This Super Bowl will be (hopefully) will be a LOT more fun than it was last year!!
Category Archives: General
Texas Meteor
A dash cam video from the Little River Police Dept shows what FAA spokesman Lynn Lunnsford says is likely to be a meteor on the evening of February 1st.
Probably not related to the Cross Quarter Day observances occurring about now, I’ll leave that up to you. The cross quarter days (and quarter days) follow the cycles of the seasons as laid out in what the neo-pageans call the Wheel of the Year.
In the northern hemisphere this cross quarter day marks the day halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox and is celebrated with various festivals or some sort of remembrances including (in no particular order and not all inclusive): Imboluc, Candlemas, Setsusbun, Wicca and yes sort of even Ground Hogs Day.
In the southern hemisphere these days are shifted 6 months to match the seasons as they would be half way between the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox. So they would be seeing summer come to a close (not to rush the season) and would be involved with harvest festivals etc. These would include (again in no order and not all inclusive): Lughnasadh and Lammas.
Ground Hogs day probably came from a Fersommling, a Pennsylvania Dutch social event attended by the “Fancy Dutch”. This from the Wikipedia page on Fersommling:
The first Fersommling was held by Dr. John I. Woodruff of Susquehanna University in 1933.[1] Shortly afterward, on March 13, 1933, a second was held in Allentown, Pennsylvania at the home of William S. Troxell, who wrote a daily column on Pennsylvania German culture for the Allentown Morning Call under the pseudonym “Pumpernickle Bill.” The purpose of the gathering was to plan the formation of the first Grundsow (Groundhog) Lodge. On the next Groundhog Day, February 2, 1934, the first Fersommling of Grundsow Lodge Nummer Ains an Da Lechaw (Number One on the Lehigh) took place in Northampton, Pennsylvania.
While my interpretation of the ground hog prognostication differs from what you typically hear, it is 100% correct:
If the ground hog sees his shadow there will be 10 more weeks of winter and if he does not, there will be 10 more weeks of winter. 
Edge of North Polar Erg
An interesting section of an erg on Mars. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA
I was catching up on some MRO image releases and this one caught my eye, possibly because the dunes looked vaguely like footprints in my early morning haze. The image caption (below) explains what the features are. Still, the pattern is interesting.
An erg? What the heck is an erg?
You can get a larger version of the image at the link below.
Here’s the caption from the MRO site:
This scene is from early spring in the northern hemisphere of Mars. These dunes are covered with a layer of seasonal carbon dioxide ice (dry ice). Bluish cracks in the ice are visible across the top of some of the dunes.
Dark fan-shaped deposits around the edges of the dunes are at spots where the ice has sublimated (gone directly from ice to gas) and the ice layer has ruptured, allowing the sand from the dune to escape out from under the ice. The sand is then free to be blown by the wind.
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Remember Apollo 1
On this date 45 years ago, (January 27, 1967) the space program lost three of its finest in a tragic cabin fire of Apollo 1.
Apollo 1 was to be the first manned mission of the series of missions that would take the US to moon.
Lost that day, but not forgotten:
Command Pilot: Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom
Senior Pilot: Edward H. White II
Pilot: Roger B. Chaffee
Aurora Possible
A quick note: You might keep an eye to the sky after dark if it is clear, a pretty decent Aurora could show itself. Not saying it will of course but the potential is there.
Going to be cloudy here so I will be watching the Boulder K index, if it is over 5 the Aurora will be visible to me at 45o N lattitude or you if you are below 45o S lattitude. The higher that number the better the show and the further south or north they can be seen (depending on your hemisphere).
The Boulder K is 5 at 2300 UTC. . . There be lights! Well if you are northerly and have good skies which I do not. 
The Planck Mission
Most of us think of the Planck Mission as either an extension of the WMAP, or as the answer to (and correction of) the WMAP. It’s not used to unseat WMAP, but to serve as the next step.
The Planck satellite - NASA image
Launched in May of 2009, Planck resides in the Earth’s second Lagrange point (yes, you do TOO know what a Lagrange point is). That’s about 930,000 miles out. More sensitive than WMAP, Planck images the oldest radiation in the universe; the cosmic microwave background. This radiation was created 13 billion years ago (plus or minus) in the Big Bang, and has existed every since – traveling away from its point of origin in all directions.
NASA image - The CMB as imaged by Planck
To really understand what Planck is viewing, you have to spend some time reading up on the cosmic microwave background — but I’ll give you a quick review. When the universe was very young, it was uniformly filled with a “fog” of glowing hydrogen plasma and radiation. As the universe aged and expanded, this “fog” became thinner and cooler, and eventually formed matter. The radiation remained equally distributed as the universe expanded, and exactly the same amount of photons filled a larger and larger universe. That’s “relic radiation”, and that’s the cosmic microwave background.
Didn’t catch it? Okay; picture hair mousse. Spray some in your hand and it will begin to expand. Same mass of hair mousse, larger blob filling your hand.
Now, what Planck is doing is sending information on this radiation (which it “images”) to supercomputers around the world. In the United States, that’s the Franklin computer in Berkeley (primarily). The information is analyzed by ESA, NASA, and JPL, among others.
NASA image - Another view of the CMB from Planck
As our understanding of the early universe increases through the data from Planck, we will know more about the size, shape, mass, age, and fate of our universe. Will it expand forever, or someday collapse back upon itself? Planck may give us the answer. Don’t forget, also, that Planck may very well help us solve the dark matter/dark energy mystery.
We will never reach a place where we know everything about the universe. Not only is it much too vast and complicated, it appears possible that there are infinite universes with infinite mystery. Doesn’t that just give you goose bumps?