The Jones Hall marquee caught my attention with “Music of Star Trek and More Sci-Fi”. They’ll be playing themes from the various Star Treks, including the new movie. They’ll also play the themes from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Battlestar Galactica. I wonder if they will play the theme from Red Dwarf.

If music isn’t enough, there’s a costume competition.

And the Houston Chronicle Dollar Concert will be playing Holst’s “The Planets”

If you prefer music from video games, see the Gamer MusiCON 09.

The Terra Cotta Warriors are on exhibit in The Houston Museum of Natural Science

From yesterday’s 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast podcast:

…if an object were to fall into a black hole it would actually get stretched out and then ripped apart. There’s a great word for that; do you remember what the word for that is, Cameron?

Cameron: I believe it has something to do with Italian cooking…

Robert: It does — spaghettification,

CNN has an article on visualizing the inside of a black hole.  It references a website with AVI and MOV video files, so I dropped the Flash video from CNN.

Now, if the LHC really could generate black holes, they could make a little side profit offering self guided tours inside the man black holes.  How long would it take to find the exit considering the effects on time?

more animals

Ten tips to LOLspeak

1. Mis-decline verbs, especially misuse the verb “to be”
2. Misuse gerunds
3. Overuse prepositional phrases
4. Blatant rearrangement of syntax
5. Incorrect plurals and past-tense verbs
6. “noun” your adjectives. (For instance, the adjective “blue” can become the noun “blueness”)
7. Improper pronouns
8. Drop the articles (”a”, “and”, “the”) in favor of adding “-age” to the end of a noun
9. Use “younger” words (”kitty” versus “cat”, “fuzzy” versus “furry”, etc.)
10. Use the word “with” inappropriately.

Video courtesy of Analytical Graphics, Inc.

Satellite collision with a statistical breakup model.
	This one-minute video demonstrates the approach trajectories of the two satellites prior to impact, as well as a statistical breakup model with an example of propagated debris. 720p HD version (38.0 Mb) as a ZIP file Broadcast-ready NTSC Quicktime MOV (by request only)

Technical description

The breakup model is a statistical model that generates 1,000 debris samples for each satellite, numerically integrated in a full force model in STK/Astrogator. Statistical debris models employ stochastic processes useful for rapidly characterizing a debris event to understand where debris could go and can assist in risk analysis. While not requiring observation data to run, this model can be refined by seeding the statistical values with data from tracked debris as it becomes available. An output of the model is a high-precision catalog of ephemeris data. The breakup model used a Gaussian distribution of samples with a 1 km/s delta-V magnitude (sigma 1 km/s) and uniform density and mass distributions. The breakup model delta-V directions were set to Azimuth -90 deg and an elevation of 38 deg and -38 deg (sigma 30 deg). The propagator used a JGM2 gravity field with degree 12 and order 12. The computational time to generate these models in STK is extremely rapid with the ability to calculate results for several day propagations in less than 15 minutes on a single legacy processor. Since each piece is modeled individually, parallel processing techniques would provide near instant data if required. Values for propagators and breakup statistics are user controlled.

Satellite collision with an Evolve-based, statistical break-up model
	This 1-minute video demonstrates the approach trajectories of the two satellites prior to impact, as well as a statistical break-up model with an example of propagated debris. 720p HD version (50.0 Mb) as a ZIP file Broadcast-ready NTSC Quicktime MOV (by request only)

Technical description

Above text from AGI.com and more detail at AGI.com.

Amazing, i actually saw the Orion Constellation, Procyon and Sirius from Tranquility Park. There are so many light downtown, often only planets are visible from the office stairs. There are some bright lights in that park at night, so see stars was amazing. You do have to shield your eyes from the surrounding lights.

Barely grown in space is no different than barely grown on Earth.  And the beer, then isn’t different.  So beer produced in space is not different.  That’s good news for austronaunts knewing there can be good beer in space, if allowed.  

… the beer will not be commercially available, and it certainly will not be consumed in space, as the name may suggest. Firstly, it is a very limited edition “pure space-grown barley” beer, only to be tasted by 60 people chosen via an exclusive Japanese lottery. Secondly, if the fizzy liquid were to be drunk in zero-gravity, there will be some rather unappealing side-effects. Down here on Earth, bubbles inside a carbonated liquid fizz to the surface, counteracting gravity. As you drink, the liquid and gas separate, letting you release the gas as a burp. NASA experiments in the 1980’s on carbonated liquids in microgravity showed that the gas and the liquid do not separate; as you try to burp, you release the liquid as well. This is known as a “wet burp”, guaranteed not to win you any friends if you were drinking on the International Space Station! Besides I doubt mission control would be very happy about letting its astronauts drink and drive the Space Shuttle…

Now the closing comments, though…

All that is needed now is to use the water from the space station’s urine recycler in the beer brewing process and we’ll have an authentic, sustainable Space Beer that can be produced anywhere in the Solar System! I wonder if that Space Beer would taste any different…

Quotes from 365 Days of Astronomy, January 9: The Link Between Beer and Space Settlement.  Audio and transcript available.

Too bad alcohol impairs star gazing.

Night vision also is impaired by alcohol, nicotine, and low blood sugar, so don’t drink, smoke, or go hungry while deep-sky observing. 

More beer:

• Sierra Nevada Galileo’s Astronomical Ale
• Astroengine Live #7: Beer, Beer and Cutting-Edge Cosmology
• Beer Drinkers in Space

Yay!  Finally, clear skies.  It’s been a while.  Now I need a star chart to learn the names of more stars I can see.

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

A New Push to Turn Off the Lights in 2009

Astronomers are fed up. One fifth of the world’s population cannot see the Milky Way because street lamps and building lights are too bright. So scientists are mounting a new campaign, called Dark Skies Awareness, aiming to reduce light pollution as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.

“Reducing the number of lights on at night could help conserve energy, protect wildlife and benefit human health,” astronomer Malcolm Smith of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile wrote in a commentary Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Smith points out that billions of dollars of light is needlessly shined into the sky each year. Beyond the waste of money and energy, this light is blocking people’s view of the heavens.

continued at blog Wired

Related:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Light Pollution
• Thousands of Citizen Scientists to Help Map Light Pollution

Woodlands billionaire offers retreat for top scientists

a pristine 6,000-acre stand of piney woods northwest of Houston where some of the world’s most brilliant scientists — theoretical physicists who ponder the universe’s deepest questions — chose to gather. Among them was perhaps the most famous living scientist, Stephen Hawking.

continued at Chron.com

A&M reaches for the stars / University plans to be a top-notch astronomy school

Philantropy

• George P. Mitchell
• $200 Million Grant To Build World’s Largest Telescope

Telescopes

• Giant Magellan Telescope
• Thirty Meter Telescope
• CalTech astronomy history

That’s a lot of roads.

• All Streets

Never Too Fast

Zenvo ST1 is excessive in everything except speed.  Some one should tell them there is no such thing as too much, especially in speed.  You can certainly save time with this thing.  See story at blog.Wired.com.

NYC LED

New York, New York is going LED.  They boast being brighter.  Could save even more electricity if they would lower the light intensity and give star gazers a little more darkness.  More at Wired.com.

Getting Started in Astronomy (PDF) was useful in getting started in naked eye urban star gazing. I was amazed at how many stars I CAN see.

Shortly after midnight this morning, I look in the sky and wonder what is that bright star about 40° north in the southeast sky southwest of the Orion constellation.  I took a picture with an old pocket digital camera.  I set it up on a small tripod, turned off the flash, and set a delay timer.  I pressed the big button and here’s the picture.

Google Earth in Sky mode is free, but it’s frustrating.