Astronomy and Space

[Grumble]

Cheers for that, not much chance in the NW though. Copied your post to my family group as we’re spread around

[Gfamily]

Cheers for that, not much chance in the NW though. Copied your post to my family group as we’re spread around

It might be worth checking on Friday evening, as the forecast is a bit better, and you never know.

[Pishwish]

Things haven't been going great for the European launch industry recently. The upgraded small Vega launcher has not returned to flight since a high profile launch failure last year, the war in Ukraine has ended medium-lift Soyuz launches from Guyana, and the heavy-lift Ariane 6 rocket looks set for further delays.
And now some propellant tanks for the last unupgraded Vega rocket, due to launch ESA's Biomas satellite in 2024, have been found in a landfill.https://europeanspaceflight.com/the-cas ... ant-tanks/

They can't make new ones, and the only spares are some old tanks intended for qualification testing. They may use these, or try to adapt the rocket so it can use the upgraded upper stage.

[IvanV]

Tonight's the night Betelgeuse will apparently disappear for about 10 seconds at about 0017 GMT, due to occultation by an asteroid.

Sadly it is clouding up here.

[Gfamily]

Tonight's the night Betelgeuse will apparently disappear for about 10 seconds at about 0017 GMT, due to occultation by an asteroid.

Sadly it is clouding up here.

Need to be in Southern Spain or thereabouts.
ETA this map I found online

[IvanV]

Tonight's the night Betelgeuse will apparently disappear for about 10 seconds at about 0017 GMT, due to occultation by an asteroid.

Sadly it is clouding up here.

Need to be in Southern Spain or thereabouts.
ETA this map I found online

Oddly, I did wonder if it was only locally visible, when I first read about this a couple of weeks ago. But I came away with the impression it would be widely visible. Which is clearly nonsense on reflection. The point is widely made in more recent articles.

[Gfamily]

Tonight's the night Betelgeuse will apparently disappear for about 10 seconds at about 0017 GMT, due to occultation by an asteroid.

Sadly it is clouding up here.

Need to be in Southern Spain or thereabouts.
ETA this map I found online

Oddly, I did wonder if it was only locally visible, when I first read about this a couple of weeks ago. But I came away with the impression it would be widely visible. Which is clearly nonsense on reflection. The point is widely made in more recent articles.

One of the methods of measuring the size of asteroids involves observing how long a stellar occultation lasts, and also observing from a range of latitudes around the 'centre path' to determine the 'width' of the asteroid as it passed the star.

[Gfamily]

Professor Chris Lintott is the Gresham Professor of Astronomy and is giving a talk on Oumuamua, the asteroid that came from interstellar space this evening.
Can be watched online and will be available on catch up later.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on/oumuamua

[Gfamily]

Professor Chris Lintott is the Gresham Professor of Astronomy and is giving a talk on Oumuamua, the asteroid that came from interstellar space this evening a while ago.

On catch-up now https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/oumuamua

[Gfamily]

Famously, a NASA mission to Mars was lost because of one calculation being done in Imperial measures rather than in metric.
Here's a tweet about what happened.
https://x.com/pronounced_kyle/status/17 ... 45755?s=20

[Brightonian]

Am told there's a very unusual red aurora borealis at the moment, being reported in Sweden at least. (Just looked from here in Ireland and there's nothing apparent.)

[Gfamily]

Am told there's a very unusual red aurora borealis at the moment, being reported in Sweden at least. (Just looked from here in Ireland and there's nothing apparent.)

A red alert came up at 6pm on my aurora app, but it's reverted to amber now..

[dyqik]

Our* MethaneSAT is launching today at 2:05pm PST/10:05pm UTC. Alongside a bunch of other stuff on the same launch.

*colleagues and others.

[Gfamily]

The third attempt at a SpaceX Starship launch is scheduled for this Thursday at midday GMT.

It is a test flight, so success is not assured, but their learning curve has tended towards achieving their goals relatively quickly.

SpaceX will start streaming for the launch about 30 minutes beforehand.
There'll probably be a link from here.
https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/

[Gfamily]

The third attempt at a SpaceX Starship launch is scheduled for this Thursday at midday GMT.

It is a test flight, so success is not assured, but their learning curve has tended towards achieving their goals relatively quickly.

SpaceX will start streaming for the launch about 30 minutes beforehand.
There'll probably be a link from here.
https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/

The launch seems to have moved back to about 12:30 GMT -
There will be a twitter broadcast starting at 11:58 available on
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission ... p-flight-3
(or on Youtube, and probably elsewhere)

[Pishwish]

So it was more successful than the previous attempt (Starship reached space) but the booster did not gently land in the ocean like it was supposed to and the Starship did not reenter successfully. Some cool footage though. Scott Manley's summary

[Gfamily]

So it was more successful than the previous attempt (Starship reached space) but the booster did not gently land in the ocean like it was supposed to and the Starship did not reenter successfully. Some cool footage though. Scott Manley's summary

Pretty cool to be able to livestream the Starship re-entry using Starlink to transmit the data. Couldn't be done if relying on ground receivers as the plasma would shield transmissions in that direction.

[Gfamily]

A great rendition of the SpaceShip re-entry video, but stabilised relative to the Earth below.
It wasn't well controlled.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1768675720014791030

Starship.jpg (35.92 KiB) Viewed 30564 times

[Woodchopper]

With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility we have misunderstood the universe,” said Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Riess holds a Nobel Prize for co-discovering the fact that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, due to a mysterious phenomenon now called “dark energy.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1037233

[dyqik]

We've finished digitizing all of the glass plates held at Harvard College Observatory, and they're now all online (all 1.2 petabytes of data).

E.g. https://starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/plate/b02312

[Martin Y]

That's a remarkable coincidence as I too have a bunch of stuff I'm going to get around to sorting out in about 130+ years.

Actually it reminds me of the star trails I photographed as a kid with a 127 format roll film camera. Nice big negatives. Made me realise that was a long time ago, back when that plate wasn't even 100 yet.

[Gfamily]

Very impressed by this.
It's the map of all the flights by NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.
https://x.com/NASAPersevere/status/1781357070576685288

[Gfamily]

What do you do when a bright meteor goes overhead?

Duck!

https://x.com/volcaholic1/status/1793089297102606823

[Pishwish]

Boeing finally launched their incredibly late crewedstarliner capsule, but the real excitement this week was SpaceX's 4th launch of superheavy https://youtu.be/8m0TY6i1Kuo?feature=shared

[Gfamily]

This is how not to do a rocket's static test

https://twitter.com/i/status/1807334917031825869

It's a Chinese Tianlong-3 rocket - looks like a copy of the Space-X Falcon9.