Did You Know The Government Of New Mexico Still Considers Pluto To Be A Planet? In Fact March 13th Is

Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos  (via wordsnquotes)

Ep. 9 Eclipses and Other Dis-astra - HD and the Void

There are a several amazing, prophetic, portentous astronomical events you can see with the naked eye, and two are coming up! Hear about auroras, meteor showers, and the total eclipse that will be sweeping the United States in August 2017.

In the ancient world (and, honestly, today too) there’s nothing spookier than the sky doing something weird. Auroras, meteors, comets, and eclipses all fell under the category of scary, prophetic bad omens, but don’t worry! In this podcast I explain what they are! There are also some opportunities to see these astronomical events in action coming up. The annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak August 11-13 and there will be a total eclipse of the Sun (or a partial eclipse, depending where you’re viewing it from) across North America on August 21, 2017.

Below the cut are sources, music credits, vocabulary list, and the transcript of this episode. Check out the glossary, it’s a big one! There are also some cool eclipse-viewing resources I’ll highlight so you can view this phenomenon safely. 

Let me know what you think I should research by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me in real life. And please check out the podcast on iTunes, rate it or review it if you’d like, subscribe, and maybe tell your friends about it if you think they’d like to listen! 

(My thoughts on the next episode were spectroscopy, probes through the ages, and the transit of Venus. Let me know by the 2nd and I’ll have the next podcast up on August 14th, barring any delays due to trip fatigue!)

Glossary

auroras - a light display that occurs when a magnetosphere is sufficiently disturbed by solar wind that charged particles scatter into the upper atmosphere and lose their energy.

comet - a small, icy body that orbits the Sun. When its orbit takes it close to the Sun, the comet warms up and releases gases and debris that produce a visible atmosphere, sometimes called the comet’s tail.

corona - the hot outer atmosphere of the Sun.

eclipse - when three celestial bodies line up so that one obstructs the visibility of the other two. A solar eclipse can be partial (only part of the Sun is obscured by the Moon), total (all of the Sun is hidden by the Moon), or annular ( the Moon is close to Earth and appears too small to completely cover the Sun completely). 

Exeligmos cycle - a cycle that is 3 times the saros cycle, or 669 months. It is more accurate means of predicting eclipses and additionally predicts eclipses that will be visible from a location close to the initial eclipse.

Inex cycle - a cycle of 28 years and 345 days long used to predict an eclipse that’s visible in the opposite hemisphere. For example, if an eclipse happens in the Northern hemisphere, one Inex cycle later there will be an eclipse visible in the Southern hemisphere. The Inex cycle does not ensure that both kinds of eclipses will be of the same type. 

meteor - a small rocky or metallic body in space, smaller than asteroids. Contact with the Earth’s atmosphere causes a meteor to burn up in a streak of light. Many meteors entering the atmosphere within a few minutes of each other is called a meteor shower. If a meteor impacts on Earth’s surface without burning up, it is then classified as a meteorite. 

penumbra - a region where only a portion of the light source is obscured. When the light source is completely blocked, this darkest part of a shadow is called the umbra. 

perihelion - an object’s closest approach to the Sun in its orbit. Its greatest distance from the Sun is called its aphelion. 

perigee - a satellite’s closest approach to the Earth in its orbit. Its greatest distance from Earth is called its apogee. 

radiant - the point in the sky where objects appear to come from. For example, the Perseid meteor shower appears to come from the constellation Perseus. 

Saros cycle - a cycle of 223 months that is used to predict eclipses.

solar prominence - a large, bright feature anchored to the Sun's surface and extend outwards into the Sun's corona. A prominence forms in about a day out of plasma, a hot gas made of electrically charged hydrogen and helium. Stable prominences may last for several months, looping hundreds of thousands of miles into space as plasma flows along a structure of the Sun’s magnetic field that has burst outward, releasing the plasma.

syzygy - the straight-line alignment of three celestial bodies.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Perseids via EarthSky

Perseids via NASA

Meteor showers and viewing tips via StarDate

Comet Swift-Tuttle via NASA

My local library’s information and recommended reading list for learning about eclipses. Love you, Multnomah County!

Map of the Path of Totality across the United States

Solar eclipse map and calendar via the Exploratorium website

Free eclipse glasses at libraries via Lunar and Planetary Institute

Guide to making a pinhole camera to view the eclipse via NASA

Historical eclipses via NASA

Historical eclipses via Astronomy Magazine

“Even if the Moon, however, does sometimes cover the Sun entirely, the eclipse does not have duration or extension; but a kind of light is visible about the rim which keeps the shadow from being profound and absolute.”

Solar prominence via NASA

Solar flares via NASA

Fred Espenak’s guide to eclipses. He’s a former NASA astrophysicist who’s credited with all the eclipse predictions so I trust him.

Some good but confusing charts on solar eclipse Saros cycles via NASA

“Van den Bergh placed all 8,000 solar eclipses in von Oppolzer's Canon der Finsternisse (1887) into a large two-dimensional matrix. Each Saros series was arranged as a separate column containing every eclipse in chronological order. The individual Saros columns were then staggered so that the horizontal rows each corresponded to different Inex series.”

A Danish webpage on calculating eclipses

Hawks, Ellison. The Boy’s Book of Astronomy. Frederick A. Stokes Co: New York, 1914. Located in Google Books preview. (Heads up, this is a fairly racist source.) 

Richard Cohen. Chasing the Sun. Random House: NY, 2010.

Robert A. Henning: “different forms, wavering, many colours diffusing and changing, sometimes far away, sometimes filling the heavens around and above, plunging great dropping spears and sheets of colour earthward towards your very head as though a great hand were dropping colour like burning oil” (43).

Ernest W. Hawkes: “whistling, crackling noise” (44).

Jeremy Belknap: “like running one’s thumb and forefinger down a silk scarf” (44).

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Eclippse’ by Radical Face off his album Sunn Moonn Eclippse. Check out the video in the album link, it’s amazing.

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

It made it!

Thank you SpaceX. You just gave us the keys to our dreams. So much is now possible…

(Image credit: SpaceX SES-10 stream)

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Haaaaaay I’m on iTunes now! Slightly more convenient to download maybe!

NASA has emailed a wrench to astronauts in space

Responding to International Space Station (ISS) astronauts’ need for a wrench, NASA solved the problem by emailing a digital file to the ISS. The astronauts then 3D-printed the tool.

In a post on Backchannel, Mike Chen, founder of Made In Space, explained how the process worked.Made in Space is a Silicon Valley startup that built the 3D printer that was shipped to the ISS in September. In November, the first-ever 3D-printed part was, yes, made in space.

“My colleagues and I just 3D-printed a ratcheting socket wrench on the International Space Station by typing some commands on our computer in California,” Chen wrote in his post. “We had overheard ISS Commander Barry Wilmore … mention over the radio that he needed one, so we designed one in CAD and sent it up to him faster than a rocket ever could have. This is the first time we’ve ever ‘emailed’ hardware to space.”

Of Course I Still Love You returned to Port Canaveral earlier this morning with the SES-10 Falcon 9 first stage. Since this is the first Falcon 9 rocket to be reflown this marks the second time this particular rocket returned to port after landing. The images above were captured by remote cameras on the droneship and show the vehicle coming into land. Falcon 9 landed eight minutes after a March 30 liftoff from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center. Extensive scorching is visible on the exterior of the rocket including the interstage and grid fins. The fins themselves were seen glowing during launch footage as the booster returned to Earth. Each fin is coated in ablative paint which helps protect the metal but the severe temperatures of reentry still cause the fins to glow. Since SES-10 was placed into Geostationary Transfer Orbit, not enough propellant remained in the first stage’s tanks to allow for a nominal reentry profile and the boostback burn was not performed. As such, the rocket came in over twice its normal landing speed and eight times hotter than flights which have a boostback burn. This particular rocket will not be reused after recovery; Elon Musk stated in the SES-10 post-launch news conference that the rocket will likely be given to the Air Force for display at either Cape Canaveral or Kennedy Space Center. P/C: SpaceX

People think they know darkness, and that they experience darkness everyday, but they don’t, really.

Across the United States, natural darkness is an endangered resource. East of the Mississippi, it is already extinct; even in the West, night sky connoisseurs admit that it’s quicker to find true darkness by flying to Alice Springs, Australia, than traveling to anywhere in the lower forty-eight.

Ever since the nation’s first electric streetlight made its debut in Cleveland, on April 29, 1879, the American night has become steadily brighter. In his new book, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, Paul Bogard aims to draw attention to the naturally dark night as a landscape in its own right — a separate, incredibly valuable environmental condition that we overlook and destroy at our own peril.

Read More.

TELLURIAN

[adjective]

1. of or characteristic of the earth or its inhabitants; terrestrial.

[noun]

2. an inhabitant of the earth.

3. Tellurion: an apparatus for showing the manner in which the diurnal rotation and annual revolution of the earth and the obliquity of its axis produce the alternation of day and night and the changes of the seasons.

Etymology: from Latin tellūs, “the earth” + -ian,  "of, relating to, or resembling".

[Frank Moth - We Used To Live There]

Escape velocities for every planet in the solar system