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I was going to save this for Sunday but I love seeing these things and couldn’t help it. 

Source

A horseshoe orbit. Image via Phyorg

A new (to us) asteroid has been found and it turns out to be an “Earth companion”.  Not new really the asteroid has been in the orbit for some 250,000 years according to astronomers.

The asteroid, named 2010 SO16 was found by the WISE spacecraft gained the attention of Apostolis Christou and David Asher who apparently noticed something different about this one.

Different indeed, with respect to Earth asteroid 2010 SO16 appears to be in a rare Horseshoe orbit.  Almost weird.

The Royal Astronomical Society explains . . .

Tiiny Janus on the A-ring Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cassini spies the tiny Saturn moon Janus.  Want to see the full-version?  Look here.

The press release:

Saturn’s moon Janus obscures part of the planet’s A ring as the Cassini spacecraft looks toward the main rings and the thin F ring.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) appears as a dark oval to the left of the center of the image. A star can also be seen on the right of the image, beyond the thin F ring. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 21, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Janus. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

FOUND! Image from WIRED (see below)

If you’re looking for a pretty decent planetarium program for FREE.  Give Stellarium a try.  It’s been around for quite a while and it’s improved upon all the time.  You can do a lot with the program including writing your own scripts if you are a mind to.

One of the things I really like about Stellarium is the satellite passes, numerous times I’ve seen a satellite pass over head while at the scope and I’ve gone back and determined what it was.  Very nicely done.

The link is on this page, a wiki page with pretty much everything Stellarium, scroll down the page a little for the download link.  Even if you have a planetarium this is worth having anyways.  Hey, good planetarium programs are like BBQ grills, can’t have too many.

I got an email the other day asking if knew of a site that would allow the viewing of a constellation from the perspective of being in another constellation.  I have seen such a site, but can’t find the particular one I was looking for.  I did find a page at The Astronomy Nexus called the Distant Worlds Star Mapper, which will allow you to look at one star from another.  Just pick stars in the appropriate constellations.

None of the constellations will look the same as they do here as the constellations are nothing more than our human ability to put things into patterns.  There might not be a lot of change in what a constellation looks like within our solar system, but on the much larger scale we are talking about, that’s a whole other deal. If you have a link to a page along these lines pass them along in the comments, I’d like to see them and see if one is the particular one I was thinking of.

Finally there is the X-37B, the secret space plane launch about a month ago.  Well it’s been found and Heaven’s Above has pass data.  The weather here is rainy so I can’t verify their data, maybe this weekend.  If you have decent skies and have a scheduled pass, give it a look.

I’m still playing catch-up, and I appreciate everybody’s patience.  Today I’m writing about Comet Elenin, which is Jerry’s post.

This is from the JPL small-body database

Comet Elenin (C/2010 X1) is a fascinating little critter discovered December 10th, 2010, by Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin.  Mr. Elenin was using the International Scientific Optical Network’s robotic observatory in New Mexico when he made his discovery.  Back in December, when the tiny comet was first seen, it had an apparent magnitude of 19.5.  Remember, in order to be visible to the unaided eye, an object must have an apparent magnitude of about 6.5.  An object becomes more visible the smaller the number.  The Sun has an apparent magnitude of negative 26.74, which is so visible you risk injury to your eyes trying to catch a glimpse of it.

Image taken 030411 by Jean-Francois Soulier, all rights reserved

Since little Elenin was just discovered like 20 minutes ago, not much is known about it yet.  It’s believed to be about 3-4 kilometers in diameter, traveling at about 86,000 km/hr.  Elenin will come to perihelion on about September 10th, 2011, and will come closest to the Earth on about October 16th, 2011.  It will pass within about 34,000,000 km (about 21,000,000 miles) of the Earth.  It’s not known how visible little Elenin will be at that time, but if you train your telescopes on Mars around October 15th, you should be able to see it approach and pass in front of the planet as it heads out away from the Sun.

Image by Bernhard Hausler, 030611, all rights reserved

As I said before, not much is known about Comet Elenin, so most information is speculative.  Right now, many astronomers believe Elenin’s previous orbital period of about 4.1 million years (with aphelion at about 0.82 ly, or 51,800 AU) was only recently disrupted, shooting it out of the Oort Cloud into the inner solar system, and giving it aphelion at about 1033 AU.  Now, you realize that when I say “recently”, I mean within the last couple of million years.  Elenin’s current orbital period is believed to be about 11,750 years.

However speculative the information on Elenin’s current orbit, this little comet will most assuredly not pass this way again in your lifetime.  Be sure to mark your calendars for October 15th, grab your telescope, and watch this tiny speed-freak buzz Mars.

Longevity is the key (Jill Tarter)

Technology may well outlive it’s civilisation (Jill Tarter)

Stephen Hawking worries they [ET] will come and trash the place [Earth] (Jill Tarter)

Neither me nor Stephen Hawking know anything about alien psychology (Jill Tarter)

I couldn’t find any astronomy under BBC wildlife but… (Mike Peel)

Use Wikipedia as a starting point, not as the end (Mike Peel)

People are the most expensive and important people so we should optimise for productivity (Matt Wood)

I will try to give a talk without mentioning the Zooniverse … Oops! (Chris Lintott)

Am I the only person in the room without a Mac? (Chris North)

How do you do research without constantly learning new tricks? (Sarah Kendew)

METI: Meddling with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Carolina Odman-Govender)

Not all data is in the Virtual Observatory. Not all data will ever be in the Virtual Observatory (Thomas Robitaille)

We have successfully take the Fourier transform of a biscuit (Cory Lehan)

Earth’s kind of boring (Jonathon Fey)

Academics are people too (Karen Masters)

Is there an internationally recognised gesture for Moon? (Markus Poessel)

Jill Tarter sets the tone at .Astronomy 3

This morning opened with a fascinating talk by Jill Tarter, director of the Centre for SETI Research. Her message was full of perspective, some physics, an overview of Kepler (see the Kepler Orrery here) and some really interesting technical aspects of the data and challenge of data processing in real time with citizen scientists. The challenge is that of setiQuest and it will be tackled at the Google Summer of Code this year. As the numerous favourite quotes from this talk populating the #dotastro twitter stream demonstrate, it was quite a start to the day.

Next came a string of inspiring presentations.

Ed Gomez from LCOGT showed off the great Virtual Sky, presented the upcoming Star in a Box (stay tuned) and invited everyone to take part in agent exoplanet!.

LCOGT uses Linked Data

Mike Peel‘s presentation initiated a debate about the use of Wikipedia in Astronomy. His talk can be found here – and is well worth a read!

Matt Wood, our favourite Amazon Technology evangelist enthused us with his Amazon web services and, as sponsor of the conference, gave us a bunch of vouchers to use the hack day tomorrow and for the rest of the meeting.

Before lunch, Chris Lintott attempted to give a talk without mentioning the Zooniverse and almost succeeded. His talk, about why the internet is terrible, touched upon how the internet is influencing the way we think. While some agreed that social networking around interests reduced serendipity, others argued that social networks led to more serendipitous discoveries of interests. The debate goes on…

Full room for the first morning

Everyone was enthusiastically tweeting on at least two devices simultaneously and we were trying to ustream the meeting to the point of breaking the network… Sorry #dotastro followers. 90 connections were not enough for 40 odd people this morning. The issue was subsequently fixed.

After a copious lunch with a memorable series of deserts, the afternoon took off with three parallel unconference sessions.

Live coding with Processing

Twitter is another way to follow #dotastro when the afternoon sessions are not broadcast.

The ‘Citizen operated spacecraft’ session was led by Michael Johnson and covered topics such as low-cost space exploration devices, the consequences of making space exploration affordable for citizens, the ethics of bringing space within citizens’ reach, what benefits there are to citizen space exploration (outreach and education, engineering skills, contributions to science) – and a controversial debate of exploration vs science. Each of these topics being worth a blog post on its own, we are looking for volunteers from the session to share their notes with us…

In the Processing 101 session, participants learnt to start playing around with Processing, an open source visualisation language and development environment based on Java that allows to create animated interactive powerful visualisations. After going through a live coding Hello World example in the form of a growing white circle on a bright red background, everyone was let loose. An image annotation app and an image-to-audio app were developed in the session, among other cool bits of code. Hopefully the game will continue at the Hack day tomorrow afternoon.

Another session led by Norman Gray focused on Linked Open Data. The two areas of focus were – the semantic web in practice and – the machine-readable web. At the session, the question ‘What is it for?’ was addressed. The suumary is that making the web machine-readable should be easy to use but it is tedious to implement. Norman predicted that the machine-readable web will come about when people with lots of data will want to make their data available to others.

Kinect in motion

Jonathan Fay demonstrated the World Wide Telescope (WWT). He imported data from various origins and visualised them in the WWT. The WWT is now interfaced with Astrometry.net and myKepler.com etc. and allows users to do much more with their own images and their own data. Tomorrow at the Hack day, we will have a demonstration of how the WWT can be used using Microsoft’s Kinect technology. Let’s go surf in outer space!

Megan Schwamb led a discussion about the future of large data-driven astronomy. Parsing, searching, doing science with big data require new methods. The debate led to a discussion on how to get more support and recognition for astroinfomatics and astrostatistics and what career paths are there for the astrosoftware engineers of today and tomorrow. There was also a discussion about the limitaions of models to compare data with and how human intervention is still crucial to discover what we don’t know is there to discover.

The last unconference session was about Gloria, a Spanish networked telescope project organised by the Montegancedo Observatory. Gloria involves the establishment of telecommunication standards for networkable telescopes such that astronomers (amateur and professional) can make their telescopes available for remote observations and how those without access to telescopes can carry out observations remotely.

All the participants are invited to share their photos and other digital memorabilia to the .Astronomy flickr group

1) First, a post from the past: Let’s talk about sex…ratios (evolution that is).

2) Weird search query of the week: “clinical flirtation consumer reality”

3) Comment of the week, in response to

Sexpectations: Male College Students’ Views about Displayed Sexual References on Females’ Social Networking Web Sites.

“STUDY OBJECTIVE: Sexual reference display on a social networking web site (SNS) is associated with self-reported sexual intention; females are more likely to display sexually explicit content on SNSs. The purpose of this study was to investigate male college students’ views towards sexual references displayed on publicly available SNSs by females. DESIGN: Focus groups. SETTING: One large state university. PARTICIPANTS: Male college students age 18-23. INTERVENTIONS: All tape recorded discussion was fully transcribed, then discussed to determine thematic consensus. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: A trained male facilitator asked participants about views on sexual references displayed on SNSs by female peers and showed examples of sexual references from female’s SNS profiles to facilitate discussion. RESULTS: A total of 28 heterosexual male participants participated in seven focus groups. Nearly all participants reported using Facebook to evaluate potential female partners. Three themes emerged from our data. First, participants reported that displays of sexual references on social networking web sites increased sexual expectations. Second, sexual reference display decreased interest in pursuing a dating relationship. Third, SNS data was acknowledged as imperfect ...

I recall years ago reading Spencer Wells discuss how important it was to sample “indigenous people”* before they were swallowed up by the cresting panmixia. Of course panmixia has to be conditioned on the fact that the vast majority of Han Chinese are stilling reproducing with other Han Chinese, and so forth. But it seems plausible to argue that the great agricultural Diasporas are only today swallowing up the residual of marginalized groups outside of the farming frontier. These populations which expanded from agricultural hearths over the Holocene may only be a shadow of the genetic variation which was once extant after the last Ice Age, as the thinly populated landscape was fractionated into endogamous networks as a matter of necessity rather than preference.

First, let’s recall that over the long term “effective population size” is defined by the harmonic mean. Concretely, a population of 1 billion can be far more genetically homogeneous than a population of 1,000, if, those 1 billion only recently expanded from far smaller populations. Imagine a toy example of two populations, A & B. They both begin in generation 1 with a population size ...

If it happens tonite, here’s what I suggest listening to at midnight:

Drink on these lyrics:

Lets paint the town
We’ll shut it down
Let’s burn the roof
And then we’ll do it again

I’ve been getting lots of emails and tweets about a young man named Jacob Barnett, a 12-year-old who is apparently a math genius. He’s been getting a lot of press lately because he’s tackling some pretty heavy problems in astrophysics, including relativity.

I want to be clear that from the videos on YouTube and such, he does appear to have an extremely advanced grasp of math and science. I also think he has a lot of promise! However, science is more than just learning the equations. It takes insight that generally comes with time. Happily, Mr. Barnett has that time, and has a big head start with the basics.

Steve Novella tackles that issue very well at Neurologica, and I don’t necessarily disagree with anything he wrote there.

But I do want to talk briefly about the way Barnett’s story has been told by some media. I first saw it at Time magazine’s site, with the headline "12-Year-Old Genius Expands Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Thinks He Can Prove It Wrong".

Barnett may very well be a genius, and may very well rewrite a lot of physics… as, no doubt, future generations of genius scientists will. But one ...

What’s the News: With Congress yet to pass a budget, the country is facing a government shutdown unless lawmakers reach an agreement by midnight tonight. In addition to shuttering many government offices, the shutdown would likely cause present serious difficulties for federal government-funded research.

Difficulties Such As…

A wide range of government-backed research—from biologists studying stem cell lines to oceanographers gleaning climate information from maritime sensors—wouldn’t be funded during the shutdown. The delay will ruin some experiments, and leave others with large gaps in their data. One stem cell researcher estimated the shutdown would cost his lab $10,000 per person, and told NatureNews, “One day is tolerable, three days is a killer.”
Scientists working on NASA’s IceBridge project—a study using special aircraft to survey ice in Greenland—would get on their planes and (dejectedly, one assumes) head back to the States.
Clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health would be stopped or, at best, slowed. The NIH Clinical Center has an estimated 640 trials, 285 of which are for people suffering from cancer—but those studies would stop taking all new patients, including one child flown to the NIH Sunday on a Miles ...