Jet Contrail Mistaken for a Secret Missile Launch!

A CBS news chopper filmed what they thought was the exhaust from a 'secret' missile launch, but it was actually the contrail of a jet. The fact that the missile was moving rather slowly seemed not to have caused them to have doubts!

I saw this mentioned first in a Bad Astronomy posting, and more in a follow-up, with a very detailed explanation complete with radar tracking data and 3d visualisation by a site that really specialises in analysing unusual contrails.

Spectacular views of a Comet Nucleus

The solid heart of comet Hartley 2, looks rather like a dog's bone, quite different to what I would have expected a comet nucleus to look like! Conspiracy 'theorists', might think it looks like some kind of weird alien spaceship masquerading as a comet.

For more useful scientific information, and for some spectacular photograph, have a look at the following web sites: one at Bad Astronomy and the other at Astronomy Picture of the Day

The photographs were taken when the EPOXI mission spacecraft came close to it. You can plainly see jets of dust and gas squirting out from the roughened ends of the comet nucleus.

The mission is not just about science and pretty pictures, if a comet was likely to ever impact the Earth, then the more we understand comets, the better we could execute a mission to save the Earth.

Design your own way to get Jupiter & win prizes!

There are a few 'pesky' rules to follow, and to succeed is decidedly non-trivial, but could be interesting for some people.

Note that the ESA is the European Space Agency - NASA is not not the only Western organization associated with Space Exploration.

Mission Analysis and Design
This yearly competition aims at advancing the automation of the trajectory design process. The competition has been taken up by the community after its first edition organized by the Advanced Concepts Team.
[...]
To organise the first international competition to find the global optimal of an interplanetary trajectory was a risky idea. We saw it, a bit romantically perhaps, as a sort of "sailing challenge", with our galaxy as the racing waters and mathematical tools as the competing boats. In keeping with this idea, we hoped each successive winner would become the host (and referee) for the next event. The competition was opened to the widest international community including industry, academia and research groups. Still it was far from certain that any of these specialists and researchers would be willing to devote their (usually scarce) free time to such a contest. As it turned out, luck was indeed on the side of those who dare, and not only seventeen different groups participated to the first contest, but the winner also accepted to carry on and organise the next event, thereby fully supporting the original vision.
[…]

See also comments on slashdot, one of which related to an existing game called Orbiter, which is a space flight simulator.

Another of the Slashdot comments says:
[…]
Also, it's a decent example of the sort of thing possible with HTML5 crap, and it's GPL, so at least it's got that going for it.
[…]

Note that Firefox 3.6 has some support HTML5, and Firefox 4 will support HTML5 even better!

UFO alert – Alien spaceship seen masquerading as a moon of Saturn!

The REAL TRUTH will be revealed, once you read the Bad Astronomers blog!

See the photo of the moon like spaceship with full afterburners!

Note how a real Astronomer reacts to this exciting discovery.

Unlike fake photos of UFOs, this is real, and so is the science involved.

Plait Tech-Tonics - Astronomer goes Entrepreneurial

With the recent bad times and consequential budget cuts, Astronomers have had to look for other sources of remuneration to supplement their incomes so that they can properly support their families...

So Bill Plait came up with a new product 'Plait Tech-Tonics', and he states that "With a slogan like "Dark energy, light taste" it can’t lose!"

So never write of Scientists as boring and lacking in Entrepreneurial spirit!

Photographs of the Moon, processed by a New Zealander

(I had accidentally posted this to another blog about open source software)

Maurice Collins, in Palmerston North, reprocessed images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera to produce some stunning photographs.

Unfortunately, he uses somewhat non-standard HTML, so I was unable too look at most of his pages at his website using Firefox.

http://www.universetoday.com/74082/the-moon-in-stunning-wide-angle/
[...]
However, the raw wide-angle images are somewhat distorted by the camera, but Maurice Collins, a Moon enthusiast from New Zealand, found that putting several images together in a mosaic removes a lot of the distortions and produces a much clearer image. The results are nothing short of stunning; here are a few example of Maurice’s handiwork, including this jaw-dropping image of the Marius Hills region of the Moon. Click on any of these images for a larger version on Maurice’s website, Moon Science
[...]

LHC beautiful diagrams of Quark 'atoms'

In the 6 September 2010: Beautiful atoms entry of the LHCb experiment web site, they have some wonderful diagrams showing how they found 'atoms' of Beauty and anti-Beauty quarks. They show how the experimental results can be mapped to the transitions where the 2 quarks drop from higher to lower energy orbitals, just like as in an Hydrogen atom.

In other news: the actual number of protons in the LHC beam is now about a millions times more than when they started this year!