Launching today, 31Jul09, is a new Astronomy web site called Experience the Planets. It is another project from IYA 2009, the International Year of Astronomy.
TOR has put together a celebration of the Lunar landing which includes a lot of top-quality SF/F authors putting forward their own input on the topic. It is a little hard to find all the bits, but that’s all right; the team at SF Signal have compiled the links in one handy location for us! If you are one of those folks who love finding the Easter Eggs on DVDs, feel free to skip the cheet sheet and hunt them down on your own. Sci-Fi Heaven has put together their first podcast, called Continuum. The first episode is in standard several-geeks-babbling mode (pretty much the way I would do it, but with more voices), we will see how it evolves.
I have already posted multiple times about Moon, the new hard sci-fi movie by Duncan Jones, but this time we are talking the actual orbital object over our heads. I have also recently posted about the LROC and Kaguya lunar missions, and the excellent images they returned to Earth. A team on the surface of this world has created a Lunar picture just as impressive; the Lunar World Record image, now acknowledged by Guinness. The project was put together as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 celebration, honoring and hosted by Sir Patric Moore. If you don’t know who he is, he mapped the Moon in the 50’s, creating the information used by both the Russian and American space program into the 60s and beyond. He also got his own Guinness Certificate for being the longest running television presenter of the BBC Sky at Night program, from 1957 until last year. IYA2009 also has The Moon for All Mankind going on, with Malta being the latest entry. And then the one that may end up being my favorite; you can relive the first manned Moon landing in real time, in every detail, including some that were not broadcast when it first happened! We Choose The Moon will take you through the entire event, but just like the first time it happened you only get one shot at experiencing it. The Retro-Launch takes off in 51 hours as I am writing this, and will unspool sequentially exactly as the original did until splashdown. I recommend using modern reminders like Twitter to make sure you don’t miss it. Discover Magazine also has a nice retrospective of the landing event freshly posted to honor the anniversary. I threw in the peek at the 1930’s version of the John Carter movie that almost was because I couldn’t resist, not because it fit with the rest of this post…
In just a few hours the ISS (International Space Station) will be sweeping overhead where I am, and I have clear skies tonight. For others inclined to do naked-eye viewing of manned orbital craft (or unmanned, or perhaps planets are your chosen targets to watch), there are a few resources you might find useful. First off, there is NASA’s Human Space Flight App, updated with the latest orbital tracking data, not only for the ISS, but also the Shuttle, the Hubble Space Telescope, and a number of others. You can reverse that as well, using their Realtime ISS Photos page to see an image of what is below the ISS right this moment. Note that the ISS location is in realtime, but the pictures are from an archive, possibly even the EarthKam; and the European version is the EuroKam variant. In Europe or the rest of the world you might want to use the ESA ISS Seeker applet. Which interestingly enough is built on the next tool I wanted to mention…
Heavens Above isn’t just for multinationals or government agencies; you can create your own account there, and customize your interface for your own interests. It is an extremely powerful database and toolset, so much so that even NASA links to them, and this site makes the wonders of the skies available for everyone to know and observe. They did a killer job on the setup parameters and the graphic output, making it both very easy to select your location and objects of interest, and even easier to understand the results it gives you.
There are a number of other online satellite/planet tracker software packages I use on a regular basis, the next most frequently visited being Night Skies, the Sky and Telescope interactive extension of their This Weeks Sky At A Glance page.
The first pictures have come in from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, with detailed enough images to see objects 10 feet across on the surface. You can see the pictures at their official web site at Arizona State University. This follows close on the heels of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Lunar satellite Kaguya sending back excellent images of the Moon from its orbit and hard landing. In honor of the holiday, stop-motion fireworks at their finest…
We are 3 weeks away from Comic-Con 2009, the big one in San Diego, and it is already sold out. Which means I will be watching it on TV and watching and listening to the many podcasts and vlogs. As always, they will be doing the Eisner Awards as well as a number of other awards presentations. Hollywood will be out in force promoting all the new genre related movies, and they will be running multiple film festivals. It runs the 22nd through 26th of July, with a preview night on the 22nd. Also on the 22nd will be the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, and you can watch it live online. Another presentation of the IYA2009 ongoing event, this contribution is being hosted by the Chinese scientific community.