I saw this on my bike ride a few days ago. I don’t understand the mechanism that makes this magnolia tree blossom in winter, but it seems appropriate for a new year.
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Sunita Williams Gives a Tour of International Space Station
On December - 23 - 2012
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Sunita Williams gave a video tour of the International Space Station a few hours before her return to earth on November 18, 2012. I found it fascinating because her tour gives a great sense of the layout of the interior of the ISS and what it actually looks like. Also, in a weightless environment, the meaning of up and down have different definitions.
There were a couple of things that were especially interesting to me. When the crew uses the exercise bike, they don’t need a seat because they don’t sit down. They use clip-on pedals to hold them to the “bike.” The pedals look very similar to the Shimano road pedals that I use on my De Rosa. The exercise machines need to be isolated from the walls of the space station so they don’t put any forces into the structure of spacecraft and solar arrays.
When Commander Williams entered the Russian segment where Service Module Central Post of the space station is located, there was a nice assortment of Nikon photography equipment on both walls.
What an Astronaut’s Camera Sees at Night (from ISS)
On October - 14 - 2012
NASA | SDO’s Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit
On June - 6 - 2012
The YouTube description from NASA Goddard: “Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun’s atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.
On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event–the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.
The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.“
The Tricorder Project
On March - 28 - 2012
Dr. Peter Jansen, founder, describes the Tricorder Project. His first Tricorder project prototype had atmospheric, electromagnetic and spatial sensors.
An Astronomer’s Paradise by Babak Tafreshi
On February - 5 - 2012
An Astronomer’s Paradise from Babak Tafreshi on Vimeo.
This video made me think about interstellar space travel. Voyager 1 is currently the fastest moving man-made object, traveling at approximately 38,100 mph (61,300 kph). At that rate, it will take 17,614 years to travel one light year. At warp 9.9, (ref. The 37′s), it would take 24 minutes and 29.66 seconds.
Cownose Ray
On November - 4 - 2011
