I spent a little time watching the Perseids Meteorite Shower this morning, or as much as I could see through the overcast and light pollution. I am obviously not the only one, as my tweet box is full of such links to pictures. SteamCon is coming in October, and it looks like a lot of fun. Author GoH is Tim Powers, Music GoH Abney Park is my favorite Steampunk band, and Artist GoH Paul Guinan is well known for his Victorian Robots web site, although his Heartbreakers Graphics Novel series (created in conjunction with his wife, who does the plot/dialog/story segment of the process) are Steampunk Webcomics that have been nominated for the Eisner Award. Finally, I was not impressed by much in the G.I. Joe movie beyond the special effects, which even I had to admit were at least somewhat competent (sad when somewhat competent impresses you compared to the other aspects of the presentation). But I did enjoy this little twist, which reminded me of Firefly’s The Hero of Canton to the point I had to include it for comparison… and then a counter-argument.
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.
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…
The latest issue of Sky and Telescope hit the stands a few days ago, with all the usual goodies and one not so usual. The cover article is called Uncovering Mars’s Secret Past, and to go with it they include a nifty little DVD with over 500 images and videos from the Mars Rovers cameras. You can also buy the Mars DVD separately, but for fifty cents more you get the July volume of the magazine along with the free DVD. The disk was put together by Dr Jim Bell, Lead Scientist for the Mars Rover’s panoramic cameras. NASA is building its own cloud environment, called Nebulous (I can’t prove it, but I suspect pun intended). This is for outreach and education, amongst other things, and is compatible with the Amazon web services platform.