22nd July 2009 – Eclipse third contact

Diamond ring at third contact. These images of the eclipse were taken from Tian Huang Ping, Anji, China.

This sequence took about 21 seconds in real time.

25th May 1961 – Kennedy’s Moon Speech

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. A number of political factors affected Kennedy’s decision and the timing of it. In general, Kennedy felt great pressure to have the United States “catch up to and overtake” the Soviet Union in the “space race.” Four years after the Sputnik shock of 1957, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space on April 12, 1961, greatly embarrassing the U.S. While Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, he only flew on a short suborbital flight instead of orbiting the Earth, as Gagarin had done. In addition, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in mid-April put unquantifiable pressure on Kennedy. He wanted to announce a program that the U.S. had a strong chance at achieving before the Soviet Union. After consulting with Vice President Johnson, NASA Administrator James Webb, and other officials, he concluded that landing an American on the Moon would be a very challenging technological feat, but an area of space exploration in which the U.S. actually had a potential lead. Thus the cold war is the primary contextual lens through which many historians now view Kennedy’s speech.

The above clip is from NASA’s page on President Kennedy’s announcement of the decision to go to the Moon.

Here is an audio recording of the speach I found on YouTube.

Twelve people have walked on the surface of the Moon.

Apollo 11

• Neil Armstrong – Commander
• Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. – Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 12

• Charles Conrad, Jr – commander
• Alan L. Bean – lunar module pilot

Apollo 14

• Alan B. Shepard, Jr – Commander
• Edgar D. Mitchell – Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 15

• David R. Scott – Commander
• James B. Irwin – Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 16

• John W. Young – Commander
• Charles M. Duke Jr. – Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 17

• Eugene A. Cernan – Commander
• Harrison H. Schmitt – Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 17 left the surface of the Moon on 14th December 1972. We have not been back since then.

19th April 2009 – J. G. Ballard

The following is taken from this article in The Guardian.

JG Ballard, novelist and short-story writer, has died after a long battle will illness, his agent has said.

The 78-year-old author, who was best known for the award-winning Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical novel written in 1984, and his controversial novel, Crash, later adapted into film by David Cronenberg.

His agent, Margaret Hanbury, said it was “with great sadness” that Ballard had passed away this morning after several years of ill health.

Member of the New Wave of science fiction authors,  JG Ballard was one of the first science fiuction authors I read in the sixties. I remember reading The Drowned World, The Crystal World and The Terminal Beach (which I still have in my library). Not my favorite science fiction author – too “psychological” for my taste – I was in to hard science fiction.

20th March 2009 11:44 UTC – Vernal Equinox

Today at 11:44 UTC (roughly the same as GMT).

The center of the Sun crosses the equatorial plane from south to north. On the equator the sun passes directly overhead. At the poles the Sun is on the horizon the whole day. On this day the Sun spends roughly the same length of  time over and under the horizon so day and night are roughly equally long at all places on Earth.

Vernal equinox  comes from the latin ver = spring, aequus = equal and nox = night (day and night of equal length).

15th March – The Ides of March

The Ides of March is the fifteenth day of March in the Roman calendar. Ides comes from latin and means half division.

A bad day for one: on the 15th March 44 BCE Julius Caeser was assainated by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several other Roman senators. He was stabbed to death. Beware the Ides of March.

A triumphant day for another: on 15th March 1493 Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first journey to the Americas.

An innovative day for technology: on 15th March 1985 the first internet domain name (symbolics.com) is registered.

14th March 1835 – Giovanni Schiaparelli born

Giovanni Schiaparelli was born on this day in 1835. He is perhaps best known because, as noted in Wikipedia:

he observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars which he called “canali” in Italian, meaning “channels” but mistranslated as “canals”.

Interestingly (or not) Google celebrates his birthday with this logo:

14th March – Pi Day

Happy Pi Day everyone.

13th March 1781 – Uranus discovery announced

From Wikipedia’s post on Uranus:

Sir William Herschel announced its discovery on March 13, 1781, expanding the known boundaries of the solar system for the first time in modern history. This was also the first discovery of a planet made using a telescope.

Sir William Herschel was not the first person to observe Uranus – John Flamsteed beat him to it. But Flamsteed did not recognise Uranus for what it was. The credit for the discovery therefore goes to Herschel.

7th January 1610 – Galileo observes Jupiter moons

Utklipp fra Wikipedia’s entry for Galileo Galilei:

On 7 January 1610 Galileo observed with his telescope what he described at the time as “three fixed stars, totally invisible by their smallness”, all within a short distance of Jupiter, and lying on a straight line through it. Observations on subsequent nights showed that the positions of these “stars” relative to Jupiter were changing in a way that would have been inexplicable if they had really been fixed stars. On 10 January Galileo noted that one of them had disappeared, an observation which he attributed to its being hidden behind Jupiter. Within a few days he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter. He had discovered three of Jupiter’s four largest satellites (moons): Io, Europa, and Callisto. He discovered the fourth, Ganymede, on 13 January. Galileo named the four satellites he had discovered Medicean stars, in honour of his future patron, Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Cosimo’s three brothers. Later astronomers, however, renamed them Galilean satellites in honour of Galileo himself.

The significance of the above is the following…
This was one of the earliest known astronomical observations using a telescope. The discovery that Jupiter had moons orbiting it was pivotal in displacing the Aristotelian Cosmology which held that all heavenly bodies circle the Earth. This discovery supported the  Copernican model of the Solar System where the Sun and not the Earth is at the centre. Galileo’s discovery in September of the same year that Venus displayed phases like the Moon  showed that Venus orbited the Sun, not the Earth.

27th December 1571 – Johannes Kepler born

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) played a major role in the scientific revolution. He is best known as the discoverer of the three Laws of Planetary Motion. He did this by studying the observations made by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) of planetary motion.

Kepler was instrumental in replacing our Geocentric – Earth centered -  view of the Universe with a heliocentric – Sun centered – view. This heliocentric view would later fall. Two major mileposts on our way towards a modern view of our Universe.

Kepler’s three laws are stated in our times thus:
First Law:
The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus.
Second Law:
A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
Third Law:
The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the third power of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Moreover, the constant of proportionality has the same value for all planets.

The first law describes the shape of a planet orbit. The second law tells us that a planet moves faster when closer to the Sun than when further away. The third law tells us that the length of a planet’s year depends on its distance from the Sun. The further out a planet orbits the Sun; the longer its year is.

Isaac Newton was later able to derive these laws using his Theory of Gravitation.

Start rant…

Did you notice that a Scientific Law describes how natural phenomenon behave?

A Scientific Theory on the other hand explains why things follow the laws they are observed to follow.

The scientific use of the words law and theory differ from the common use of these words.  In common use a Law is a rule agreed upon by common agreement and a theory is an untested idea that has not been proved. In common use a theory is weaker than a law. In science the opposite is true.

Note that scientific theories are never proved to be true. Theories can either be proved false (rare) or (more commonly) replaced by a new theory that explains natural phenomenon even better.  Newton’s Laws of Gravitation have not been replaced by Einstein’s General Theory of relativity. Relativity is just more accurate than Newton’s Theory in extreme situations.  When sending a probe to the Moon; Newton’s Theory of Gravitation works just fine. Sending a probe into orbit round a black hole on the other hand would require use of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity because the velocities in question are much closer to the speed of light and therefore more extreme.

…end rant.