Nothing really exciting to post today, so here I give you a picture of our cat, Reyn. Cat pictures have long been considered the currency of the internet, so I hope this makes me rich, haha. Yay, Caturday...
Saturday, February 26, 2011
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Friday, February 25, 2011
Friday Something
4:47 PM
Astronomy Pirate
So I think before I said I was going to try to post some sort of gadget or gizmo every Friday that looked of interest to me. I decided to cut out the gadget and gizmo part since there are enough blogs about that stuff out there and just go with whatever interests me. Whether its a game, gadget, book, movie, or whatever.
So today it is windy here, real windy. Like the power every once in awhile cuts off and you can hear ambulances screaming off in the distance occasionally (I live near the hospital). The power being unreliable makes doing stuff on computers and TVs rather difficult. So it has put me in a bit of a reading mood, and I wanted to recommend an amazing book. For whenever you have a windy, rainy day where reading seems like the best activity.
The book is How I Killed Pluto and Why...
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Last mission of Discovery (STS-133)
5:47 PM
Astronomy Pirate
The Space Shuttle Discovery just made its 39th and final flight into space at 4:53 PM EST. After much delay (first scheduled to launch in November), it is good to see it get off the ground, but a somber moment in the age of space exploration.
Discovery will be in space for 11 days, manned by 6 astronauts, and providing components for the International Space Station. This includes Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot in space. I hope the mission goes smoothly and they all make it back to the Earth.
The last scheduled launch is Space Shuttle Endeavour, set for April 19th. Atlantis is tentatively scheduled for launch during the summer, depending on its need and fundi...
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Of Kepler and Fermi
8:03 PM
Astronomy Pirate
Last time I left off talking about the cosmic lottery. We are pretty lucky to be around, and just how widespread that luck is. Estimates say there are roughly 500 million planets in our galaxy residing in habitable zones, 500 million chances for life to arise at any given time. And not all these might seem obvious at first; a few might turn out to moons orbiting giant planets.
The number of planets that will actually have life will turn out to vary from this a bit. There is a great diversity in planets and the right conditions need to be there. In our own solar system, it is accepted that Venus is at one end of our habitable zone and Mars is at the other. If conditions were different on these planets, life might have taken hold, and it might have even been there in the past. In our search...
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Of Kepler and Drake
6:00 PM
Astronomy Pirate
I have made a few mentions to the Kepler Mission in my previous posts. It really is one of the most amazing and fantastic missions that NASA has going on right now. And recently, they released the data on 155,000 stars. This wasn't even the entire sample taken by Kepler, the rest of the stars were released to the public through stuff like PlanetHunters.org. And Kepler is still running! Which means there will be more observations, and more planets observed. The first set of data was taken over 4 months. So every planet that transits a star in that 4 month period is observed. If we are looking for Earth-sized planets, that is only 1/3 of Earths entire year. So the longer Kepler looks, the more planets will become observable as they transit.
Now, from the 155,000 stars released there included...
Questions and Answers
11:49 AM
Astronomy Pirate
First, I would like to thank all of my followers, the blog broke 100 followers last night. I really enjoy all the comments everyone contributes, I like answering your questions, and I like being involved with the community.
So, I am going to start doing Question and Answer articles. I will select two or three questions, depending on how many I feel like doing, from the comments section. This will start with this article, and I will make a 'Call for Questions' in future posts. I will provide my answers the next week, so next Tuesday, check back and see if I selected your question. If I don't try again, I will try to make this my Tuesday 'thing'. If it doesn't seem to work out, I'll just skip it.
Please keep the questions clean and civil, and try to stick to astronomy and science, but I will...
Monday, February 21, 2011
How Kepler Works, How Glass Works
6:26 PM
Astronomy Pirate
I was going to talk about some recent estimates from the Kepler data, but find myself short on time. So I am dumping a few awesome videos. First we have a 2-part series on the method used by the Kepler Telescope to discover new exoplanets. They are fantastic in quality and made by Paul A. Wilson, A Widely Unknown Exoplanet Astronomer, and has a wonderful blog I recently discovered.
The last video is something else that is entirely different, but totally interesting none the less. But not so different, because it's principals are why things like the Kepler mission are possible. This video is on why glass is transparent. Honestly, it isn't something that I have thought to question any time recently and I was bit intrigued by it. I knew there was something that had to do with their electron...
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Case for Secure Browsing
8:53 PM
Astronomy Pirate
Most of the time when going to a website, people will just type the address like so, 'amazon.com', without any concern for the http://www. portion of the address, unless you happen to be really old or unfamiliar with computers. Occasionally people might recognize the www. portion, but the http:\\ goes entirely ignored by most internet users. To many it may just seem like an old appendage that is fairly useless, and in most cases this may be entirely true. But it has a purpose.
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and is the networking protocol that forms the foundation of data communications for the Interwebs. Its used to load up whatever webpage you want to view, whether you are aware of it or not. All very good stuff to know, makes you a little bit more web savvy.
Now that you know...
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