The Pillars Of Creation And Spotting Comet Lovejoy

Gibbous by Abi Ashra (Tumblr)

tfw your inactive blog gets a whole bunch of notes out of nowhere and you wonder if you could ever bring it back to life

Catching Up: Weather is weird... TWWN continues... 80 Meter woes...

-=> Weather is just plain odd around here. We’re supposed to get up to 7 inches of snow, but nothing so far. Here in town it’s actually pretty nice

Out in the country it’s a different story. Not snowing, but 30+ MPH winds are whipping the snow we do have into near blizzard like conditions in some areas. Went down to Stockbridge to my favorite coffee shop, Mud Creek, and if I hadn’t been driving the Jeep I don’t think I would have made it. Was bucking drifts a foot or more deep in some areas, and visibility was down to just a few feet in places.

Problem with the Jeep is I get overconfident. I was bashing along around 40 mph in four wheel drive, and nearly lost it when I nailed a 2 foot deep drift. Wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been driving slow, but at 40 the front end wiped out and I nearly went sideways before I got it straightened out again. Needless to say, I slowed down a bit after that.

So, snow storms today, and by Thursday it’s supposed to be 40 degrees and raining.

Sigh…

Noticed they got the street dug up just down the road from the house here. Another water main break. Must be the fifth one we’ve had in town in the last two months. Feel sorry for the water utility guys. And I stocked up on bottled water just in case…

-=> Work on The World’s Worst Novel continues unabated. I’ve been having way too much fun with this thing. It’s an SF novel in the worst sense of the word, harking back to the old space opera days with ridiculous space battles, paying very little attention to whether or not the ‘science’ bears any relationship to actual physics. It’s also gotten very, very dirty. Well, not by modern standards. Compared to modern fiction it’s actually pretty mild, but for me… I keep wondering where this stuff comes from.

Curiously, I just realized that almost all of the main characters are female. The protagonist is female, her spouse is female, almost all the heads of government are female… Not sure why. Didn’t do it deliberately. 

-=> Amateur Radio stuff… I have, alas, been doing very little of late except listening. I’ve discovered that my Comet vertical antenna is total crap below about 20 meters or so, which is understandable when you look at how the thing is built. Most of the energy going into the thing, especially at lower frequencies, is never getting into the air. Frankly, it’s surprising I can get a decent SWR at all with the thing on the lower bands. I ran some generic calculations and if I got the formulas right (which I probably didn’t) if I put 200 watts into the thing down at 3.8 mHz I’m lucky if I get 20 out of it.

Weather has been so nasty I’ve never even tried to get the dipole up. For one thing, mounting it is going to be a problem. I’m going to have to put up some kind of mast to try to get the center of the thing up to around 35 feet, and then it’s going to have to be configured as an inverted V because there’s nothing I can hook the ends to.

I picked up a Gap Titan multi band vertical that I’m going to give a try. It’s far more efficient than the Comet and even better, I can finally use my big amplifier with it. It’s rated to handle 1,500 watts so I can finally fire up the Ameritron. If it works, that is. Considering Ameritron’s reputation, you never know what’s going to happen. I talked to a guy who used to sell the things and they’d go through every one before they sent it out because they were having a 25% failure rate straight form the factory. I looked it over carefully when I put it together and didn’t see any obvious issues, and it does come up in standby mode, but until I actually try using it, whether it’ll work or not is anyones guess.

From what I’ve been hearing, the Titan has some issues when it comes to tuning it to work on the various bands. One fellow I talked to told me he never could get the thing down to a reasonable SWR on 80 meters. Other people tell me they had no problems at all. So we’ll see. SWR doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve got a massive Palstar auto tuner that can handle up to 2,000 watts output to hang behind the Ameritron.

I really wish now that I’d spent a little bit more and gone for the solid state amplifier rather than the tube based one. The solid state amps are a lot easier to work with. They’re pretty much plug and play, just turn them on, select the band you want, and go. Tube amps are fussy, requiring a lot of fiddling whenever you change bands, even changing frequencies. It’s easy to mess them up and end up blowing a $300 tube. Still, it was almost a grand cheaper than the solid state amp I was looking at, so we’ll see.

Pre-Winter Storm, Southwestern Australia in 2014

Credit: NASA / ISS

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from Voyager 1 Color Inverted

What will become of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? Recorded as shrinking since the 1930s, the rate of the Great Red Spot’s size appears to have accelerated just in the past few years. A hurricane larger than Earth, the Great Red Spot has been raging at least as long as telescopes could see it. Like most astronomical phenomena, the Great Red Spot was neither predicted nor immediately understood after its discovery. Although small eddies that feed into the storm system seem to play a role, a more full understanding of the gigantic storm cloud remains a topic of continued research, and may result in a better understanding of weather here on Earth. The above image is a digital enhancement of an image of Jupiter taken in 1979 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it zoomed by the Solar System’s largest planet. NASA’s Juno spacecraft is currently heading toward Jupiter and will arrive in 2016.

Image Credit: NASA, JPL; Digital processing: Björn Jónsson (IAAA), Color: thedemon-hauntedworld

Getting ready for 8/21/17

I am making a journal as I get ready for the total eclipse of the sun on 8/21/17 and you can find it on http://www.astrotidbits.com.  Irregular posts as I do something new or learn new ways of doing things.

Saturn’s Moon, Enceladus, Is Our Closest Great Hope For Life Beyond Earth

“Cassini provided scientists with a wealth of data about Enceladus’ surface and the composition of its powerful plumes. This data showed evidence of a deep saltwater ocean with an energy source beneath Enceladus’ surface. The presence of water, warmth, and organic molecules are the necessary requirements for sustaining life as we know it. Water is proven to exist, while the tidal forces from Saturn provide the necessary heat. Based on observations of other bodies in the Solar System, Enceladus likely contains the raw ingredients for life as well. The suspected existence of all three hints at the possible presence of the precursors to amino acids in this vast subsurface ocean. Should we find extraterrestrial life on Enceladus – or in the geyser-like plumes erupting into space – the implications are almost incomprehensible.”

When you think about life beyond Earth, you likely think of it occurring on a somewhat Earth-like planet. A rocky world, with either a past or present liquid ocean atop the surface, seems ideal. But that might not even be where life on Earth originated! Deep beneath the Earth’s surface, geologically active hydrothermal vents currently support diverse colonies of life without any energy from the Sun. Saturn’s icy moon, Enceladus, has a subsurface ocean unlike any other world we’ve yet discovered. The tidal forces of Saturn itself provide the necessary heat, and also create cracks in the Enceladean surface, enabling massive geysers. This subsurface ocean rises hundreds of kilometers high, regularly resurfaces the world with a coat of fresh ice, and even creates the E-ring of Saturn. But most spectacularly, it may house actively living organisms, and could be the next-best world for life, after Earth, in the Solar System today.

Come get the full story on Enceladus, and welcome Starts With A Bang’s newest contributor, the remarkable Jesse Shanahan!

The Great Red Spot

NGC 7023, Ghost Nebula