Jupiter - 29th December viewing

We finally received the filter and eyepiece kit and attempted another viewing of Jupiter. The orange and yellow filters enhanced details of the Jovian belts and general atmospheric structure, while the extra eyepieces provided some much needed magnification options.

Unfortunately, without the SLR kit (still waiting on it) we couldn't attempt any real astrophotography. Relegated to using the Samsung S3's camera again, the 25mm Plossol coupled with a 2x Barlow, and a Moon filter (the orange and yellow filters didn't seem to agree with the cellphone camera) managed to provide us a reasonable picture of Jupiter (below). 

Equipment list: Celestron NexStar 6SE - (25mm Plossl eyepiece & 2x Barlow) // Imaging - Samsung Galaxy S3

Who: Ayushi/Rajat/Kashif
 
When: 20:59 hrs, 29th Dec, 2012 

Post-Christmas day observations

As an update to yesterday's post we'd like to share our photos from today's attempt at capturing the Moon and Jupiter. In addition, we managed to catch a speck of light known as Aldebaran, a rather bright red giant star some 65 light years (that's 614.9 million million kilometres) from us.

Beginning with the Moon again - 

                                                    

Today's observation of Jupiter and its moons displays the three closest moons forming a skewed triangle  of sorts. Callisto, the fourth and farthest Galilean moon can be seen as a faint dot away from the trio. 

Jupiter + 4 Galilean moons

The diagram below (screen capture from Sky & Telescope's handy Jupiter applet) indicates the predicted position of the Galilean moons with respect to the giant planet. As before the letters denote each moon's name:

I = Io, E = Europa, G = Ganymede, C = Callisto 

 Our final image of the day was a capture of Aldebaran (from the Arabic, Al-debaran, 'the follower').

Aldebaran (Red giant star)

Since we were unable to capture a wide angle image of our objects of interest, we've included a screen shot from Stellarium (a free to download interactive planetarium) illustrating the relative positions of all three objects. 

Equipment list: Celestron NexStar 6SE - Stock setup (25mm Plossl eyepiece and a wonky StarFinder) // Imaging - Samsung Galaxy S3

Who: Ayushi/Rajat/Kashif

When: 1800 hrs, 26th Dec, 2012 

Christmas astronomy - The Moon & Jupiter

Most people around the world were treated to a great view of a waxing moon paired with Jupiter this Christmas night. The astronomical event presented itself to be the best way to start using our newly acquired telescope!

The Moon was spectacular offering plenty of detail (although at this stage of it's cycle it's increased brightness reduces contrast), and Jupiter was clearly visible with it's majestic bands and four Galilean moons - Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto - And since none of us had seen Jupiter through a telescope before, we were all rather chuffed. 

Although we'd not yet received our astrophotography kit, we shivered through the sub-zero temperatures (a crisp -20 deg C)  here in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to grab a few shots through the eyepiece with our cellphone cameras. Granted the images are really low-quality, we're happy we got anything at all on our very first astronomy outing!

Beginning with the Moon - 

Using a cellphone camera our shot of Jupiter and its four Galilean moons couldn't obviously produce the detail we observed through the eyepiece. The image below is untouched and includes distortion due to the eyepiece barrel and the fact that we were trying to keep a cellphone centered at -25 degrees Celcius.

Attempting to clean up and re-size our original image gave us something a tad clearer (below).

Both the observed and captured image above were 'mirror reversed' since our telescope is a Schmidt-Cassegrain design. A comparison between a 'direct' view versus the captured view is shown below. The rendering is a screen capture from Sky & Telescopes' Jupiter's Moons applet available here. 

Note: E = Europa, I = Io, G = Ganymede, C = Callisto

From Sky & Telescope (SCT mirrored)

From Sky & Telescope (Direct view)

Equipment list: Celestron NexStar 6SE - Stock setup (25mm Plossl eyepiece and a wonky StarFinder) // Imaging - Samsung Galaxy S3

Who: Ayushi/Rajat/Kashif

When: 1830 hrs, 25th Dec, 2012

Merry Christmas!

Everyone.

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, animated with love:

Farewell (at 5K in slow-motion)

From Cassini, in colour

Images through NASA Cassini's UV lens:

Source

Vanity.

From 'The Verge':

"NASA's original photo is somewhat obscured by a dust cover on the MAHLI camera used to capture the picture, but The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla made the necessary touchups to reveal the memorable portrait above. That large "eye" you're looking at is actually one of Curiosity's most vital tools: it's a powerful laser capable of vaporizing Mars rocks and instantly analyzing their chemical composition as they vanish from sight."

Source

"How long is a piece of string?"

A BBC Horizon documentary with Alan Davies (of QI: Quite Interesting fame) exploring the intricacies of measurement - from rulers to thought experiments and quantum mechanics.

Overall, the science and maths is a tad over simplified; I feel viewers could handle a little more detail.

Via

This was overdue

To be watched in HD only! 

Video description:

"From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle DVD/BluRay by NASA/Glenn a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound. The Skywalker sound folks just helped bring it out and make it more audible."

Remembering Sally Ride

The first American woman in space and third woman in space after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya is remembered by @fyfluiddynamics:

  

                                   

Source

Time-lapse video compiled from photos taken from the ISS

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Source

F-22 oxygen supply problem not a contamination issue

From Flightglobal:

The USAF has also gathered data that indicates that the problem has to do with the amount of oxygen that is reaching the pilot, Schwartz says. Based on tests conducted inside an altitude chamber and a centrifuge, the USAF has concluded that a combination of hardware defects with the pilot's life support gear contributed to the problem.
"Part of that is the upper pressure garment of the g-suit assembly," Schwartz says. "Part of that has to do with hose and valve and connection hardware in the cockpit."

 Source

The Messenger Lectures - Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman's lectures on physics at Cornell University in 1964. Microsoft Research's Project Tuva has added to these videos by including commentary, notes and extras. All seven videos are available here. 


Note: The site linked above requires Microsoft Silverlight to be installed for your browser.


Alternatively, you could watch the videos on YouTube (without all the Project Tuva additions though):

Photo - chalk as examined by Thomas Huxley in the 1860s

From NPR's 'Krulwich Wonders...' - A science blog by Robert Krulwich (excerpt follows):

"Chalk is composed of extremely small white globules. They look, up close, like snowballs made from brittle paper plates. Those plates, it turns out, are part of ancient skeletons that once belonged to roundish little critters that lived and floated in the sea, captured a little sunshine and carbon, then died and sank to the bottom. There still are trillions of them floating about in the oceans today, sucking up carbon dioxide, pocketing the carbon. Over the millennia, so many have died and plopped on top of each other, the weight of them and the water above has pressed them into a white blanket of rock, entirely composed of teeny skeletons. Scientists call these ancient plates "coccoliths." Technically, they are single-celled phytoplankton algae.

Chalk doesn't proclaim itself. It is usually out of view, buried in the ground below. Every so often, when a highway is being carved through a mountain, or when the sea and wind erode the side of a hill, that's when the green cover comes off, then you can see it. The White Cliffs of Dover are all chalk, piled hundreds of feet high."

Find more posts at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/


Read more..

Slick public service message on viruses

Warner Bros and Participant Media create a rather well produced public service message for Take Part's pandemic and disease prevention campaign:

Via

An astrophysicist's poetic act of revenge in 1984

From Maria Popova's fantastic 'Brain Pickings': 

A Vintage Scientific Paper Published as a 38-Stanza Poem:

...Reader Julia Deneva, a Cornell astronomer and fellow Bulgarian, alerts me to The Detection of Shocked Co/ Emission from G333.6-0.2 by New South Wales physicist J. W. V. Storey, a paper published as a 38-stanza poem, appeared in The Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia in 1984. It was as much an act of creativity as it was one of vengeance. Deneva writes:

"The unfortunate astronomer who got scheduled last at the annual meeting of said society decided to take revenge and gave his talk in verse — and later submitted it for publication."

The first few stanzas:

I wrote my abstract, sent it in,

With words that don’t offend.

Imagine my horror to find that I

Am scheduled at the end.

Let me say, to be last speaker,

There are very few things worse.

And so this talk, to get revenge,

Will be entirely in verse.

The subject I address today

Is that of star formation.

And what we’ve found out recently

About the situation.

Stars start out as clouds of gas and

Dust and bits of spinning stuff.

Collapsing gravitationally

Until they’re dense enough. 

They form themselves in little lumps,

(Or so says this bloke Jeans).

‘Dynamic Instabilities’

Whatever that term means. 

Source

Schweizer glider out-landing/crash

From the uploader (LarryHockensmith) -  

Complacency has no place in soaring. I was trained better than to have lingered on the lee-side of a ridge over rough terrain. The dramatic outlanding was due to my actions exclusively.

While tight turns over roofs, brushing treetops and dodging street signs are not desired flight maneuvers, they do make for interesting viewing. An almost perfect (for a power pilot and plane but not a sailplane) landing until an unnoticed mailbox catches the right wing of the sailplane about 8 inches from the tip.

The original is 16 minutes of Full High Definition Video and shows every second of the events leading to this out-landing/ crash. It has been closely reviewed and much learning has taken place. My instructor, safety officer, FAA and NTSB were all outstanding professionals in helping grow skills from this experience.

More videos on this are coming. See if you can spot how the differences between a power pilot's training and a glider pilot's training could have contributed to this outcome.

Dark Matter - Unaccounted for

From Quantum Diaries :

Neal Weiner, a theorist from New York University, started his lecture saying that contrary to the Higgs boson, for dark matter “we have no model, only guesses”. There is nothing within the Standard Model of particle physics to account for dark matter. This is one key reason we physicists are all convinced there is a bigger theory hiding behind the current known one.

So theorists and experimentalists are in the dark… As Neal stressed, there are many manifestations of dark matter. Different experiments observe strange signals where dark matter could be the explanation. But formulating an explanation is far from being trivial.

Full post can be found here. 

XKCD: Visual Field

Lego Rolls Royce 'Trent' Engine

On display at the Farnborough International Airshow 2012. Comes with functioning stages! Well functioning to the extent of 'turning' roundy round. 

From the Royal Aero Society's YouTube video:

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTCSKRsOdT4&feature=youtu.be


Via: http://twitter.com/FlightTestFact

Source: http://twitpic.com/a62qqv

Source: http://twitter.com/EADSlive/status/222642839253815296/photo/1

Explained: Sigma - MIT News Office

Given the news we've just heard from CERN, this simple explanation from MIT (Feb 9, 2012) offers some insight into the magnitude of today's announcement. I'll collect many more links/resources to provide a more thorough picture of this discovery.

Explained: Sigma - MIT News Office

SU2: Open-source CFD Software from Stanford's Aerospace Dept.

From the Stanford University website:

At a recent demonstration, the Stanford team debuted "Stanford University Unstructured" (SU2), an open-source application that models the effects of fluids moving over aerodynamic surfaces such as fuselages, hulls, propellers, rotors, wings, rockets and re-entry vehicles.

Dubbed SU2 for short, the application incorporates everything engineers need to perform a complete design loop for optimizing the shapes of aerospace systems.  While commercial programs offering similar capabilities are available, they can be prohibitively expensive. SU2, on the other hand,  can be downloaded for free from the lab's website.

Source: http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-aero-engineers-debut-open-source-fluid-dynamics-design-application

Update: Version 1.1 of SU2 is available as of 06/29/12

Download via: http://su2.stanford.edu/news/news_release1p1.html

Many thanks to @FlightTestFact for the link!

Human birth as viewed through an MRI machine

From Medical Daily:

"The 30-second movie captures the active second stage of labor as the mother makes expulsive efforts to push out the fetus.  Researchers had to stop recording in the late second stage as the fetal head extended and from the mother to ensure that the ears of the newborn were still covered by maternal soft tissue so that it was not exposed to MRI noise."

Source: http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20120626/10461/childbirth-mri-video-inside-delivering--magnetic-resonance-imaging.htm

Von Karman Vortices with a Pair of Rainbows

From New Scientist:

" The layer of stratocumulus clouds normally reflects a portion of solar energy into space and in this image the clouds are diffracting the sunlight back to the satellite splitting the light into its constituent colours.

...Von Karman vortices are linear series of alternating spiral eddies formed by a fluid moving round an obstacle, in this case it is the clouds moving around the island.  "

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/06/swirls-and-glories.html

"Nikola Tesla in Sound & Light"

via @orezavi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/orezavi/status/216138782179721216

Irrationality & Intelligence -- Two of a kind?

From Jonah Lehrer's blog, Frontal Cortex (The New Yorker): 

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.

Although Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, his work was dismissed for years. Kahneman recounts how one eminent American philosopher, after hearing about his research, quickly turned away, saying, “I am not interested in the psychology of stupidity.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html#ixzz1yVfbNgld

GE to research unsteady spray phenomena to improve fuel injectors

http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/10/iran-blocking-access-to-internet/

LEGO Sorting Plant!

So Dynaway had these guys ----> BrickIt 

make them --->

Capable of this ---->

Nothing further.

Reference Text: "Summary of Airfoil Data" - National Advisory Committee For Aeronautics

Old but valuable, airfoil theory and the aerodynamic characteristics of various airfoil sections (NACA profiles)


The complete text available via the NASA Technical Report Server: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930090976_1993090976.pdf


Report No. 824
Summary of Airfoil Data, 1945
by: Ira H. Abbott, Albert E. von Doenhoff & Louis S. Stivers, Jr.


Also see: University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign - Airfoil Coordinates Database 

USAF Stability & Control DATCOM (Data Compendium)

For those who haven't come across this colossal project, here's a quick intro from its wiki page:

The United States Air Force Stability and Control DATCOM is a collection, correlation, codification, and recording of best knowledge, opinion, and judgment in the area of aerodynamic stability and control prediction methods. It presents substantiated techniques for use (1) early in the design or concept study phase, (2) to evaluate changes resulting from proposed engineering fixes, and (3) as a training on crosstraining aid. It bridges the gap between theory and practice by including a combination of pertinent discussion and proven practical methods. For any given configuration and flight condition, a complete set of stability and control derivatives can be determined without resort to outside information.

A spectrum of methods is presented, ranging from very simple and easily applied techniques to quite accurate and thorough procedures. Comparatively simple methods are presented in complete form, while the more complex methods are often handled by reference to separate treatments. Tables which compare calculated results with test data provide indications of method accuracy. Extensive references to related material are also included. 

The report was compiled from September 1975 to September 1977 by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation in conjunction with the engineers at the Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAF_Stability_and_Control_DATCOM


Ok, with that of the way, here's the entire (1978 revision) declassified PDF document (3134 pages, 113 MB):

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADB072483

I can safely say that this report was a life saver during stability and control analysis projects and preliminary aircraft design. It also helps that it's easy to use with a detailed table of contents that almost always gets what you what you need.

My stability and control textbook from college extensively implemented DATCOM methods. Here's a preview:



The DATCOM report also gave way to a computer program (USAF Digital DATCOM) which allowed users to analyse various aircraft configurations based on geometry and flight condition inputs.

Intro tutorial we used at college:

Direct link to file: http://openae.org/files/resources/digital_datcom/DATCOM_Tutorial_I.pdf



The Digital DATCOM project has seen 3rd party updates and innovations over the years, with the inclusion of 3D model viewing, MATLAB/Simulink integration etc. To get a better idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAF_Digital_DATCOM#Current_Development

Boeing 747-8 Flutter Issues with Tail Tanks

The horizontal stabiliser tail tanks on the 747-8 are to be 'deactivated' to comply with FAA regulations. With fuel laden tail tanks, the 747-8 Intercontinental manages to excite a structural mode 'under a certain regulatory-required structural failure scenario'. 


I'd love to know what kind of scenario this occurs under. I'm betting it's some sort of longitudinal manoeuvre that sets off the empennage. Guess we'll know if and when Boeing decides to reveal details from their flight test report. 


From source: "The 747-8 programme has faced vibration concerns before, after a 2.3Hz limit cycle oscillation (LCO) in the wings prompted Boeing to develop the Outboard Aileron Modal Suppression (OAMS) system to dampen out vibration with the aircraft's fly-by-wire ailerons."


Original article: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-locks-out-747-8-tail-fuel-tanks-on-flutter-concerns-367148/

The Royal Institution's New Video Collection - Science, Maths, Nature, Engineering, Space, Environment etc!

This looks like a great showcase of science vids! For a start:

The RI Channel 

Oh, and of course, they have all their Christmas Lectures too. 

Here's an example:

The creator, Matthias Wandel, has a website too --> http://woodgears.ca/ (An Engineer's Approach to Woodworking)

New Process Promises Drag Reducing Coatings for Marine/Aero Applications

Infrared Radiation-Assisted Evaporative Lithography:

Although the University of Surrey researchers claim that this technology may initially see aesthetic applications the possibility of using this customisable coatings on ships and aircraft could mean serious fuel savings.

News via Tim Robinson (@RAeSTimR) https://twitter.com/#!/RAeSTimR :

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/inexpensive-process-offers-prospect-of-low-drag-surface-coatings-366952/

Link to the University of Surrey news release: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2011/68467_new_coatings_process_to_reduce_the_carbon_footprint_of_the_transport_industry.htm

Link to a PDF presentation introducing the chemical process (from 2010): http://tinyurl.com/7ok87c6

MIT Researchers Find Critical Speed Above which Birds - and Drones - are Sure to Crash

Emilio Frazzoli, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT explains his concept of a 'theoretical speed limit' for birds and aircraft alike. He and his research student argue that regardless of the apriori knowledge available to said bird/UAV about their terrain, a critical speed exists beyond which a collision is highly probable. 


Results of his research could mean faster UAVs that do not simply rely on sensor data but engineered intuition.


"When you go skiing off the path, you don't ski in a way that you can always stop before the first tree you see," Frazzoli says. "You ski and you see an opening, and then you trust that once you go there, you'll be able to see another opening and keep going."


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/miot-mrf011912.php

First Flight for Cessna Citation 'Ten' Prototype

A two hour first flight for the upgraded Citation X, branded the 'Ten', tested the aircraft's flight controls package, engine performance and handling qualities.

Full story here: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/picture-video-citation-ten-takes-to-the-skies-367082/

Aircraft performance and spec numbers here --> http://www.cessna.com/citation/citation-ten/ten-performance.html#

Promo video:

Video: Wide angle in-cockpit view from an A320

On-board an A320 - Great video of takeoffs and landings in HD.