Dilip Simeon's blog

The Cassini space probe will be taking images of the Earth from Saturn in a month's time, as part of its mission to explore the ringed planet . Click here or on 'view gallery' to see images of Saturn taken by Cassini The shots will be taken from a distance of 1.44 billion kilometres, giving people a view of the Earth from the perspective of Saturn. Although the Earth will only appear as a small blue dot in between the rings, it will be part of a multi-image portrait that of the Saturn system that is being composed by Cassini.   15 Sep 2006: With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun's blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world . NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute The images of the Earth will be taken at 10:27 pm for 15 minutes while Saturn eclipses the sun. Cassini has previously created two mosaic images of the Saturn sys...

"Outer Space," the two-minute film from Netherlands-based editor and director Sander van den Berg, was created using actual still images from NASA's Cassini and Voyager spacecraft.The final product is a choreographed collection of images that is set to The Cinematic Orchestra's "That Home." According to io9's Robert T. Gonzalez, "Ring gaps, moonlets, geysers, big red spots and littler red spots abound" in the film.   The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 twin spacecraft launched in 1977 and have explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune as they made their way to the outer edges of the solar system, according to the Associated Press. NASA announced in December that Voyager 1 was 11 billion miles from the sun and had entered what's called the "stagnation zone." NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is equipped with 12 instruments, launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. The spacecraft's mission has been extended twice, and is ...

This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows planet Earth as a point of light between the icy rings of Saturn. The spacecraft captured the view on April 12, 2017 at 10:41 p.m. PDT (1:41 a.m. EDT). Cassini was 870 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) away from Earth when the image was taken. Although far too small to be visible in the image, the part of Earth facing toward Cassini at the time was the southern Atlantic Ocean. Earth's moon is also visible to the left of our planet in a cropped, zoomed-in version of the image. The rings visible here are the A ring (at top) with the Keeler and Encke gaps visible, and the F ring (at bottom). During this observation Cassini was looking toward the backlit rings, making a mosaic of multiple images, with the sun blocked by the disk of Saturn. Seen from Saturn, Earth and the other inner solar system planets are all close to the sun, and are easily captured in such images, although these opportunities have been somewhat r...

Nasa has released a new photograph of Saturn described as “perhaps the most unusual image ever taken in the history of the space programme”.  Taken four months ago from the Cassini spacecraft, the image - actually a mosaic of images -  shows Saturn eclipsing the sun, with Mars, Venus and Earth all appearing as tiny dots besides the second largest planet in the solar system. The photograph is partly a tribute to the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. As the craft prepared to leave the solar system US astronomer Carl Sagan requested that it take a “last look back”, photographing the Earth as a “fraction of a dot” in the vastness of space. “Consider again that dot,” wrote Sagan in 1997. “That's here. That's  home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”  This recent photograph shows something similar, with the Earth appearing as a b...

NB - ' Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.  That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened..' ( Friedrich Nietzsche) And we still think we need nationalism! and that religious and national communities need atom bombs to kill one another! Truly we humans are masters of self deception -DS ***************** A robotic  space  probe nearl...

From Hubble telescope images of spiral galaxies to closeups of the bizarre moons of Saturn, via stunning shots of the night sky from Earth, see the wonders of space as photographs of the cosmos go on display at London's Royal Maritime Museum http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jun/11/visions-universe-royal-maritime-in-pictures two lost hikers stand in a bubble of torchlight in Yosemite national park, California. The picture captures the last remnants of daylight and the bright dust clouds of the Milky Way The three bright stars on the left in this image are those of Orion’s Belt. Although part of a familiar constellation, a view such as this can never be seen with the naked eye.  Saturn's rings from the Cassini orbiter spacecraft, 2005 Venus taken from the Magellan spacecraft, 1991 The Crab Nebula (M1) from the Hubble Space Telescope, 2005 Stars such as our Sun die slowly, gently expelling their outer layers over millions of years. But for star...

The lonely probe, which is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and hurtling away at 38,000 mph... Given the distance, it takes about 17 hours for Voyager's signals to reach NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory The spacecraft's technology was laughable by today's standards: It carried an 8-track tape recorder and computers with 240,000 times less memory than a low-end iPhone. When it left Earth 36 years ago, it was designed as a four-year mission to Saturn, and everything after that was gravy.  But Voyager I has become - unexpectedly - the Little Spacecraft That Could. On Thursday, scientists declared that it had become the first man-made object to exit the solar system, a breathtaking achievement that NASA could only fantasize about back when it was launched in 1977, the same year that "Star Wars" was released.  "I don't know if it's in the same league as landing on the moon, but it's right up there - 'Star Trek' stuff, for sure," said Do...

As of this writing, the two Voyager probes are between 15 and 20 billion kilometers from earth; transmissions, traveling over the Deep Space Network at the speed of light, take more than 15 hours to bridge the gap. And yet despite the distance they’ve traveled, the probes are still in the solar neighbourhood, mind-bogglingly far from other systems; Voyager 1 won’t pass within two light years of another star system for some 40 thousand years, and Voyager 2 will come within five light-years of Sirius in about 300,000 years. The probes are now moving through the heliosheath, the outer layer of the sun’s atmospheric influence, on the verge of interstellar space. Regardless of their speed relative to the Earth, in galactic terms they’re very nearly stationary, joining the vast dance of stellar and dark matter in its stately, 250-million-year orbit of the Milky Way. When the two Voyager missions launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, embarking on a grand tour of the outer planets that ulti...

In 1929 Dr. Edwin Hubble determined that "the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it appears to move away." This formed the basis of the Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model of the development of the universe... The Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990, ushering in a new era in space exploration. From its low-earth orbit, the telescope can take pictures without interference from the planet's atmosphere, snapping photographs in visible light, ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths. Link For Images From The Hubble Space Telescope Named for astronomer Dr. Edwin Hubble, who established the notion that the universe is expanding, the images the telescope has produced over the past 20 years have similarly changed the course of astronomy, "[turning] astronomical conjectures into concrete certainties," according to the Hubble Space Telescope website. Its landmark discoveries include more accurately gauging the age of the universe-...

On December 18, 2018, around noon local time, a huge fireball was reported at a remote spot over the Kamchatka peninsula, in the Russian far east. Since the location is very remote, there were no visual reports of the explosion and after, but monitoring stations set up worldwide to detect nuclear explosions recorded the low-frequency sound waves caused by this cataclysmic event. The event was also captured by cameras on a Japanese weather satellite. The explosion was caused by the burning of a meteor 10 metres in diameter, weighing more than 1,400 tonnes and moving at more than 100,000 kph which burnt itself at a height of around 25 km in the atmosphere. The energy released by the event is estimated to be equivalent to around 170 kilotons of TNT. To get a perspective on this number, the total energy released in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was about 10 times smaller. Pale blue dot - Earth captured in rare photograph from Saturn spacecraft Cassini Chicxulub asteroid impact: Stu...

Hayhoe wrote particularly critically of those who imply that dissenting voices are suppressed - arguing that they're not, they're simply contradicted with evidence.  But over the last 10 years, at least 38 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals, each claiming various reasons why climate wasn't changing, or if it was, it wasn't humans, or it wasn't bad. They weren't suppressed. They're out there, where anyone can find them.  So we took those papers and - thanks to the superhuman efforts of my colleague  Rasmus Benestad  - recalculated all their analyses. From scratch. And you know what we found?  Every single one of those analyses had an error - in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis - that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus.  It's real, it's us, it's serious. The study found that some scientists were 'cherry picking' data and using flawed methodologies to reach their c...

No one had previously penetrated one of the continent's sub-glacial lakes, prompting Valery Lukin from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg to liken his team's achievement to the Moon landings in 1969. Whatever the comparison, it represents a remarkable feat. Over 20 years of stop-start drilling, the Russian team ground their way through 3.7km (2.3mi) of solid ice, working in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth . The Vostok project is one of several similar ventures being undertaken in the world's last wilderness. In West Antarctica, the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) is hoping to begin its effort to drill into Lake Ellsworth, while the American Wissard project is targeting Lake Whillans. More than 350 sub-glacial lakes - kept in liquid form by pressure from above and the Earth's heat below - have now been identified across Antarctica, and many others may lie undetected. Together, they form a huge and only partially co...

From the hidden colours of the moon to Bonnie Doon, and Tarantula Nebula to Saturn, these spectacular images of the universe are the finalists in the 2016 CWAS ‘David Malin’ awards. The annual competition, which celebrates the best astronomy images taken by Australian photographers, is part of AstroFest 2016. The winners will be announced on 16 July. An associated exhibition opens the following day at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory visitors centre, and a second exhibition will also travel to selected venues around Australia ConjunctionCross by Svantje Mertens Photograph: CWAS See more:  https://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2016/jul/12/beauty-of-space-spectacular-australian-photographs-of-the-universe

Mercury  is the smallest of the solar system's eight planets and, for decades, also its most neglected by humans. While Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn have been probed and photographed in exquisite detail during the  space  age, the closest planet to the Sun has had to make do with a few flybys from the Mariner 10 spacecraft in the early 1970s.  Now Mercury has its own high-resolution maps, down to the scale of kilometres, made from thousands of images taken by   Nasa 's Messenger spacecraft as it orbited the planet over the course of a year. "Messenger has revealed Mercury to be a fascinating, dynamic and complex world," said David Blewett at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and a scientist for the Messenger mission. Part of the reason, he said, that it had taken more than 30 years to revisit the planet since the Mariner 10 flybys was that most people thought Mercury was probably like the moon and largely inert and boring. "We...

some of these snapshots of our home planet were taken by  astronauts  on board humanity's floating platform in orbit (the  International Space Station ), satellites in space  around Earth , and even from a telescope zooming  around Saturn . While we may think we know Earth well since we live here, it's worth taking a few moments to ponder just how special our planet is. First of all, it's the only place we know about in the entire Universe that has life. Scientists are looking for evidence of life elsewhere in the Solar System and even from the far-flung reaches of the galaxy, but so far Earth is it as far as hosting anything living -- current or past. The Earth is in a sweet spot -- traveling on average about 93,000,000 miles from the Sun -- that lets the planet get not too hot or too cold. This means we can have liquid water, which is something we humans certainly need to survive. Our atmosphere is also the right recipe for life to exist. Not only does ...

Dear Readers, The first week of June 2016, marks just short of 56 months since I began blogging. This is to mark half a million hits since October 2011. And to thank you for reading. As you know, its not a commercial blog, and my only satisfaction is to see it being used and appreciated. I have also used it as an archive for talks and lectures.  I'm aware it has  readers in countries all over the world - it's great to be able to reach them. Salaam to all of you!  Here's a brief survey (all titles listed below are links):  The first post was on Oct 17, 2011, and included these: On the public commodification of privacy Jayeeta Sharma's long awaited monograph on Assam, Empire's Garden 500,000+ hits in 56 months marks an average of about 9000 per month, and an average of 90+ posts per month (total posts 5089). Over the years the number of monthly hits increased, and in the past few months has sometimes gone over 18,000.  The highest number of ...