Remembering Allan McDonald: He Refused To Approve Challenger Launch, Exposed Cover-Up
“Allan McDonald leaves behind his wife Linda and four children, and a
legacy of doing the right things at the right times with the right
people.”
May we all get such a good epitaph.
Better images of last night’s conjunction, now with annotations!
This is about half an hour before the absolute closest point, but the clouds rolled in and I couldn’t get the shot. Still cool.
Everything except the last photo is a real image taken through a telescope, you can clearly see Jupiter and Saturn (including the rings!), and if you look carefully you can see all four Galilean Moons (those being Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto).
If you can’t see them, I’ve provided an annotated diagram and a shot from inside Stellarium showing where everything is. Saturn’s moons are much too dim to see with a small telescope like mine, so while they appear in the simulation you won’t see them on the photo. If you see any weird bright red/blue/green spots in the image, those are probably dead pixels on my camera’s sensors. It is nine years old, it is doing its best.
Contrary to what some people may have told you, at no point during this conjunction will Jupiter and Saturn appear to cross over each other. This is about as close as they get, which is closer than it’s been for over 600 years. If you want to get closer than this, you have to go back to 1226, or wait until 2080. Some of you may actually see that one! Wild. If you happen to be in the Southern hemisphere early in the morning of the Ides of March in 2080, try looking up!
Pretty DANG EXCITING right? Even though it’s barely even making the front page news. (At least not yet.)
But we now edge ever closer to Futurama.
A team of scientists in the UK has discovered what may be a sign of life in Venus’s atmosphere. The scientists say they’ve found the chemical biomarker phosphine in the hellish planet’s cloud decks. The only time scientists have detected phosphine otherwise is here on Earth, where lifeforms are its sole producer. Professor Jane Greaves…
Hold Up, There Might Be Alien Life on Venus — Nerdist
Before anyone ticks this off their 2020 Bingo Card this is not really the same thing as finding LIFE life but it’s exciting nonetheless!
When I was a kid I got Venice and Venus confused and told my parents I wanted to go to Venus on holiday and got angry when they laughed. WHO’S LAUGHING NOW? Okay fine actually going there is still impossible.
Laser labs that detect ripples in space-time may have witnessed a new class of cosmic object.
‘Black neutron star’ discovery baffles astronomers — BBC News – Home
Representatives of humankind get into a spaceship and approach this terrifying new discovery. After waiting around for some time, eventually a group of aliens float out of it.
ALIENS: “Take us to your leader.”
HUMANS: “Um… we’d better not.”
I don’t think it’s there. (Unless it’s the tiny dot behind the tree. It was kinda flickering?) What a great sky though.
As if 2020 wasn’t a bizarre enough of a year already, the Pentagon sparked a flurry of news headlines Monday thanks to a turn of events that sounds like the stuff of science fiction movies. UFO videos declassified by the Pentagon were released on Monday, following the confirmation of their existence back in the fall…
The Pentagon just released three UFO videos, as if 2020 wasn’t already weird enough — BGR
Mm okay nothing surprises me about this year anymore.
(In many ways this is legit frightening to me, but I’ll take solace in the fact that none of the crafts seen in the videos are doing anything threatening, just flying around chillin’. And um, well if War of the Worlds is anything to go by, we have… enough germs for weaponry.)
“Good leadership, initiative, to think outside of the box. When things go wrong, how do we repair them? Those were the three things that were absolutely necessary,” said Commander Jim Lovell Jr.
Apollo 13 Crew Overcame Incredible Obstacles 50 Years Ago: Here Are Their Quotes on Survival — PEOPLE.com
Fifty years since the frankly quite incredible story of Apollo 13.
