Space and Astronomy in general

Intense Meteor Outburst Expected from the Alpha Monocerotids

Peter Jenniskens, a senior research scientist with the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center, along with Esko Lyytinen of the Finnish Fireball Network, have been keeping tabs on the shower for years. During outbursts, such as those that occurred in 1925 and 1935, activity reached meteor-storm levels with a zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of more than 1,000. Activity rose to near-storm levels again in 1985 and 1995 with ZHRs around 700 and 400.
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Circumstances are nearly identical to the 1995 outburst when the ZHR briefly reached 400.

We get these sorts of hopeful predictions every now and then. They usually turn out to be a bust, but I try to check them out anyways. You never know, and even if it turns out to just be an "average" meteor shower, it's still fun to watch.

So noticed that Boeing’s Starliner uncrewed capsule test got off the pad the other day, and the report said it was fine, so I stopped paying attention. Turns out, it inserted in an orbit that was too low - “anomaly” in the flight control system - and burned a lot of fuel trying to the ISS in that wrong orbit. Engineers finally got it under control, but now they don’t have enough fuel to do all the testing they wanted, although they are raising its orbit to the proper altitude.

Another engineering-based screwup for Boeing. Not good at all. Elon Musk may be crazy, but I think he’s the crazy we need now on giant engineering projects.

If you want to give anyone props, give it to the people running Space X, not the pedo guy funding it.

Robear wrote:

So noticed that Boeing’s Starliner uncrewed capsule test got off the pad the other day, and the report said it was fine, so I stopped paying attention. Turns out, it inserted in an orbit that was too low - “anomaly” in the flight control system - and burned a lot of fuel trying to the ISS in that wrong orbit. Engineers finally got it under control, but now they don’t have enough fuel to do all the testing they wanted, although they are raising its orbit to the proper altitude.

Reminds me of my Kerbal Space Program failed launches.

Wow, that is awesome. I love that it orbits a blue dwarf.

Blue Dwarf? Is... Is there a song for that?

Robear wrote:

Blue Dwarf? Is... Is there a song for that?

It's cold outside
No kind of atmosphere...

No no, that's *Red* Dwarf, comrade! We're talking *Blue* here...

Robear wrote:

No no, that's *Red* Dwarf, comrade! We're talking *Blue* here...

It’s sad outside,
Rain from the atmosphere.

Huh. And the rest of the song still fits... Bravo, Wink, bravo!

Interesting video, really neat.

How Many Stars are in the Sky?

There's an extra h at the beginning of your YouTube ID. I believe this is the video you meant to link?

The Spitzer Milky Way panorama is here, including two zoomable viewers:

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/glimp...

It is, thanks for fixing it. I found it to be a cool video

VERY cool. Even cooler if you go check out that zoomable panorama. Incredible achievement for the Spitzer team.

Praise the Sun!

ESA Solar Orbiter is on its way.

Since this thread tends to also cover a lot of cosmology and whatnot:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-experiment-hopes-solve-quantum-mechanics-biggest-mystery-180974132/

“In GRW, collapses happen randomly with fixed probability per particle per unit time,” says Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of physics at New York University. In the Copenhagen theory, on the other hand, collapses only happen when a measurement is made, so “one would need a clear physical criterion for both when a measurement occurs and what is measured. And that is precisely what the theory never provides.”
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“Collapse models are actually experimentally falsifiable,” says Matteo Carlesso, a physicist at University of Trieste, who studies quantum theories. Even though no experiment has been sensitive enough to successfully verify or falsify a collapse model, such an experiment should be possible with the sensitivity of something like TEQ.

Yeah, the New Horizons team themselves posted about their latest papers:
New Horizons Team Discovers a Critical Piece of the Planetary Formation Puzzle

Here is a really good explanation of why we can see stars only of certain colors.

Every time I learn more about color, I feel like my brain is being shifted in a totally new direction.

Still, I'll probably never get rid of the RBY "color wheel" that we learned in grade school.

OMG BETELGUESE IS GOING TO SUPERNOVA!

some time in the next 100,000 years

I read one cool thing about it, though. If it happens any time soon on human time scale, we will have several hours warning due to neutrino and gravity wave detectors. They travel at the same speed as the light from the supernova, but our current understanding is that the center of the star goes crazy first. That should give us enough warning that we can point telescopes at it in time to catch the light show.

I suspect there are a number of sensors of various types targeting it continuously, these days. I'm really hopeful that we'll get to see it happen. It's not every lifetime that we get a near-Earth supernova, and I'd like to experience what I've only read about...

SpaceX failed to land their booster this morning. Strange that a fail is now the unusual outcome.

Astronomers Think They Know Why Betelgeuse Got Dimmer

Cuz of Dimmerswitch