Perseids meteor shower - great time to gaze into space!

The night of Friday, August 12 into the early morning of Saturday, August 13 will certainly be the best time of the year to watch meteor showers. Everyone, get your telescopes out of the garret!

Article:

Stay 'Up All Night' to Watch the Perseids!

08.12.11 - NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama

Looking for a good reason to enjoy an August evening? This year's Perseid meteor shower peaks on the night of Friday, Aug. 12 and into the early morning of Saturday, Aug 13. The Perseids are considered the best meteor shower of the year by many, but with the full moon washing out all but the brightest meteors, rates will probably only be 20-30 per hour at most -- weather permitting. The Perseids rate in the southern hemisphere is quite a bit lower, since the Perseid radiant doesn't climb above the horizon.


Perseid meteor shower. Image credit: NASA / Michael Menefee. Full resolution.

Watch the Perseids! Live Video/Audio Feed

A live video/audio feed of the Perseid shower will be embedded below on the night of the chat. The camera is mounted at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. During the day, you'll see a dark gray box -- the camera is light-activated and will turn on at dusk each evening. At night you'll see white points, or stars, on a black background. You can also access these links to more all sky cameras to have other views of the sky.

Before the camera activates, you can still hear the audio of meteors passing through the sky, creating blips, pings and whistles. The meteors themselves don't make sounds, but they ionize the air around them as they burn up. These ionized air molecules reflect radio waves back to our antenna.

More About the Perseids

The Perseids have been observed for at least 2,000 years and are associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 133 years. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comet's debris. These bits of ice and dust -- most over 1,000 years old -- burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. The Perseids can be seen all over the sky, but the best viewing opportunities will be across the northern hemisphere. Those with sharp eyes will see that the meteors appear to radiate from the direction of the constellation Perseus.


Source: nasa.gov

Webb Telescope questioned - Drawback for space exploration?

The US House Appropriations Committee has made a recommendation to cancel the James Webb Telescope. That should make everyone remotely interested in space discoveries listen attentively. The recommendation alone is of course no final decision. But it is a warning shot to set priorities for science and research.
The United States might be in a miserable budgetary position. But this telescope, the main achievement for space exploration for the next decade and perhaps even further, is not even the tip of the iceberg and definitely the wrong asset to start with. Let us all hope this is not going through, otherwise mankind will suffer from a huge deficit of knowledge and remarkable discoveries for years!

The article featured at New York Times:

Panel Proposes Killing Webb Space Telescope
Published: July 6, 2011 - by Dennis Overbye

The House Appropriations Committee proposed Wednesday to kill the James Webb Space Telescope, the crown jewel of NASA’s astronomy plans for the next two decades.

The telescope, named after a former administrator of NASA, is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and it was designed to study the first stars and galaxies that emerged in the first hundred million years or so after the Big Bang.

Current Hubble telescope compared to the now almost finished Webb telescope. Source: Wikipedia

It was supposed to be launched in 2014, but NASA said last year that the project would require at least an additional $1.6 billion and several more years to finish, because of mismanagement.

Just last week, NASA announced that it had finished polishing all the segments of the telescope’s mirror, which is 6.5 meters in diameter, but the agency has still not announced a new plan for testing and launching the telescope.

The announcement of the telescope’s potential demise came as part of a draft budget for NASA and other agencies, including the Commerce and Justice Departments. In all, the committee proposed lopping $1.6 billion off NASA’s current budget, which is $18.4 billion for 2011. The Obama administration had originally requested $18.7 billion for NASA.

Astronomers reacted with immediate dismay, fearing that the death of the Webb telescope could have the same dire impact on American astronomy that killing the Superconducting Supercollider, a giant particle accelerator in Texas, did in 1993 for American physics, sending leadership abroad.

Canceling the Webb telescope would “have a profound impact on astrophysics far into the future, threatening U.S. leadership in space science,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which would run the new telescope. “This is particularly disappointing at a time when the nation is struggling to inspire students to take up science and engineering,” he added.

Tod R. Lauer, an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, echoed his view. “This would be an unmitigated disaster for cosmology,” he said. “After two decades of pushing the Hubble to its limits, which has revolutionized astronomy, the next step would be to pack up and give up. The Hubble is just good enough to see what we’re missing at the start of time.”

The Webb telescope, he said, “would bring it home in full living color.”

The Appropriation Committee’s proposal was the opening act in what is likely to be a long political drama, in which the Senate will eventually have a say. The measure is expected to be approved Thursday by the subcommittee in charge of NASA and the other agencies, according to Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the committee.

Next Wednesday the full Appropriations Committee will meet again to consider the final bill.

Source: nytimes.com