The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to depart from the International Space Station this afternoon, with undocking scheduled for 3:26 PM EDT and final separation at 5:09 PM EDT. Then the fun begins. All across the contiguous 48 states, assuming the sky is clear (or at least clear enough to see Venus — thin, wispy clouds are OK), there will… Read more »
I didn’t end up watching the Perseid meteor shower last night — I don’t need any extra sleep deprivation when I’ve got a 1-month-old at home, thank you very much — but SpaceWeather.com says “anecdotal evidence is mounting” that the predicted “uptick” in meteor rates early this morning, around 0800 UT (2:00 AM MDT), did indeed happen. If so, those… Read more »
As I mentioned last week, the Perseid Meteor Shower is due to peak tonight and tomorrow morning, with a possible hour-long burst of ~200 meteors per hour between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM Mountain Time (1-2am PDT, 4-5am EDT). Otherwise, “dozens of meteors per hour” are likely throughout the night, though the gibbous Moon will overwhelm the dimmer ones. Aside… Read more »
SpaceWeather.com has the scoop on a possible Perseid outburst next Wednesday morning, in the wee hours: This year’s Perseid meteor shower could be even better than usual. “A filament of comet dust has drifted across Earth’s path and when Earth passes through it, sometime between 0800 and 0900 UT (1 – 2 am PDT) on August 12th, the Perseid meteor… Read more »
Via Flickr, here’s a shot of Wednesday’s total solar eclipse as seen from Bayohara, India: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ptwo/ / CC BY 2.0) More photos can be found at SpaceWeather.com. And here’s a video of the Moon’s shadow sweeping across Asia, as seen via satellite. UPDATE: Still more photos via the Boston Globe‘s always excellent The Big Picture photoblog.
Millions of people in India, China, and other Asian nations will have a front-row seat for the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century tomorrow: The event begins at the crack of dawn on Wednesday, July 22nd, in the Gulf of Khambhat just east of India. Morning fishermen will experience a sunrise like nothing they’ve ever seen before. Rising… Read more »
Space Shuttle Endeavour launched an hour or so ago from Kennedy Space Center on its delayed STS-127 mission. This was the sixth launch attempt for this mission, the previous five tries having been scrubbed for a mixture of technical and weather reasons. At first sight, the launch looked flawless. However, as slow motion replays became available shortly after Endeavour entered… Read more »
Tonight’s directly-overhead flyover by the International Space Station was as spectacular as promised. That thing is really bright now! Unfortunately, my efforts to photograph it were somewhat less spectacular. My SLR’s shutter problem has now evolved into a focus problem — it can fill the frame again, but autofocus is completely busted — and my hasty efforts at manually focusing… Read more »
There is a veritable marathon of flyovers by the International Space Station — brighter than ever, thanks to new solar panels added earlier this year — happening over the continental United States during the next several days. Definitely worth checking out. For local flyby times and magnitudes (lower numbers are brighter), check out SpaceWeather.com’s Simple Satellite Tracker, or for more… Read more »
I have various additional introductory blog posts scheduled to go online throughout the day today, but in the mean time, blogworthy stuff is happening in the world — and the cosmos. Specifically: [This] morning, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft will fly by the Moon only 9,000 km above the lunar surface. The purpose of the encounter is to put LCROSS in an… Read more »