back, you hear?
The Book of Enoch, a translation, Chapter Two
The patterns of the sky, of perfect harmony and order, begin to shift.
What then?
How we must have sinned.
Saturn, the one who seemed to rise and set in our geography — the King who walked among us!
When heaven begins to shift, surely some evil has been done.
Or, put another way, when the shapes we have assigned to groups of stars, passed down a thousand years, disappear below the horizon, surely it is caused by some sin against your perfect order.
Oh, lord.
new (old) word
The Book of Enoch, a translation, Chapter One
Because we live in a time of great transition . . . .
Because the orbit of the moon, and planets, and stars are all that are available to us. To guide our impressions of the world. To help us mark the tracking of time. To remind us when to plant and when to harvest . . . .
Because the star map provides such comfort in its regularity, in the patterns we recognize and invent, imagine the terror we must feel when the constellations that mark our year — the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the winter and summer solstices — because of patterns we recognize but do not understand — begin to shift . . . .
All hell has broken loose.
Driver Takes Off Before Reaching Airport
According to the police report, Villasana claimed to have had only one vodka cocktail, the night before.
She repeatedly tried to get back into her burning vehicle, despite police efforts to keep her away.
See the article here, and be sure to look at the link for the video. I think she has a future as a stunt woman for Bruce Willis. This one looks like Willis’s helicopter kill in Live Free or Die Hard.
She would have been 84 today.
She always got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
HiLobrow‘s Peggy Nelson has a brief tribute to MM‘s “flickering photosynthesis from a celluloid sun”.
Catalog Number 36514, 2010-015A, OTV-1 (USA 212)
Amateur astronomers have tracked the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B mini-space spy plane.
“Well the challenge is finding it without much data to go on,” Roberts responded. “If the data were freely available we would probably not have bothered with it. I see little sense in tracking objects for which data is freely available. It’s like re-inventing the wheel. So as long as there are missions with little or no information, I personally will be interested in the challenge of finding them.”
quote out of context
70% of the reason I linked to this is because of the title, “Rampaging cannonball star is rampaging.”
Jupiter lost a stripe
“Jupiter with only one belt is almost like seeing Saturn when its rings are edge-on and invisible for a time — it just doesn’t look right,” wrote skywatcher Bob King of Duluth, Minn., in a May 10 entry of his blog “Astro Bob” while discussing Wesleyan’s surprising Jupiter views.
Y’all
It’s three weeks from today.
giant ammonia-ice blizzard on Saturn
An ammonia-ice blizzard large enough to be seen by amateur astronomers has developed on Saturn.
“A balloonist floating about 100 kilometers (62 miles) down from the bottom of Saturn’s calm stratosphere would experience an ammonia-ice blizzard with the intensity of Snowmageddon,” said Brigette Hesman, a composite infrared spectrometer team member and assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland.
“These blizzards appear to be powered by violent storms deeper down — perhaps another 100 to 200 kilometers (62 to 124 miles) down — where lightning has been observed and the clouds are made of water and ammonia,” Hesman said.
The Universe with Doctors Jimes Tooper and Donna Gust
Back in the Golden Age
Built a scaffolding, scraped the side of the house, replaced the tails at the top. I don’t think I could climb up there now. Cindy got tired of how long it was all taking me and hired some people to paint the rest of the house.
this is us
Twenty years ago the Voyager 1 space craft beamed back a photograph of our tiny planet.
Carl Sagan on the pale blue dot:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
