... is finally online. Sorry for the delay, but it is the holiday season... On this program, I discussed:
- News: Congratulations to the Custer Institute and Observatory in Southold, Long Island for being chosen as a recipient of a Fund for Astrophysical Research grant, to be used to purchase optical equiptment to start a search for extrasolar planets and supernovae (if interested in helping, please contact Donna L. McCormick) as well as Cal Tech and the UC system for being awarded $200 million dollars to start designing the Thirty Meter Telescope; new software package called Montage designed to combine images of the sky from different sources, wavebands, etc.; initial data from the largest yet digital survey of the Milky Way (called IPHAS) is released; NASA diverts Epoxi mission to Comet Hartley 2 since initial target, Comet Boethin, disappeared; NASA's GLAST satellite arrives at Naval Research Laboratory for final round of pre-launch testing; new international task forces called IMARS is formed to determine the best way to return samples from Mars to Earth; NASA announces plans to select next major Solar System mission soon.
- Solar System
- Sun: SOHO sees evidence for the next solar cycle beginning.
- Earth: NASA's AIM satellite releases initial results concerning "night-shining" clouds; THEMIS releases new measurements of Northern Lights.
- Mars: Made its closest approach to the Earth for this year; Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter detects "lace" and "lizard skin" terrain on Mars, likely from vents of carbon-dioxide gas forcing through the icy surface; Mars Rover Spirit discovers a rock composed of silica-rich rock believed to form naturally only in hot springs or volcanic vents, implying Mars used to be much warmer; organic material and molecules dicovered on meteorite Allan Hills 84001 which is believed to have come from Mars.
- Jupiter: New strategies discusses to probe under the ice shell on Jupiter's moon Europa.
- Saturn: Small moons Pan and Daphnis around Saturn show evidence of sweeping up ring material, getting larger in the process; rings around Saturn appear to have different ages, with material being recycled between them; current of charged particles detected around Saturn in a ring, which appears to be rotating with Saturn and changing in size and shape on short timescales.
- Outer Solar System: Voyager 2 crosses "heliosheath," where the Solar wind is decelerated by the interstellar medium - the material between stars that fills most of the volume of the Milky Way, at a much closer distance that Voyager 1, implying the solar system is "squashed."
- Wednesday Morning Astronomer: My weekly discussion on the "A Cosmic Thought" section of the Tuesday Morning Quaterback article written by Gregg Easterbrook.
- Calendar of Events in the New York area
- Interview with Michael Bank of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association on amateur astronomy in the mid-Hudson / Poughkeepsie region.
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