Category Archives: Astronomy

Christmas morning assumptions to all

Old Sol

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I assume all of you are responding to the Universe in whatever ways suit you best this morning, and I wish that on you with profound enthusiasm and cheer.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, things have changed a lot here on earth since last Christmas.  For instance, the barycenters of earth and moon:

                                   Earth                                 
    
                     Barycentric Equatorial Positions                    
                    Mean Equator and Equinox of J2000.0                  
    
   Date        Time               X                Y                Z  
        (UT1) 
             h  m   s             AU               AU               AU
2012 Dec 25 00:00:00.0    -  0.059985055   +  0.898520188   +  0.389478777

                                   Earth                                 
    
                     Barycentric Equatorial Positions                    
                    Mean Equator and Equinox of J2000.0                  
    
   Date        Time               X                Y                Z  
        (UT1) 
             h  m   s             AU               AU               AU
2011 Dec 25 00:00:00.0    -  0.048871098   +  0.900279920   +  0.390286717

                                   Moon                                  
    
                     Barycentric Equatorial Positions                    
                    Mean Equator and Equinox of J2000.0                  
    
   Date        Time               X                Y                Z
        (UT1) 
             h  m   s             AU               AU               AU
2012 Dec 25 00:00:00.0    -  0.058478965   +  0.900591248   +  0.390372982

                                   Moon                                  
    
                     Barycentric Equatorial Positions                    
                    Mean Equator and Equinox of J2000.0                  
    
   Date        Time               X                Y                Z
        (UT1) 
             h  m   s             AU               AU               AU
2011 Dec 25 00:00:00.0    -  0.048617062   +  0.897988672   +  0.389385589

Nothing to be alarmed about, at least not yet, but still something to keep in mind.  I’m a lot more concerned about Old Sol and that Frosty The Snowman carrot he’s got for a nose at the moment.  That can’t bode well for any of us.

However, on a more cheerful note.  Or less ominous, anyway.

I just got around to opening my latest Hawaii KONATE bulletin from December 19, expecting to find out what time it was somewhere sometime.  Instead, I got this:

human clock

time greetings

I’m not certain what to make of it.  The time might be ten minutes until twelve somewhere, or  what?  Ten pm?

Then there’s this thing declaring time is valuable and what I ought to do with mine.  What the hell do these people know about time?  If it’s so valuable, what the hell are they doing lying around pretending to be a clock?

Here I was wanting to know what time it was in Hamburg sometime last week and might be in Peking day-after-tomorrow.  Last thing I wanted Christmas morning was a lot of cryptic meaning telling me what to do with my time and people lying around somewhere sometime on an upside-down clock.

But I hope you’ll all respond to it in whatever barycentric way you choose.

The New Old Jules and the Enlightened Cats

Searching for The Lost Granfalloons* – Mine

FAST-GROWING SUNSPOT: Barely visible when the weekend began, sunspot AR1619 has blossomed into a large active region more than three times as wide as Earth.  So far the growing sunspot has not produced any significant flares, but the quiet is unlikely to continue if its expansion continues apace. Fast-changing magnetic fields on the sun have a tendency to reconnect and erupt. NOAA forecasters estimate a 20% chance of M-class solar flares during the next 24 hours.  http://spaceweather.com/

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been watching SS 1619 and wondering what the hell is going on with Old Sol. Likely you’re wondering, as I am, why he persists in blessing us with all those weird smiley faces with Errol Flynn mustaches.  Wondering what he’s got up his sleeve.

I have the advantage on most of you because I’ve been messing around with rare earth magnets, glueing them behind cabinet doors in the RV to keep them closed.  So rapidly changing magnetic fields are fresh on my mind, along with the wrinkled, crispy fingertips acquired by fastening them in place with super glue.

Which has created a loose granfalloon Old Sol and I both belong to.

But I’m what most people would call a real cool guy, full of compassion and sensitivity for all you who aren’t in a granfalloon with Old Sol right now.  So I’m not going to arouse your fears and spoil your Thanksgiving holidays by telling you what he might have up his sleeve.

One of the shortcomings, in fact, with granfalloons is that it might be anything, anyway.  Your guess is as good as mine.

But I’ve digressed.  My main purpose in posting today is to tell you about some other granfalloons of my past are cropping up hither thither and yon in my sinookas**.  For reasons I dassn’t speculate about, a good many of them involve a search I used to do for a lost gold mine.  Strangers from hell to breakfast are sending me emails wanting to talk to me about it, hinting around that, though they haven’t been within a thousand miles of that country, they know where it is.  Or might be.

Some granfalloons just don’t let go once they get their teeth locked into your leg.

So maybe  all this busy, busy, busy*** going on around here right now is about me going out and searching for the Lost Granfalloons – Mine.

Not that I plan to bank any money on it.  I’m spang out of money until my SS pension check arrives.

Old Jules

* granfalloon – a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is “Hoosiers“; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so they really share little more than a name. Another example is a Cornellian, a student or graduate of Cornell University.

**sinookas – the tendrils of one’s life.

***Busy, busy, busy” – what a Bokononist whispers whenever he thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Magnetar – The Mechanism

“This image shows a ghostly ring extending seven light-years across around the corpse of a massive star. The collapsed star, called a magnetar, is located at the exact center of this image. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope imaged the mysterious ring around magnetar SGR 1900+14 in infrared light. The magnetar itself is not visible in this image, as it has not been detected at infrared wavelengths (it has been seen in X-ray light).”

Good morning readers.  I’m aware most of you won’t have any interest in this and my sense is that the folks who once did read here and did have an interest no longer visit the blog.   I’m just posting it in case someone ever happens to be chasing disbelief down the same corridors I’ve been following the past several years and type the right words into a web search. 

SGR 1900+14, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. After a long period of low emissions (significant bursts only in 1979 and 1993) it became active in May–August 1998, and a burst detected on August 27, 1998 was of sufficient power to force NEAR Shoemaker to shut down to prevent damage and to saturate instruments on BeppoSAX, WIND and RXTE. On May 29, 2008, NASA’s Spitzer telescope discovered a ring of matter around this magnetar. It is thought that this ring formed in the 1998 burst.[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

SGR 1900+14′s not the magnetar I’ve been testing against.  I just used this one on the post today to illustrate it’s actually possible for something 20,000 light years away to exert a subtle influence on affairs in this solar system.  That, and the fact the image is particularly impressive as it bounces off the human mind.

The one I’ve been testing things against is

1E 1048.1−5937, located 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina. The original star, from which the magnetar formed, had a mass 30 to 40 times that of the Sun.

The Spin-down Rate and X-Ray Flux of 1E 1048.1-5937 http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/475/2/L127/fulltext/5676.text.html

If I live long enough to do it, I’ll be testing the other 20 magnetars to try to discern whether they’re involved in what’s going on here in the solar system.

I’d been trying almost all this year, and on-and-off for several years to isolate a source and a mechanism inside the solar system.  About a year ago I began to suspect the magnetic fields within the solar system were behaving as something akin to lenses for whatever the mechanism was, changing focal lengths in relation to earth as they followed their orbits.  Those changing focal lengths bore a direct relationship to specific, repetitive, securely recorded events on the surface of the earth. 

The most obvious source would seem to be Old Sol, but exhaustive testing never provided any indicators that was where it was originating.  But recently someone who knew I was interested in such matters sent me an email forward concerning a particular magnetar.  Before recieving it I’d never been aware they existed.

But I’d been having a rough time making myself continue chasing the solar system down every path imaginable, coming up with intriguing, argumentative, persuasive results along with the arrogant statement, “Screw you, bud!  You still ain’t looking in the right place for the source.”

So I pulled up the coordinates for the nearest magnetar and began running through the routines, testing it against the lenses of the planetary magnetic fields.

Voila, thinks I.

The problem with a project of this sort is that a person’s constantly having to discard everything he believes he already knows in favor of possibly learning something he doesn’t know yet.  As the song says, “You push the little key in and the music goes round and round and it comes out here.”

Old Jules

Old Sol – August 10, 2012 – Praying Him Up

Me:  HIYIPP big guy.  Time to get your honeybee ass in gear and start climbing.  Got no time for your backtalk and finger twiddling this morning.  I’ve got important things on my mind.

Old Sol:  Yeah, I’m awake over here.  Sometimes your cheek causes me to faint and have to revive myself, but it’s never kept me from doing my job.

Me:  What you’re calling cheek, amigo, is just proper perspective.  You don’t have one because you’re too preoccupied with insignificant happenings that take too long to make any difference.

Old Sol:  I wonder why I bother.

Me:  Lately I’ve wondered if you’d mind skipping a day-or-three.  You’ve been doing your job a bit too anal for my tastes.  I’m not saying today.  We’ve already got things planned for today.  But how about we schedule something later this week?

Old Sol:  I swear it would be a relief.  I could use the sleep.

Me:  Let’s do it then.  I’ll have my people talk to your people.

Old Sol:  Sure thing.  By the way, you are one weird duck.  Time was you used to pray me up.  How’d we get from there to here?

Me:  Other things just got more important.  A person can set his watch by what you’re going to do, but there’s stuff going on closer in requires hands-on attention.  There’s a popular movement to put you on a time-clock and forget about you.   My cup’s empty and I need to feed the cats.  Just try to get everything right and do things on time today.  I’ve got no time to mess with you.

Old Jules

Earth in Upheaval – Immanuel Velikovsky – Book Review

During the last 18 months of Albert Einstein’s life, November 1953 until April, 1955. he sat around with Immanuel Velikovsky on numerous occasions mulling over the implications of the historical/geological evidence described here.  Largely ignored, met with a shrug by the scientific community because no explanation within accepted scientific theory could account for the massive physical evidence, the two men examined other possibilities, no matter how unconventional.

Mountain ranges yanked from their roots and moved laterally, sometimes as much as 100 miles during a short passage of time.  Megafauna stacked like cordwood in cracks from southern Asia to the Arctic Circle by the millions, perhaps hundreds of millions.  Countless among them quick-frozen rapidly enough to leave them relatively undecayed for examination by modern man thousands of years later. 

Entire tropical forests uprooted, moved by massive waves and left to petrify when the water receded.   When Bad Things Happen to Good Megafauna

If Einstein had lived to see the publication of Velikovsky’s book his interest, prestige and comments might have provided the momentum to carry the discussion into the overall scientific community and more widespread recognition.  Might have forced the unpalatable conclusions to which examination of the evidence leads without leaving many alternatives.

Instead, Planet in Upheaval was published quietly, largely ignored by science, Velikovsky vilified and often denounced by his peers.

But the book’s still out there, used.  Probably available from Amazon for pennies.  I bought my copy in a thrift store in Kerrville for $.25.  I couldn’t have afforded it, wouldn’t have bought it had it cost a buck.

But I bought it for quarter and have now read it enough times to make up for a lot of the people who never did.  Pick up a copy somewhere and you can make up for a few others.  I suspect you won’t be satisfied with a single reading.

If you do read it you’ll be forced to conclude, Stuff Happens.  Sometimes it happens fast and big.  And it doesn’t need man to push it along, make it happen.  Doesn’t even pause to explain itself and why it happens for the benefit of the best minds of humanity to carefully ignore.

Old Jules

Afterthought – Edited in to avoid confusion:

The book referred to here is not Chariots of the Gods.  The author is not Erich von Daniken, of whom you probably have a vague recollection as a discredited ‘scientist’, author of half-truths, incomplete truths, and fig-newtons of the imagination. 

Erich von Daniken.  Immanuel Velikovsky.  Two entirely different individuals.  They even spell their names differently.  Admittedly both foreigners by heritage, but they had little else in common.  Von Daniken actually had a following and readership.  Velikovsky, on the other hand, was a scientist.

Certainties, Self-Examination and BS

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

If I hadn’t carefully avoided ever typing the words, “I’m dismantling Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle here,”  I’d find it easier to understand how a casual acquaintance could call this blog BS.  Anyone who’s certain Heisenberg’s correct usually has a conviction at a religious-level and genuflects muttering Hail Marys and Amens to the concept enough times per day to keep it fresh.  If I’d ever come right out and flatly stated it’s a fig-newton of the imagination I’d expect to be damned from hell to breakfast.

But I haven’t.

So I’m forced to conclude there must be something else I’ve posted here during the past year that a person considering himself prudent, reasonable, intelligent, could disagree with.  If I had time I’d scroll back over the entries and try to figure out what it could be.  Seems to me everything I’ve ever posted here is so patently obvious as to be absolutely outside the scope of rational argument.

For instance, I’ve frequently implied, but probably never come out and actually said I consider cops to be lowlife scum no better than the people they’re sworn to chase and catch.  Motivated by greed, lust for power, and cowardly, weak-kneed, vacuous need to find something inside themselves to rhyme with an ambiguous concept of self-worth.  Admittedly, it’s probably an over-generalization.  No doubt there are exceptions. 

Exceptions that prove the rule.

Same with politicians, rabid rabbit-frightened patriots, flag wavers, lawyers, CEOs of multi-national corporations, Texans, people with “WHOOPTEEDOO!  I’M A VETERAN“ bumper stickers and mostly the rest of us.  Whomever we might be.

What’s not to like, what’s to disagree with in any of that?

But, of course, I’m a man with a weakness for brutal, honest self-examination, so I’m going to have to think more on all this.  Possibly scan over some past posts in an effort to find some slip I’ve made in my posts someone might be able to construe as BS.

Old Jules

Hurling Off Splinters and Chunks of our Lives Into the Parker Spiral

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  Old Sol jumped when I said ”Frog!” a little while ago, so you can rest easy knowing I’ve got him headed for the horizon, rate of climb indicator showing him right on schedule.  I’m figuring his ETA’s going to be about what you’re expecting.

Back when I was a wealthy man [measured in how much time I figured was left between me and exiting the vehicle] I used to spend a lot more time and energy begging and cajoling Old Sol to behave himself.  I put up with all his yawning and complaining, because I had a lot of life I was needing to get rid of and that seemed as good a way to slough it off as anything else.

Not just that way, either.  I was fat with life, spent it like a drunken sailor hurling chunks and splinters of it off every which way, losing weight gradually until I was more comfortable carrying what was left of it around in earth gravity.  I’ve got a lot more of my life spinning around in the Parker Spiral not knowing whether it’s Abel or Mable or which way’s up than I have left around here to tip my hat to.

What’s left is comparable to trying to squeeze groceries, gasoline, cat food and necessaries into a monthly Social Security pension check, so I tend to be more conscious about what I spend it on than I used to do.  It ain’t as though there’s any of it I can afford to run off downstream without me having had a look at it.

So, once I’ve reminded Old Sol he’s got important people waiting on him, I try to get on with my other business and let him tend his own affairs.  Lately he’s been grumpy about that, running the thermometer up over a hundred degrees F, but he’s going to have to get used to it. 

I ain’t got time for Old Sol’s games, not like I thought I did back when I was fat and wealthy.

Old Jules

Magnetic Fingers et al Preliminary Hypothesis

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Flux Transfer Event Topology,

Old Sol – Fondling Mother Earth With Magnetic Fingers

I doubt anyone’s going to be edified by this, understand what I’m saying, or assign anything serious to it.  But I’m going to say it anyway. 

Those flux transfer events between earth and Old Sol and their 8 minute dayside intervals are manifesting themselves in a number of indirect, measurable ways a person in his right mind wouldn’t be inclined to attribute to them.   The 8 minute gap isn’t actually an 8 minute gap, but is filled in with flux transfer events targeted somehow to other solar system bodies.  Those show up as reflected energy detectable and measurable on darkside earth, distinguishable by the magnitudes and distances of the objects doing the reflecting.

The hypothesis, weak enough to begin, weakens further relative to the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ events sunside, spinward and anti-spinword, and the ‘hidden’ events the guy at University of Iowa detected.  But there’s a body of indications the passive events are actually the boundary zone where the reflective energy merges and influences the weakening dayside events.

It’s not my intention to persuade anyone to the accuracy of what I’ve said here.  The limited testing I’ve done to form the hypothesis has been almost entirely on darkside and twilight-zone data.  However, the data I’m using is probably only one of the ways these events are manifesting themselves and being recorded as unrelated phenomena.  Anyone with an interest and a smidgen of imagination can probably find other datasets equally measurable and testable.

And anyone not interested enough to do it probably is better qualified to judge whether there’s any validity to it.

Old Jules

Old Sol – Fondling Mother Earth With Magnetic Fingers

spaceweather.com

Me:  How’s the hammer hanging this morning, big guy?  You ready to rock and roll?  Ready to kick some serious ass of darkness?

Old Sol:  Depends on the part of the spectrum you’re referring to.  I imagine where you’re standing it’s the impression you’ll be left with.

Me:  Cool.  Hey, while I’m thinking about it, been intending to ask you about this a couple of days.  About all this sneaky pinching and feeling around on Mama Earth’s magnetic field every eight minutes . . .[Flux Transfer Event Topology]

Old Sol:  Hold on just a minute there, Bubba.  Just because you took so long noticing doesn’t mean I’ve been hiding anything.  Nothing illicit, surreptitious going on at all.

Me:  Okay.  Forget I said that part.  But We, and I think I speak for everyone on the planet in asking this.  We, I was going to say, are curious about a couple of things.  First, what are you getting back out of it?  Some sort of erotic feedback? 

Old Sol:  You need to get your mind out of the gutter.  First off, my relationship with your planet is strictly platonic.  Free exchange of hmmm, not ideas, exactly, but something that rhymes with ideas on a somewhat larger scale.

Me:  Yeah.  So you say.  But those little throbs every eight minutes don’t seem all that platonic to the disinterested observer.  Is this connection, this rubbing around against one another something you just do with Earth?  Or are you doing with the other objects you can reach, too? 

Old Sol:  Think about it before you start your holier than thou moralizing.  Do you think I can resist a magnetic field anywhere close enough for me to feel it?  I’ve been watching you long enough to know, when it comes to issues of resisting, you’ve got no more going for you than I have.

Me:  We’re not talking about me here.  Quit trying to dodge the issue.  You got your pulsing little fingers out there on Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus all the time, too?  And what’s with the eight-minute thing?

Old Sol:  Some are more satisfying than others, I’ll admit.  Those crustal magnetic fields don’t give me much of a lift, but they can be a nice quickie.  But there’s nothing like a good core magnetic field to wake up against on a cold morning.  I’m an old renaissance star in a lot of ways.  I can go either way, crustal, or core.   Either way’s fairly celestial on my end of things.  And nobody out there’s complaining, that I’ve heard.

Me:  Mama Earth know about all this?

Old Sol:  No.  And don’t you go telling her about it, either.

Old Jules

Running Around Bare-Assed Naked – Visitors, Telescopes and Determination

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting outdoors reading Mitcheners, The Bridges at Toko-Ri [a truly bizarre piece of twisted logic intended to explain why the US was fighting a war in Korea nobody understood] wearing nothing but a pair of shoes.  Nobody much comes here, but I heard a vehicle on the hill, glanced up and saw a truck making its way down.  Ran indoors and slipped on a pair of trousers, still zipping up and pulling my galluses over my shoulders when the newish neighbor pulled up in front of the cabin.

Which has happened occasionally since he moved up there.  Something just to get used to, me being a guy who ain’t interested in what neighbors think of me if they have to use binoculars or come unexpected to get around to thinking it.

We talked a while, had a pleasant visit, and he left without commenting on the fact he’d probably gotten a forbidden view of my almost 70 year old traffic stopping bod.

But this morning when I logged on and glanced through the daily digests of Yahoo Group posts I came across this posted yesterday on the “Not Your Usual Goat” list:

Re: OT: Zillow
 
Fri Jun 29, 2012 9:33 am (PDT) . Posted by: “Cheridehart” thumber_smiget
I am to open to even consider going out nude more or less even in my nighty
. We are to open for that . Even with the neighbors on the next 20 acre lot
We are in farm land area my place was a wheat field at one time what trees
I have around the house I planted . I was adjusting the telescope one day for the hubby for sky watching and
focused in on a house going up on the hill side say about 25 miles away . I
did not think anything of it it was being built did not know someone was
staying there had not seen any one . Had hubby check it out if I had it set
for him okay it was a little blurred for me he wears glasses . Well when he
looked the guy was taking a shower in the garage part of the place right
where I had it pointing Hubby ask me if I was spying on the neighbors and
how many times have I watched him shower . I told him for now on he can
adjust it for him self from now on I am sticking to my own scope which is
pointed a Venus at the moment be going back to the moon soon . We have very
few out side lights so makes for a very good night sky watching around here
Can not believe how may satellites are up their blinking there way across
the skies. The last three good sky events we have had we where so clouded
could not see anything. Cheri
Led me to consider the big house someone built on the ridge about 10 miles away from here, which I watched them build through a telescope.  As it happens, I shower outdoors every day pouring gallon orange juice jugs of water warmed by sunlight over my head.  Direct line of sight from the big house on the ridge.
 
Got me wondering whether Cheri might be up there looking at my private stuff through a spyglass pretending I’m Venus.
 
Which I ain’t.
 
Maybe I need to start keeping one hand over my crotch.
 
Old Jules
 
Afterthought:  About The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Paraphrased
 
Navy Task Force Admiral character:  “No, this war isn’t necessary.  We could let them have it [read, let the North Koreans have Korea].  But what would we give them next?  Japan?  Hawaii?  California?  Besides, it’s honorable.”
 
Soon-to-be-dead fighter pilot:  “I’ve got to do this because the bastards shot down a guy I admired while he was directing fire on their advancing troops.  I can’t let my buddies down.  Wouldn’t be honorable.”
 
Soon-to-be-dead helicopter rescue pilot:  “I do it because I hate communists.  I’m a gutsy guy.  Not some coward.”
 
Weepy wifee of soon to be dead fighter pilot:  ”I was against the war, didn’t want my hubby killed.  But I changed my mind after the Admiral explained why it’s necessary.  Now I’m okay with it, though I still whine and weep.  Now I whine and weep in a noble, more courageous way.”