This Is What A Comet Looks Like, Up Close And Personal.

Scientists slow the speed of light

By Kenneth Macdonald

A team of Scottish scientists has made light travel slower than the speed of light. 

They sent photons - individual particles of light - through a special mask. It changed the photons’ shape - and slowed them to less than light speed. 

The photons remained travelling at the lower speed even when they returned to free space. 

The experiment is likely to alter how science looks at light.

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Two comets pass in the night bound for your telescope

Remember comets Lovejoy and C/2012 X1 LINEAR? We dropped in on them in late January. On Feb. 6 the two cruised within  2 degrees of each other as they tracked through Ophiuchus before dawn.  Were it not for bad weather, astrophotographer Damian Peach would have been out to record the cometary conjunction, but this unique photo, taken two mornings later, shows the two comets chasing each other across the sky. Of course they’re not really following one another, nor are they related,  but the illusion is wonderful.

Image credit & copyright: Damian Peach

http://player.vimeo.com/video/62255585

Comet Panstarrs captured in gorgeous time-lapse above the skies of Boulder, CO by Patrick Cullis. Lovely stuff.

Comets are mysterious frozen chunks of stellar and planetary debris, these dirty snowballs that wander in darkness until their tails are blown bright and wide by solar winds. Some follow paths so random and eccentric that they may pass a star only once, or perhaps not at all, instead floating through interstellar space, never to be known. But for those fleeting moments, like Panstarrs’ current passage, they are like icy candles lit for our enjoyment by the breath of the sun.

A song of ice and fire, indeed.

Video: Camera inside a ball of water, in space!

During Expedition 40 in the summer of 2014, NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman — along with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst — explored the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity on the International Space Station. The crew “submerged” a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water the size of a softball and recorded the activity with a 3-D camera. (Video: NASA)

General Ham: Digital Mode Introduction

This is probably a bit more repetition, but well worth the time!  So digital modes are where data are encoded as bits instead of in waves, and some are created commercially, while others are created by amateurs!  

Digital modes consist of two things: a protocol and a method of modulation.  A protocol is the set of rules that control the encoding, packaging, exchanging and decoding of digital data.  For example, packet radio uses the AX.25 protocol standard.  This standard says how each packet is constructed, how packets are exchanged, what characters are allowed, and so forth.  The protocol standard doesn’t say what kind of transmitter to use or what the signal will sound like on the air.

Digital mode signals are restricted to the CW/data segments of each band and most digital mode operation is close to the top of the CW segment.  Calling frequencies for the popular digital modes are incorporated into band plans and are usually the lowest frequency of operation with operators moving up in frequency as activity increases.

For example on 20m, most PSK31 signals are found near 14.070 MHz.  RTTY and other digital mode signals are found above that.  The modems used for digital signals often do not recognize signals from CW or other digital modes.

Here’s the Digital Signal Band Plan:

@atdiy/@tymkrs

Comets may hold the secret to the origin of life on Earth

We’ve studied life on Earth extensively, but we still have no idea where it came from. Some scientists think it may have spontaneously arisen on Earth by some unknown process. Others think the ingredients for life were delivered here by comets crashing into Earth in the early days of the solar system. The latter theory just got a huge boost.

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Liquid oxygen tank confidence weld complete on VAC

A liquid oxygen tank confidence article for NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, completes final welding on the Vertical Assembly Center at Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

A liquid oxygen tank confidence article for NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, completes final welding on the Vertical Assembly Center at Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

Breathtaking views just keep coming! At a distance of 63,400 miles above the cloud tops of Jupiter’s South Pole, the Juno spacecraft reveals incredibly detailed views of the planet’s powerful cyclones and storms.

(Image credit: NASA / MSSS / SwRI / JPL / Caltech. Reprocessing Roman Tkachenko)

Space shuttle launch (no sound).

The orbit of Jupiter protects the Earth from asteroids.