Comet ISON Comes to Life
Veteran comet observer John Bortle reports that Comet ISON is undergoing a major outburst. It was six times brighter when he observed it this morning (November 14th) than on the previous morning.
Bortle noted a short, faint tail while viewing the comet through 15×70 binoculars. At least one observer has reported seeing the comet without optical aid.
Animations and Images (C) Bruce Gary. Much more at http://brucegary.net/ISON/
I am getting his blog dated May 18th 2009 at http://craigmurray.org.uk/
Weird.
Clark; I’ve suspected these last 4 weeks of inertia means Craig has determined the blog is just too much trouble. Really a shame. AA’s prescience in setting up this place still gives me a refuge from my ethnocentrism. Have you tried changing up those nerve pathways? You seem to have emerged from the fog somewhat.
AA; Tried a comment and got error message. Comments don’t appear closed.
Weirder.
Weird. Craig’s home page has reverted to 2009, the old Moveable Type blog.
He hasn’t even tweeted since Oct 11.
https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg
I’m trying to ‘phone Craig’s mobile, but it goes straight to the answering service.
Ben, the tweets are automatically generated when Craig posts to his blog. He doesn’t actually use Twitter directly.
AlcAnon, do you think you should put a blog post up on this matter, just in case?
I hope that’s not the most recent backup restored! Was that blog software custom written Clark? I notice it says Coded by wibbler.
What on earth could be going on.
Clark,
Good idea about a post. I’ll hold off for a bit just in case Jon’s in the middle of something and trying to fix it. If you’ve any reason to think I should post sooner let me know. You can always email me if you find out anything.
I’ll write up a quick post now but hold off on making it public just for a bit.
Squonk, no, there are backups of the newer, WordPress blog. I don’t think that was the last page before the blog upgrade, either. This has to have been done deliberately.
Why that page?
I’d actually expected Craig to probably post today on Nelson Mandela’s death. Instead we get this. Reading through the front page posts now.
New post up http://squonk.tk/blog/2013/12/06/craig-murrays-blog-reverts-to-2009/
Hey, have a look at this, the latest post at Bloggerheads::
http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2013/11/nadine-dorries-andy-rayment/
Nadine Dorries!
Bloggerheads is Tim Ireland’s blog. Tim and Craig are friends, and Tim did all the setup for both versions of Craig’s blog. I think Tim and Craig must have decided to put that page from 2009 up for a reason.
Anyone up for an escape This beautiful Earth Moment ( or in this case For all Eternity Lol )
An ambitious project that aims to send volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars unveiled plans for the first private unmanned mission to the Red Planet today (Dec. 10), a robotic vanguard to human colonization that will launch in 2018.
Sounds like a Plan
http://www.space.com/23899-private-mars-colony-robotic-mission-2018.html?cmpid=514630_20131211_15570274
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1211/Comet-ISON-now-an-ex-comet-says-NASA-video
More at link http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1211/Comet-ISON-now-an-ex-comet-says-NASA-video
Wow.. Stunning footage there AA
What hectic ,exciting time that was …Rip Ison… Wouldn’t it be a good idea to rename if -possible- Ison or Lovejoy to give one Mandela’s name… not likely eh
What ya think of this stunning image?
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=591015467619490&set=a.439163289471376.103049.439160722804966&type=1&theater
P.S. AA
i got two posts lost on the Mandela Thread… and one went through ok.
Brian,
For some reason the spam filter ate two of your posts. I’ve restored them.
Nice image 🙂
Thank you AA
Was oot Geminid hunting earlier…. Seen a beaut around 11 ; 30 falling south through Orion… Really did look to be in my Local(ish) skies and not in the Atmosphere Meteorite methinks…
Have a good weekend
How much real time do the video sequences of Ison’s encounter with Sol represent? I find myself watching the sun more than the comet. Watching it in time-lapse like that, seeing the constant outward streams and the sudden large outbursts, it’s just awe-inspiring.
Star
A line from the film script of Sunshine 2007, Clark.
“At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass. Man will be gone. There will be nothing to show that we were ever here… but stardust. ”
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) I did not see it.
Hmm. Dozens, possibly hundreds of fragments may still be in the orbital path. Dead comets are harder to see. I hope I’m wrong.
Impressive China;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25356603
Very impressive, Mackey. Quite an accomplishment. Sinus Iridum is an impact crater of basaltic lava. Do they have some mission other than testing a soft-landing?
http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-images/earth/20131202_iridum2.html
Only perhaps trying to tweak the US’s high nosed superiority complex !
Exomoon…cool as a jewel. Exotic physics, aa?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24773-first-exomoon-glimpsed–1800-light-years-from-earth.html#.UrJGrijTKFK
Ben,
Thanks for the link. Definitely interesting but not especially exotic physics (in the detection anyway). Well unless you consider General Relativity (predicted gravitational lensing) as exotic but that’s been around for almost a century now thanks to old Albert 🙂
Have you seen this kool vid AA..The excitement of it
http://www.space.com/24038-nasa-recreates-apollo-earthrise-video.html?cmpid=514630_20131220_16089074
Will I be around when Gaia reveals the 3D map of 1 billion stars?
Liftoff! European Spacecraft Launches to Map 1 Billion Stars
by Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com contributor
December 19, 2013
http://www.space.com/24020-gaia-galaxy-mapping-spacecraft-launch.html
Hi Brian,
Meant to mention I can’t get that space.com video to play properly on my ancient Linux laptops. Going to have to switch the Windows box on when I remember to watch it!
Pre String theory mainstream physics looks quite exotic enough to me, in fact just exotic enough to apply to the sort of universe we observe. Post string theory physics looks too exotic.
Clark,
This bloody cache is exotic enough for me at the moment. And because I’ve got the “recent comments” box on every page I pretty much have to invalidate all page caches for every post every time someone comments if I want the most recent blog comments to actually appear on all these pages. Normally you only need to regen the front page, the post/comment page itself and the feeds. Still with no thanks to the documentation I think I’ve figured it out. It’s a good plugin but the documentation in some areas is very vague and it will cost me $75 dollars for them to answer basic queries.
Still fingers crossed.
Clark; What is ‘post’ string theory? Castanada cited ‘strings of the world’ some twenty years before ‘science’.
Aye AA, that video was a little jumpy but watchable, however, it now seems to be like unwatchable on my p.c. damn Machines …
Anyway after the numpties took the Ison real time page down just as it got to high excitement…. I’m not one for numbers at all, but this realtime chart had me hypnotized…But after some protest they have it back up…. Whatever is left of Ison, is still ( would have been ? ) barreling along at serious Velocities….The Ghosts Closet to Earth – Boxing Day
http://www.cometison2013.co.uk/perihelion-and-distance/
Ben, you’re right, string theory is the current thing. I’ve read complaints that string theory gets too much attention. My gripe is that it’s looking for something more fundamental than quantum physics, and I feel that a fair few theorists may be striving for a deterministic theory so they can be rid of all that pesky quantum weirdness.
I think that pursuing determinism would be likely to lead to confusing dead-ends that could waste a lot of time; nature has already given her answer on such issues, and they contradict certain common prejudices of aspects of human thinking. So what? The whole history of science is the proving wrong of commonly held and apparently obvious assumptions. The Earth is flat; wrong. Everything orbits the Earth; wrong. What goes up must come down; wrong. Solid objects are solid; wrong. The matter in living things is special and different stuff from all the other matter; wrong. This time we’ve been proven fundamentally wrong. Big deal; it had to happen eventually.
I think parts of quantum physics look pretty messy; there seem to be somewhat arbitrary distributions of particles, masses, values and coefficients, etc,. String theory looks suitably mathematically versatile that it could enable the standard quantum theories to be reformulated into something far more elegant. I suspect that such an achievement could well reveal something deep about reality, but something entirely in accord with the anti-intuitive ‘modern physics weirdness’ which has already been experimentally confirmed so decisively.
Relativity has forced us to ask “what is time, apart from our awareness of it?”, and quantum physics has forced us to ask “what does it mean to be aware of something?”. The study of that which we took to be independent of ourselves has led us right back to examining the essence of our own experience, and I feel that from this point on, any ‘deeper’ physical theory that attempts to head away from that is attempting to head in a wrong direction.
as A new year ( human Term ) approaches…
We Would do well to Ram Some of Carl Sagan’s words down the Throats of So called Politicians….But, Will it change Anything, it should, But!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9TIeuBF9Ss
Footage shows a fiery object streaking across the sky in America’s Midwest – but what was the object?
http://news.sky.com/story/1187998/meteor-mystery-as-fireball-caught-on-cctv