umbraphile : One who loves eclipses, often travelling to see them.
You are probably hearing a lot about the August 12thsolar eclipse. It’s path of totality will pass over the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Iceland, Atlantic Ocean, Portugal, and northern Spain.
The National Solar Observatory has created a neat eclipse map that shows the path.
There is one group of people who know this well — they are the Umbraphiles, more commonly known as Eclipse Chasers. They are unique tribe, and their fascination with the celestial event tends to be described in terms outside the realm of science.
Here’s a link to the article about them that actually inspired the title of this post.
If you would like to become an Armchair-Umbraphile, then head on over to YouTube — there are a ton of 360° Videos of Solar Eclipses to enjoy anytime and anywhere.
Here are even more links that might be of interest to Umbraphiles.
umbraphile : One who loves eclipses, often travelling to see them.
You’ve probably heard about the April 8th solar eclipse (Wikipedia), and if you live near the path of totality, then you’ve probably also seen news stories like this one.
Now, you may or may not know, all of the fuss about people in the United States getting to see a total solar eclipse might be just a wee bit overblown. With all the hype about the tourism and special sun glasses, you may have missed a couple of stories pointing out that the event isn’t all that rare. Here’s one of those stories.
There is one group of people who know this well — they are the Umbraphiles, more commonly known as Eclipse Chasers. They are unique tribe, and their fascination with the celestial event tends to be described in terms well outside the realm of science.
Here’s a link to the article about them that actually inspired the title of this post.
So, one way or another, in real life if you’re lucky enough to be in a good place to see the eclipse, or online with NASA at YouTube, enjoy next Monday’s eclipse with safety and awe.
Then if you’re inclined to join the ranks of umbraphiles after that, here’s a handy list from Wikipedia that includes when and where future total solar eclipses will occur.
If you would like to become an Armchair-Umbraphile, then head on over to YouTube — there are a ton of 360° Videos of Solar Eclipses to enjoy anytime and anywhere.
Here are even more links that might be of interest to Umbraphiles.
Finally, if you’re into really rare celestial events, then keep an eye out for a star to appear sometime between now and September. Here’s a NASA story about it that I tripped over while doing research for this post.
Saturday, July 20th is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, and there’s a massive media blitz surrounding the occasion. Pretty much every major news outlet is covering it in some way, and it’s no surprise that NASA is leading the publicity frenzy.
In honor of this momentous occasion, and being the total space buff that I am, I couldn’t resist dipping into my personal trove of “Moon Media” and rummaging around to find a few tidbits that might not show up in mainstream news stories.
The website Virtual AGC — AGS — LVDC — Gemini also has tons of information about computer simulations of the guidance computers used in the Apollo lunar missions.
If you want a glimpse into at least part of the calculations that the Apollo computers had to do to get humans to the moon, then try your hand at the game Lunar Lander. There’s an example of it on the Web thanks to the artist Seb Lee-Delisle who created it as part of his Lunar Trails exhibit. His version is called Moon Lander.
Of course, my archive happens to have a few relevant 360° videos 🙂
My favorite one is this two minute simulation of Apollo 11’s landing and the first moonwalk.
Here’s a link to a more realistic 360° video about Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan’s last walk on the moon in 1972 that has a panorama created from photos that he took at the time.
If you want to experience some more “real” moon imagery, then try out Google Moon!
Hardcore Apollo 11 fans might also enjoy the two plus hours of NASA’s restored video Moonwalk, and NASA even uploaded all of the 9,000 hours of audio from the Apollo 11 mission to the Internet Archive.
Cool stuff!
However, if you’re only looking for a fun way to kick off the weekend, then take a ride on this Space Mountain-esque 360° video complete with audio from the Apollo 11 Mission!
NASA engineers had quite a New Years celebration in 2019 when New Horizons successfully executed a flyby of a tiny object named 2014 MU69 while moving at 32,000 miles per hour.
The planetesimal 2014 MU69 is better known by it’s nickname Ultima Thule, and it’s located way out past Pluto in a region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.
Here’s a link to a video covering the achievement as well as what it has to do with the rock band Queen!
Some scientists may be referred to as “rock stars” from time to time, but it’s seldom literal. It’s also fairly rare for an astrophysicist to be mentioned in Rolling Stone.
Most news stories about Ultima Thule mentioned that it’s the furthest object that’s been photographed. However, New Horizons isn’t the spacecraft that’s the furthest away.
That honor belongs to the twin Voyager spacecraft. In fact, months before New Horizon’s encounter with Ultima Thule, Voyager 2 joined Voyager 1 in interstellar space. Here are a couple of stories abou that feat.
Many stories about the Voyagers mention that they both carry special golden records. Here’s a link to a video that explains how the records were designed to communicate with any aliens that might happen upon them in the distant future.
Believe it or not, there’s even a tie-in with rock ‘n’ roll here, too. The cool scientists that designed the record included a recording of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode!
There was a lot of news about space rocks closer to home around that time as well. That’s because, not just one, but two spacecraft reached milestones in their respective journeys to explore two asteroids.
The biggest news was that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx entered orbit around asteroid 101955 Bennu on New Years Eve. Among other things, this set records for the smallest body ever orbited by a spacecraft and the closest orbit of a planetary body by any spacecraft.
Here’s a video and press release about this milestone that was posted by the OSIRIS-REx Mission on December 31st.
There are many reasons that Bennu is an interesting object, but one of its biggest claims to fame is that it is a “potentially hazardous object” that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table with the second-highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale. The only one with a higher rating is asteroid (29075) 1950 DA (JPL/NASA) (Wikipedia). Neither of these asteroids are very likely to hit Earth, but they are the most likely (that we know of, so far).
That holiday season also brought continuing coverage of Japan’s nail-biting Hayabusa2 Mission to asteroid 162173 Ryugu (Wikipedia). The mission is scheduled to collect a sample of Ryugu and return it to Earth in December 2020.
Here’s a fun bit of trivia. Last summer Brian May also created a 3D stereoscopic image of Ryugu using a picture captured by Hayabusa2.
Of course, almost every story takes advantage of the teachable moment to clarify that it should be called the “far side” rather than “dark side” of the Moon, because it isn’t dark there. There are also inevitable references to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. In fact, when I went searching on YouTube for videos about China’s landing, it served up this trippy 360° video.
I’m sort of sad that it happens to be Pink Floyd’s album that’s getting a bit of play over this, because the more relevant rock music about the Moon is probably David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Notably, astronaut Chris Hadfield paid homage to this by making a music video of it while living on the International Space Station (ISS).
So that’s a wrap up of that wild holiday season in space exploration, and I hope you enjoyed the detours into rock ‘n’ roll, too.
Space Rocks & Happy New Year!
If you want to learn more about the the Solar System, explore this Toy World!
Click the 360° image below to explore it, click the menu in the upper right for controls and click “i” buttons on/off for links to experiences. Use “portals” to visit otherToy Worlds.
NASA’s new experience includes a feature that let’s you download snazzy travel posters for each of the planets, and those posters have a backstory of their own. Here’s a Buzz 60 story about three of the posters in the new project.
Here’s a Slate article with some more background on the Work Projects Administration (WPA) See America poster series that inspired the style of NASA’s travel posters.
This isn’t the first time that NASA has dabbled in publishing travel posters. The three exoplanet posters featured in the video are actually a subset of fifteen posters that NASA released in 2016 as a series entitled Visions of the Future.
Of course, the timing of the release of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau is no coincidence — it’s neatly timed to coincide with last month’s launch of NASA’s planet hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Here’s a short one minute explanation from NASA Goddard about what TESS will be doing.
Did you hear the one about the octopuses from space?
It sounds like the title of a cheesy sci-fi movie, doesn’t it?
But it isn’t, this time, or at least, yet. Instead, it’s actually an oddball theory that’s been put forth in a recently published “scientific” article that’s getting quite a lot of buzz in the media lately.
First, let’s start with the particular article about octopuses that is causing all of the fuss.
It appeared in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, and it was published with a list of an 33 co-authors.
One can’t help but wonder if there was a share the blame scenario going on. It’s not even the theory that is suspect. The problem is in the scientific aspects of the work. Even the sensationalist article in Newsweek politely described most responses from the scientific community as “critical.”
Personally, I checked to see if the article was published on April 1st — that would’ve been a bit o’ fun, but it wasn’t. Perhaps they submitted it on April 1st, though?
Anyway, all joking aside, the core of the article is based on an old and relatively well established theory about how life began on Earth. The theory is known as panspermia, and it really has been discussed by serious scientists.
Panspermia is a hypothesis proposing that microscopic life forms that can survive the effects of space, such as extremophiles, become trapped in debris ejected into space after collisions between planets and small Solar System bodies that harbor life. Some organisms may travel dormant for an extended amount of time before colliding randomly with other planets or intermingling with proto-planetary disks. Under certain ideal impact circumstances (into a body of water, for example), and ideal conditions on a new planet’s surfaces, it is possible that the surviving organisms could become active and begin to colonize their new environment. — Wikipedia
Here is a link to a video segment that covers the scientific basis of the panspermia theory relative to Mars, and an article from Scientific American that goes into more depth about various discussions about it among well known scientists.
Of course, the usual biological suspects mentioned are those cute little water bears, but this is not the first time octopuses have been included in the list of suspects.
Given the recent understanding of the necessary conditions for life existing on large ocean moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the theory that octopuses are from elsewhere in our solar system isn’t quite as crazy as it might sound.
If you listen to the whole story, you will hear that some scientists tend to believe that it is actually Jupiter’s moon Europa that is the older, and thus the more likely candidate to harbor ocean life beyond Earth. This has been reinforced by a study just published in Nature this month that shows reanalysis of old data gathered by NASA’s Galileo probe back in the 1990s provided unexpected evidence of salt water plumes on Europa.
Unfortunately, the scientific basis of the particular article in the news about a life form on Earth being from space, while not as nutty as it might sound, has serious flaws. Here are two articles that are far more elaborate about the criticisms being waged against the article.
Still, you can kind of see why they would think that octopuses, in particular, are alien. They are indisputably the weirdest, intelligent life form on Earth. That much is pretty much hard to deny. Here’s a link to a lovely video that goes into just some of the reasons that is the case.
Okay, this could go on and on. I’ve got videos of these creatures escaping from a jar, going through holes the size of a quarter, stealing crabs from fisherman, using shells to hide from prey, walking on land to hunt and a ton of other absurd things that they can do that you don’t exactly expect from a lump of flesh with some eyes and suckers. You can see them all on the octopus page if you like.
However, one of the most bizarre things about them turns out to be their DNA. Here are some videos and links that show how Ragsdale Lab at the University of Chicago found out some extremely surprising truths about octopus DNA that explains their amazing powers of camouflage, dexterity and deception.
So octopuses are impressively weird, and they are wicked smart too. That doesn’t make them “aliens,” right?
Well, hold on to your brains, because that isn’t even the strangest thing about them. New research has shown that they can even edit their own RNA! Here’s a link to a video about this along with some supporting sources.
In the end, octopuses really are relatively alien, whether or not they’re from space. The thing is, even if they are from Earth, which honestly, they probably are, then that means some core things emerge, independently, in entirely different biological milieus.
That’s kind of awesome news, when you think about it!
Who knows? Maybe water bears really are from Mars and octopuses are from Jupiter, or well, Europa specifically. There is also that pesky little problem of that unexplained methane on Mars, so who knows?
We could by now, but we don’t.
Specific theories about octopuses and water bears aside, there are serious scientists that do believe that life on Earth may have come from space in general, and that said life might still be out there elsewhere in our solar system right now. We also have the technology that we need to find out what is, or is not, lurking about on other planets and moons. The real question is whether or not it will happen, soon, perhaps in some of our lifetimes, or at all, in the future history of humanity.
April 22nd is Earth Day! In honor of that, here are some great ways to see the honoree.
First, you can get a nice view from this neat 360° video from Seeker. It essentially shows you what it would feel like if you could just fly straight up and see the Earth from space.
For a really, really extreme wide shot of Earth, there’s a relatively hot off the press snap from New Horizons. It was taken from about 3.79 billion miles away. Not surprisingly, this is the record for the furthest away a picture of Earth has ever been taken, and this video covers both the shot as well as some interesting context about how it was taken.
Of course, the video paid a humble tribute to the iconic Pale Blue Dot (Planetary Society) image taken by Voyager 1 that was then made famous by this commentary by Carl Sagan.
Those are certainly some awe inspiring views of Earth! Along the way it is hard not to notice that NASA has a lot to do with all of those long shots.
As great as it is to have the pictures and the knowledge from the missions, it turns out that NASA keeps pretty busy taking care of our home planet, too. Here’s a lovely article that Forbes published for Earth Day that highlights the many ways that NASA is working to save the Earth.
In certain circles it is not uncommon to trip across the debate “Is graffiti art?” You can also find scads about it online if you are so inclined (Google). However, the debate doesn’t come up all that often in the context of conversations about satellites or space… until now.
In 2018 a company named Rocket Lab launched some previously announced satellites from New Zealand. They also launched an unannounced satellite, and more notably, one with no explicit scientific or technical purpose. That satellite was The Humanity Star, and it was a carbon fiber geodesic sphere about 3 feet in diameter that is designed to reflect the sun in order to be one of the most visible objects in the night sky from anywhere on Earth for about nine months. Here’s an article about the satellite, its sponsor, Rocket Lab’s CEO Peter Beck, as well as the message that it is intended to convey.
The satellite was intended to be a relatively short-lived statement of inspiration, but it created quite a stir. Here’s a link to a one minute video about the satellite, its creator and the controversy surrounding the whole enterprise.
The story behind the controversy is that Caleb A. Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia, published this scathing rant about the satellite via Scientific American.
The truth is that if you dig deep enough, there was probably more controversy about this than was warrented. First, while “light pollution” is a serious issue (worthy of an entire post), this particular case of it is a temporary and spurious scapegoat. The same is true about the accusation that it is contributing to the problem of “space junk” since this modest little missionary was designed to follow modern protocols for such things and plunge to its own pre-calculated death upon the conclusion of its short life.
Interestingly, while the satellite probably didn’t deserve the bum rap it got, it did end up serving a higher purpose. It brought attention to the serious, real problem of the massive amount of “space junk” that’s floating around our planet now and the bevy of stuff that is likely to join the ruckus in the near future.
Here’s a two minute visualization generated by Stuart Grey using tracking data from Space-Track.org that shows how space debris has propagated over the last half century.
Of course, the problem of “space junk” in not a new and shiny problem. It has been a growing concern in scientific and engineering circles for decades. Here’s a link to a PSA from the ESA about it.
Here’s a link to a fantastic article from the Washington Post that also provides more specifics about controversial subjects like “collisional cascading impacts” a.k.a. Kessler Syndrome (Wikipedia) and the CubeSats that are especially worrying to some space scientists and engineers.
If you think satellites are cool in general, then you might want to check out an app that Google Earth and Analytic Graphics Inc. made to track the positions of satellites around Earth. You can find out about the app on this blog post.
If you’re looking for a perfect gift for your favorite geek, look no further. Now you can give them a copy of the Voyager Golden Record. Up until 2016, you couldn’t buy a copy, but then Ozma Records ran a brilliant Kickstarter campaign to issue a limited vinyl edition.
Here’s a link to a video about the successful Kickstarter campaign.
The Voyager spacecraft will continue to send back information, and you can keep track of where they are on this page.
If you want to learn more about the the Solar System, explore this Toy World!
Click the 360° image below to explore it, click the menu in the upper right for controls and click “i” buttons on/off for links to experiences. Use “portals” to visit otherToy Worlds.
Last week NASA released this fascinating video entitled Our Living Planet based upon 20 years of data from satellites that observe all plant life at the surface of the land and ocean.
Of course, releasing fantastic imagery like this is nothing new for NASA — they have a long and illustrious history of sharing iconic imagery to amaze and inspire people around the world.
The most famous image NASA ever shared is the photo known as Earthrise. It was taken by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, and it was the first time a human ever saw the whole earth from space. Here is a video about the image that was released in 2013 on the image’s 45th anniversary.
The next most famous image from NASA is probably The Blue Marble. It was taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. Here is a NASA video from 2015 that discusses the original image as well as newer imagery captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory.
These two images may be the most famous, but thanks to Carl Sagan, none has been more inspirational than the Pale Blue Dot. It was captured by Voyager 1, and here is a video of Sagan unveiling the photo in 1990.
Of course, NASA continues to share awesome imagery from time to time. For example, back in 2012 they released Earth at Night. It is also sometimes called “The Black Marble,” and it is an animation of Earth’s city lights assembled from data from the Suomi NPP satellite.
NASA has already released numerous 360° Videos related to other planets, so it is only a matter of time before they release an explorable 360° image or video of Earth. In the meantime you can enjoy this 360° Video created by the Opaque Media Group to promote their VR application Earthlight.
You’ve probably heard that NASA has found a trove of “Earth-like” planets circling the TRAPPIST-1 system roughly 40 light years away, but just in case you haven’t, here’s a short video from NASA/JPL about the discovery.
Most entertainingly, here’s a 360° YouTube video published by NASA/JPL that let’s you experience an artist’s conception of the view from the 4th planet in the system.
This 360-degree panorama depicts the surface of a newly detected planet, TRAPPIST-1d, part of a seven planet system some 40 light years away. You can explore this artist’s rendering of an alien world by moving the view using your mouse or your mobile device. The depiction is based on the latest scientific data about this planetary system, and this world’s sister planets can be seen as bright points of light in a dark sky. Each world is roughly in Earth’s size range, in terms of both mass and diameter. Further observations will be needed to determine whether any or all of these worlds might be habitable.
The “Little Mission that Could” has come to an end, but what a mission it was to watch! In honor of the success, here are some videos and articles about the many, many accomplishments.
