Welcome to the Moon!

I was in Ballyclare for the first meeting of the Northern Ireland Amateur Astronomy Society last night giving a talk on the Moon. I don't know about the audience but personally I had a great time. Thanks to all involved for making me so welcome.

I promised to provide sources for all the wacky stuff I talked about so here's a reading list.

Apollo Archive (Images and much more about the Apollo missions)
SMART 1 (Europe's Moon mission)
China heads for the Moon (the title says it all)
Can you find love on the Moon? (not what it sounds like)
The last men on the Moon (Apollo 17 retrospective)
The Astronotes newsletter carried a monthly Apollo-related story throughout 2009, the USSR's moon program was covered in the March issue.

Bizony, Piers, The man who ran the Moon: James Webb, JFK and the secret history of project Apollo, Icon, Cambridge, 2006 (Fascinating look at how the Apollo missions were managed.)

Chaikin, Andrew, A man on the moon: the voyages of the Apollo astronauts, Penguin, London, 1994 (Complete, accurate, brilliantly written: the best book on Apollo, if you read one book on this list, make it this one!)

Clarke, A.C, “The men on the Moon” in Report on Planet Three, Pan, London, 1984 (Amusing essay on the naming of lunar features)

Godwin, Robert, Project Apollo: exploring the Moon, Apogee, Burlington, 2006 (Very useful pocket-sized guide to the later Apollo missions)

Godwin, Robert, Apollo 11: first men on the Moon, Apogee, Burlington, 2005 (A pocket-sized guide to Neil and Buzz’s excellent adventure)

Godwin, Robert, The lunar exploration scrapbook, a pictorial history of lunar vehicles, Apogee, Ontario, 2007 (A magnificent guide to the evolution of Apollo hardware including vehicles and devices which never flew.)

Kustenmacher, Werner, The Moon: A guide for first-time visitors, Fommers, New York 1999 (A fun and factual lunar travel guide.)

Light, Michael, Full Moon, Jonathon Cape, London, 1999 (A wonderful coffee table book of beautiful photographs taken on Moon missions.)

Mackenzie, Dana, The Big Splat, Wiley, New Jersey, 2003 (Clear account of theories of lunar origin.)

Pellegrino, Charles R. and Stoff, Joshua, Chariots for Apollo: The making of the lunar module, Antheneum, New York, 1985 (History of the Lunar Module with some facts I’ve never seen anywhere else.)

Riley, Christopher and Dolling, Phil, NASA mission AS-506 Apollo 11 1969 (including Saturn V, CM-107, SM-107, LM-5), Haynes, Yeovil, 2009 (Gimmicky presentation but very solid technical description of the Apollo 11 mission’s hardware.)

Rose, Bill, Secret Projects, military space technology, Midland Publishing, Surrey, 2008 (Not specially about the moon, but has a detailed description of a bizarre 1950’s plan to build a US Army base on the Moon)

Shayler, David J, Apollo 11 moonlanding, Ian Allan Ltd, Surrey, 1989 (A minute by minute account of the historic mission)

Smith, Andrew, Moondust: in search of the men who fell to Earth, Bloomsbury, London, 2005 (Very readable account of the lives of the Apollo crews today.)

By the way, this is post No 100 of this blog, who said it would never last!

Image Credit : NASA

Four ALMA antennas on the Chajnantor plain

ESO - alma4anttimelapse2 - Four ALMA antennas on the Chajnantor plain

ALMA is an amazing project, we'll be covering it in detail in Astronotes soon.

Responses to Bolden's Muslim comments reveal space community's nasty side

In June NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was in Cairo, Egypt where he gave an interview to the Al Jeezera television network. Near the start of the interview, when asked why he was in Egypt, Boldin said that his goals included finding "a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering. "

This apparently polite and innocuous reply to a local audience has provoked a furious knee-jerk response from armchair astronauts (and sadly, in the case of Gene Cernan, a real astronaut). Blogs and other websites created by US space enthusiasts have included wild accusations of stupidity, cowardice, "selling out to the enemy" and other failings to Bolden. Comments on one site included stuff like

"(NASA is) being run by incompetant (sic) jackasses like Bolden and whatever MORON installed him in that position. Telling Americans that we are incapable of doing what our ancestors did, and begging for help from those who would see us destroyed, is not the job of the NASA administrator"

"Reaching out to Muslims is going to result in Muslims having access to the information to strike out on our scale. I cannot imagine anyone with a normal view of daily life who would want to provide them with that."

Few seem interested in listening to Bolden's actual words, lifting words without context from a 20 minute interview , or applying any rational analysis to them, preferring outrage to what they think he said and to direct mindless anger and spite towards Bolden (a former astronaut and combat pilot) and his boss, President Obama.

The space community ought to be a forward-looking group which celebrates education and peaceful exploration (remember "we came in peace for all mankind"?), but this unseemly fuss has revealed some ugly streaks of deliberate ignorance and prejudice in its ranks.

In advance of the landings

It has been a busy week for strange things in in the sky. We get a few unresolvable queries every year but so many in a short period must mean something. It could be we're about to be invaded, an odd statistical quirk or perhaps the good weather means more people are outdoors and are looking at the sky. Here are the details followed by my comments.

• Friday 18 June: a lady in Belfast observed over several minutes a slowly moving orange light which left a smoke trail and appeared to have bits dropping off it. It was recorded on video (see still above).
• Saturday 19 June: a gentleman in Bangor observed a slowly drifting fireball leaving a smoke trail. It eventually vanished. The witness rang friends a few miles away who had seen it too.
  
• Saturday 19 June: a family watching a sunset from the north coast observed a flaming comet-like object which hung in the sky for 15 minutes or more and gradually dispersed.
• Monday 21 June: an observer in Cookstown observed a relatively bright but slowly moving light which abruptly "exploded", becoming extremely bright, then faded away.
• Tuesday 22 June: an observer in Maghera reported a fireball like a burning aircraft which appeared to fall in a nearby field.

So what have these people seen? I was not there so I cannot say. The first two sound like the 'Chinese lanterns' so common today. I have never seen one myself but these really do seem meet the description. The 'flaming comet' is a mystery; my best guess is it was a high-altitude cloud or contrail illuminated by the reddish rays of the setting Sun. I'm fairly certain the exploding light was the flare of an Iridium satellite, a magnitude -6 one was visible from the witness's location during the time he was observing. The final one may have been a bright meteor or bolide. I hoping some else may have seen it. (Update: sadly, as of 1 July no one else has came forward to confirm this sighting.)

Alas, I am very certain none of these represent sightings of alien spacecraft. Unidentified flying objects and spaceships are not necessarily the same thing.

Mysteries of Jupiter

That second most important object in the Solar System, Jupiter, has had its ups and downs recently.

Several months ago its Southern Equatorial Belt vanished. Jupiter is of course a gas giant world with no surface as we know it. When we look at Jupiter through a telescope or binoculars (what do you mean you've never seen it? Look east in the early morning sky, it's the big bright thing!) we are looking at the top of a cloudscape. The planet's rapid spin forces the clouds into a series of bands running parallel to the planet's equator. Dark coloured bands are called belts, light ones zones, each has its own characteristics and is semi-permanent. The zones' pale colours are those of frigid wisps of frozen ammonia crystals, the belts are coloured by darker (possibly organic) material dredged from the planet's mysterious depths.

The Southern Equatorial Belt is usually the most distinct and dramatic belt, unsurprisingly the Great Red Spot is to be found there. Occasionally, though it fades away leaving a pale emptiness, obscured by cold clouds of ammonia, only to emerge again. We do not know why yet, the whole planet's atmosphere is a complex system of convectional upflows and downdrafts driven by titanic interplays of heat from the Sun and Jupiter's interior shaped by the mighty Coriolis forces of the planet's spin. We cannot yet accurately model the atmosphere of a tiny world like our own, never mind that of a behemoth like Jupiter. Presumably in the next few months the Southern Equatorial Belt will reappear, until then I cannot look at Jupiter without thinking that something is missing.

Then on 3 June 2010 amateur astronomers Anthony Wesley (in Australia) and Chris Go (in the Philipines) simultaneously observed a flash of light on the disc of Jupiter. This is not Wesley's first discovery of something hitting Jupiter, he was already celebrated for drawing the world's attention to the July 2009 impact on the planet which left a black smudge almost the size of the Earth on the planet. Similar wounds were observed following the 1994 impacts of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 cometary bodies and are thought to be clouds of dark and sooty debris from the impacting body.

Yet no such marks have appeared this time. Even the Hubble Space telescope's very sensitive Wide Field Camera 3 has failed to find any Jovian bruises. The impact location is circled in the HST image above, nothing can be seen there. Why was this event's aftermath so different? The previous impactors are believed to have penetrated deep into the planet's gargantuan atmosphere before exploding. In the latest case, the object was probably a giant meteor (giant by our standard, tiny compared to the previous impacting bodies) which burnt up at a high altitude above Jupiter's cloud tops, failing to leave behind a debris cloud, as seen in previous Jupiter collisions.

Wesley and Go were lucky enough to observe a fleeting glimpse of a flash of energy bright enough to be seen here on Earth, across 770 million kilometres of space. Take a moment to imagine what a similar impact would do to our fragile world. It is a frightening thought.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley, USA), H. B. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado, USA), A. A. Simon-Miller (Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA) and the Jupiter Impact Science Team.

One of ours

The gorgeous sight of the upper stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launcher spinning and venting fuel over Australia is clearly seen in this video. It seems to be getting more exposure than the launch itself.

This is something clearly identified yet it is astonishing how many people don't want reality to introduce on their speculations (alien spaceship, testing of scalar weapon, testing of torsional physics weapon, testing of HAARP, Sign of the End Times).

Watch the video, it is really a spaceship. But it's one of our's.

Japanese voyage to Venus begins

Nice video of this launch from JAXA's rather pretty launch site.

Good luck Akatuki!