Blogs

The artist's conception simulates an infrared view of the giant ring. Saturn appears as just a small dot from outside the band of ice and dust. The bulk of the ring material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). The ring's diameter is equivalent to roughly 300 Saturns lined up side to side.

Thanks to the much-heralded International Year of Astronomy, this much we know: Galileo used a telescope to observe the moon in 1609. But the inventor of the revolutionary resolutionary device remains unknown, and its early history is muddied by simultaneous discoveries and competing claims.

A surprise in the upper atmoshere of the Earth
 
Another way of heating the earths atmosphere has been found... THis one is not due to the sun's heating of the earth by sunlight.
 
 

MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget

Bespoke is old hat. Off-the-shelf is in. Even Google runs the world’s biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space.

British photographer Martin Pugh has been named the Astronomy Photographer of the Year. Martin’s Horsehead Nebula, which also won the Deep Space category, was taken with a 12.5” diameter Richey-Chrétien telescope and CCD camera mounted in his garden shed in Canberra, Australia. Martin, originally from Dudley in the Midlands, acquired the picture over 14 nights with a total exposure time of 19 hours

Anybody here has Flickr account?
I can add a feature to 'blog' from your flickr account any pic you may like to blog about
Post it here FROM flickr with description
Just let me know if anybody interested

Check out the rare chance movie imaged from Earth of Io casting a shadow on Ganymede at
www.space.com

A group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black.
Read full article here:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0%2c8599%2c1911517%2c00.html

and some more here
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_sc826

We discussed having a dinner.  It's really important to get together on this now if we are going to make it happen in November as suggested at our last meeting on July 8th by Mary Lou.  We need a head count.  Mark E. was to contact a restaurant or two and Mike W was to send out requests for door prizes.  Now your part is telling us yes or no.  If we can't make November, how about in February like in really old times.  Correct me if I'm wrong about the old time dates.  All I can remember was being snowed out several years.