Category Archives: Science

Earlier Versions of MICA Software if you can use them

Posted on June 6, 2012 by | 3 comments

Over the years this compulsive project of mine chasing what isn’t happening and when it isn’t has led me into ownership of several versions I ceased using after upgrades were released.   Salt Cedar Latillas for Erosion Control

 Even the earliest versions are better than the next-best off-the-shelf software intended to do what it does.

So I’ve got three versions of the CDs and 120 page hardback handbooks lying around drawing dust.  They’d serve for most folks who aren’t being fanatic about the kinds of issues I’m fanatic about.

If any of you readers are into what’s going on in the sky in a way that might allow you to benefit from owning a not-quite-up-to-date version, these are available for the cost of postage getting them to you.

Feel free to email me at josephusminimus@hotmail.com if you’d savor a copy.

Old Jules

An easy-to-use astronomical almanac from the U.S. Naval Observatory

About MICA

MICA, the Multiyear Interactive Computer Almanac, is a software system that provides high-precision astronomical data in tabular form for a wide variety of celestial objects. The program computes many of the astronomical quantities tabulated in the The Astronomical Almanac. However, MICA can compute this information for specific locations and flexible times, thus eliminating the need for table look-ups and additional hand calculations.

Designed primarily for professional applications, MICA is intended for intermediate-to-advanced users. Basic knowledge of astronomical terminology and positional astronomy is assumed.

MICA provides essential data for use in

Astronomy and astrophysics Space science Geodesy and surveying
Geophysics Meteorology Environmental science
Operations planning Accident reconstruction and litigation Illumination engineering
Architecture Photography  

MICA was first released in 1993 for MS-DOS and Apple Macintosh systems. MICA 2.0 was updated for Windows and modern Apple Macintosh systems and released in August 2005. MICA 2.0 provided all the data available in earlier versions of the software and included several new features. The current version of MICA is 2.2.2, which was released in January 2012.

Features

MICA can perform the following types of computations:

  • Precise positions for the Sun, Moon, major planets, Pluto, selected asteroids, selected bright stars, and cataloged objects (e.g. stars, quasars, galaxies, etc.) using external catalogs provided with the program. Up to ten different position types are available (depending on which object was chosen).
  • Various astronomical time and reference system quantities (e.g. sidereal time, nutation and obliquity, equation of the equinoxes, Earth Rotation Angle, calendar/Julian date conversions, and delta T).
  • Twilight, rise, set, and transit times for major solar system bodies, selected bright stars, selected asteroids, and cataloged objects.
  • Physical ephemerides useful for making observations of the Sun, Moon, major planets, and Pluto. Both illumination and rotation parameters are available for all listed bodies, except for the Sun.
  • Low-precision topocentric data describing the configuration of the Sun, Moon, major planets, Pluto, and selected asteroids at specified times and locations. MICA also includes a sky map option as an aid in locating the objects.
  • Visibility information for solar and lunar eclipses, as well as transits of Mercury and Venus.
  • Four different types of positions of Jupiter and the Galilean Satellites and offsets of the satellites from Jupiter.
  • Dates and circumstances of various astronomical phenomena (solstices and equinoxes, apsides of Earth and the Moon, moon phases, conjunctions, oppositions, and greatest elongations of Mercury and Venus). A phenomena search feature is also available, which generates a table similar to the ‘Diary of Phenomena’ contained in section A of The Astronomical Almanac.

New features and changes in MICA 2.2/2.2.1/2.2.2 include

  • Earth Rotation Angle (ERA) and the equation of the origins.
  • Apside times (perigee/apogee of the Moon, perihelion/aphelion of Earth) as a stand alone computation or within the Phenomena Search function.
  • The DeltaT.val file has been updated with new data. The date with the first predicted value for this file is 2455745.0 (2011 July 2 12:00).
  • Computations of future eclipses and transits now allow the user to set their own value of delta T.
  • Configurations of major solar system bodies and asteroids, lunar eclipses, and all phenomena calculations now include “Zone” as a time system option.
  • Magnitudes have been added to the positional information provided for solar system bodies and catalog stars.
  • The International Astronomical Union (IAU) 2000B nutation model was replaced with the 2000K nutation model described in USNO Circular 181, Nutation Series Evaluation in NOVAS 3.0 (Kaplan 2009).
  • Lunar distance has been added to the “Phases of the Moon” output table.
  • Physical ephemeris algorithms have been updated to account for the aberration of the Sun due to the planet’s motion.
  • Physical ephemeris calculations have been updated with data from the “Report of the IAU/IAG Working Group on cartographic coordinates and rotational elements: 2006.”
  • The ‘Planet’ column header in the solar conjunctions output has been renamed to ‘Object’ to cover both planets and asteroids.

3 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Science

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Talking the Walk – Part 2 – Leading a Cow to Water

Posted on June 6, 2012 by | 1 comment

http://www.rt.com/news/monsanto-brazil-seed-soy-908/

Monsanto is also the world’s largest manufacturer of synthetic bovine growth hormone, injected into cows in order to stimulate greater milk production. The widespread pressure by the company to use the chemical and the subsequent measures taken by Monsanto to suppress information regarding the potential health risks sparked uproar among American farmers.

When dairy producers that did not use Monsanto’s products began labeling their products as “Hormone Free” or “Organic”, Monsanto slapped them with a lawsuit as recently as 2008, claiming the labels amounted to negative advertising against hormone-produced milk.

Director of corporate communications for Monsanto, Phil Angell, summed up Monsanto’s take on the issue in a report by food author Michael Pollan for New York Times Magazine in 1998: “Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is FDA’s job.”

http://rt.com/usa/news/white-house-monsanto-peer-991/

Michael Taylor, a former attorney for the US Department of Agriculture and lobbyist for Monsanto, was recently appointed to a federal role as the deputy commissioner for foods at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Since then, the FDA shot down requests from consumer protection groups to label genetically modified products as such. With a White House-Monsanto connection already established with the appointment of Taylor, PEER and others are interested in what other ties could exist between the two.

Heck, readers.  There ought to be something a verbose man such as myself could think of to say about all this.  I’d do it, too, if I could think of something.

Maybe I could point out those pointee-heads working three shifts in the Monsanto laboratories would call themselves ‘scientists’ if someone asked what they are.  Same as the folks over at CERN.

Or maybe I could just ask the reasonable question:  “Do you honestly believe one of the two breeds of foxes guarding the hen house is going to leave more feathers lying around when the dust settles?”

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Animals, Government, Nature, Politics, Science

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Talking the Walk – Higgs Boson and ‘Science’

Posted on June 6, 2012 by | 9 comments

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9307672/CERN-director-says-LHC-will-find-God-Particle-by-end-of-the-year.html

“Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director of CERN where the LHC is based, said he was confident that by the end of the year it will be possible to say whether the Higgs Boson, the particle which is responsible for giving mass to the universe, exists.

“The theoretical particle, nicknamed the God Particle due to its central role it has in explaining modern physics, has never been detected and scientists have been working for decades to prove its existence.

“Scientists hope that high energy collisions of particles in the 17 mile underground tunnel at CERN will finally allow them to create the conditions to allow them to spot the elusive Higgs Boson.

“Dr Heuer, who was speaking at the Hay Festival, said the LHC is scheduled to be closed down at the end of this year for up to two years in order to carry out upgrades that will increase its power and allow it to continue with more experiments.”

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

Those guys over at CERN need to think of something else to call themselves.  They’re inadvertently allowing their use of language to act as a confession booth.  “. . . scientists have been working for decades to prove its existence,” says just about everything needs saying about the difference between science and engineering.  Or whatever it is they think they’re doing.  “Got me a theory, now I’m going to PROVE it,”  ain’t science.  But the difference is too subtle to penetrate the ice surface those folks are skating on.

For several years now they’ve been bragging about creating ‘baby black holes’ that ‘dissolve’ [they say the little guys dissolve because they don’t know what the hell happened to them – spang lost track of them].  There’s a body of opinion among outcasts and heretics from the ‘science’ religion that some of what’s going on stands a shot at creating black holes that don’t do any vanishing.  Black holes, or something else nobody anticipated. 

At CERN, though, they’re got things to prove and they’re not going to let anything stand in the way of proving it.  When a physicist somewhere raises his hand to suggest they mightn’t know what the hell’s going to come out of this or that, they shout him down.  “There’s an extremely LOW probability of it.”

Back before they detonated the A-bomb at the Trinity Site a group of the physicists there expressed similar concerns.  “We oughtn’t do this.  There’s a minute chance it will set fire the atmosphere of the planet.”

“Why hell, the probabilities for that are low.  How the hell can we know whether it will without TRYING it?”

So guess what!  Trinity didn’t set fire to the atmosphere.  All manner of other great things grew out of it, though.  Hiroshima, Nagasaki.  The Cold War.  Mutually Assured Destruction.  ICBMs.  Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and a lot of potential today for more drama in the North Pacific centered around Japan.  Countless people born deformed downwind from the low-probabilities that became high-probabilities with Chernobyl.  Arms races all over the world and weapons of mass destruction used as an excuse to invade any country with something worth stealing.

As nearly as I can figure, those Higgs Boson particles [or something rhyming with them] are out there doing their thing all by their lonesome selves without needing permission from physicists.  They do what they do without needing some airhead calling them God particles, Higgs Boson particles, or anything else.

The people at CERN are doing something they’re calling ‘science’, throwing up their hands calling it the innocent pursuit of knowledge, wanting to prove things.  Hopefully one of the things time will prove is they were right about those baby black holes dissolving instead of going into orbit around the sun.

Hopefully they’ll prove the human species wouldn’t have been better served hanging them upside down from lamp posts when they had the chance.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2012, Education, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, Science, Survival

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Old Sol’s Bumper-Stickers

Posted on June 3, 2012 by | 2 comments

Me:  “Hey!  Up and at’em guy!  Rise and shine.”

Old Sol:  “Sheeze!  Hush you mouf, boy.  I’m sleeping in this morning.  Got a heluva headache.”

Me:  “Little too much partying, did we?  Get your lazy butt up over the horizon.  You’ve got a tight agenda today.”

Old Sol:  “Hell, I’ve got things going on you don’t even know about.  Didn’t any sooner get this Venus drama out of the way and got Mercury coming up.  And that ain’t the half of it.  Same old same old.  And I’ve got all this magnetic field crap to deal with.  Look at this damned coronal hole if you think you’ve got problems.”

Me:  “Look here, big guy.  I know it ain’t easy, but you’ve got a job to do.  If you can’t handle it, someone’s going to start talking to Alpha Centauri.  We’re already farming out everything important this side of the planet.  If you don’t want to be out-sourced you might start doing some gratitude affirmations you’ve still got a job at all.”

Old Sol: “Are you threatening me?  You?  I’ll tell you what, bubba.  You guys just try passing all that mess off to Alpha Centauri.  That sissified bastard couldn’t do half of what I do.  And you’d be in for a loooong dry spell, meanwhile.”

Me:  “It ain’t my call.  It’s the multi-nationals.  Just get on up and maybe we can both keep our jobs.”

Old Sol:  “Yeah, yeah yeah.  But look at that damned coronal hole, would you?  I need an aspirin.”

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Human Behavior, Relationships, Science, Senior Citizens, Texas

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Black Eye for Conventional Wisdom

Posted on May 29, 2012 by | 5 comments

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

Back when  I was a real smart cookie I knew all manner of things needed doing to straighten out this country and this world.  I used to sit around with others whom I allowed to be real smart cookies, too, telling one another how stupid everyone who disagreed with us.  They thought they were real smart cookies, too, which proved how stupid they were.

During that general time period Their Majesties, Gerald Ford, then Jimmy Carter, were telling us we needed to turn down the thermostats, drive slower, become energy independent as a nation.  Find alternatives to the conventional energy sources.  I think my group of real smart cookies agreed with this, though I don’t recall anyone liking it much.

But one thing we did agree on.  Nuclear energy needed to be developed and used a lot more than was happening at the time.  Seemed the only thing that might fill the bill until something else was developed.  Gradually we got so hardened in our opinions about it we made excuses and apologized anytime anything happened suggesting we might re-examine our opinions and debate points.

Along came Three Mile Island, and naturally we didn’t need to know much about it to agree among ourselves it was just a shrill scare thing.  Hanoi Jane Fonda came out with a movie named “The China Syndrome” and a lot of monkey wrenches got thrown into the mix, people opposed to more nuclear plants. 

Then that plant in the Ukraine went sour.  Spewed all manner of radioactive crap into the sky for a longish while.  We real smart cookies saw that as an indictment, not of nuclear power, but rather of Soviet technical, engineering and construction skills.  Another indictment of Communism.

Somewhere back there I quit thinking about all that, didn’t bother knowing so much about it as I became less smart with the years.  I sort of lost track of the whole issue, had no idea whether they were still building, not building, using, not using nuclear power plants.

About a year ago my friend, Rich, started telling me about a tsunami hit Japan, did all manner of damage.  Some included nukes on the Japanese coast.  I suppose I didn’t think a lot about it.  Just another disaster somewhere for people to tell one another about while they waited for the coffee to perk.

But Rich kept updating me and the Japan nuclear part of the tsunami and earthquake began swelling into something trying to rattle how smart I used to be.  Japan was letting a lot of ugly into the Pacific and into the sky.  “Man, they need to do something about that crap!” I declared to Rich.  “I feed my cats a lot of fish that might be coming out of the north Pacific.”

“Would you rather feed them fish out of the Gulf of Mexico?  Fish coming out of there are loaded with carcino-whatchallits from the emulsifiers they used from the BP oil spill.”

I thought about that a while and decided I didn’t need to track down an instrument to measure the gamma radiation in the cat food.  Trade a headache for an upset stomach, more-or-less.

But at least I don’t have to have all the answers anymore, don’t have to know what anyone ought to do about anything.  Takes a lot of weight off, me not having to do anything but concern myself about what to feed the cats and chickens.

Old Jules

 

5 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Country Life, Current Issues, Emergency Preparedness, Government, Politics, Science, Survival

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Current Brush Dam Project

Posted on May 18, 2012 by | 2 comments

When I began this a person couldn’t tell there was an oak tree without standing off at a distance because it was so choked with cedars.

A gully was being cut down to bedrock in the swale.  I’ve got a lot more cedar in the immediate area I’ll be clearing, but I’m figuring before I put anymore on the dam I’ll stand atop what’s there and cross cut as deep as the chainsaw bar will reach to compact it as much as possible before adding more material.

Incidently, once I got most of the cedar cleared from around that oak I found this great, long, straight one.  It’s a keeper, though I don’t know what for.  Assuming I can get it loose and untangled from the upper parts of the oak without having to cut it.

There’s a watershed of maybe fifteen acres with a lot of slope draining into this spot.  My thought is I’ll bring the dam roughly six feet high after compacting, then thicken it with whatever cedar’s left in the immediate area.  Afterward I’ll move upgrade and create a series of brush berms across the grade to slow down concentration times.

Lots of work left to do on it, but watching that dam grow’s a smiler for me.  Someday I’m going to try to figure out what makes me tick.  This whole sudden new joy of doing all this came out of nowhere.  Gale’s up there laid up, doesn’t have a clue I’m doing most of it on his property, though I describe most of it to him.  He shrugs and tries to seem encouraging, but I doubt he can picture what’s going on here.

Meanwhile, me just down here working my arse off for the hell of doing it, not a clue why.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Adventure, Country Life, Outdoors, Science, Texas

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Salt Cedar Latillas for Erosion Control

Posted on May 14, 2012 by | 2 comments

During the toughest times of the post-Y2K years the blessing I appreciated most, but enjoyed least was cutting salt cedar in the bosques, trimming it,and selling it as latillas off some busy intersection in Albuquerque.  The best bosques weren’t accessible by vehicle, were loaded with ticks, and all the bosques on the Rio Grande are home to more rattlesnakes than live in the rest of New Mexico combined.

But when nothing else was working, when they’d cut off the utilities because I couldn’t pay the bills, I’d hitch up Old Faithful, the pickup bed trailer, load the chainsaw and loppers, and head for the bottomlands for a couple of days.

The work was grueling.  Bundling them and pissanting them back to the trailer took forever and assured a person would have a dozen ticks fighting over every inch of skin, and avoiding Brother Rattler required lightning reflexes along with a wary eye.

Once I had a full trailer-load I’d bundle them, pack them down and find a busy street corner where I’d sell them for $10 per bundle.  Usually took all day, but I’d try to get back to Grants in time to reach the city offices, pay the utilities and have the power turned back on first thing the next day.

It’s a lot easier in Texas, though I doubt there’s any market for them.  Never heard of anyone in Texas using latillas.  But salt cedar’s as water-hogging, damaging, invasive and pervasive here as in New Mexico.  Grows in the grader ditch between here and the State Ranch Road 385.

I can get a truckload of it in half-hour or so, and in a lot of ways I think it might be better than juniper for erosion control.  In that particular length of driveway between Gale’s front gate and his house the last runoff bypassed some of the earlier work and cut some new channels.  The salt cedar’s easier to obtain in this instance than juniper, so I’m shoring it up with salt cedar.

I’ve built four more rock and brush dams downstream from the first one in the creek to the east, hopefully to catch whatever washes out of the main one, come next runoff event.

Hmmm an aside.  A digression.  A parenthetical remark:

The new neighbor up the hill’s got him a spanking new machine to back up his track loader dozer and his rubber-tired backhoe/frontend loader. 

It’s a lopper of the magnum variety mounted on a Bobcat with tracks over the tires.  Air conditioned, everything computerized, even got a rock rake with it.  Only $57K.

I reckons I’ll just stick with my $8 thrift store Chinese repair job loppers.

Meanwhile, on a more exciting note.

I was telling my friend Rich on the phone about weirdness and anomalies I was getting on barycentric calculations for Old Sol positions.  While we were talking he went to the US Naval Observatory site and pulled up the ‘Read Me’ file for the MICA software. 

Rich, generous, amazing friend that he is, spang right-then-and-there ordered a copy for me.

Turns out they discovered an error for multiple calculations that didn’t exist for single calculations.  They’ve released a new version, 2.2.2, with the errors corrected, along with some other improvements I’d grumbled to myself it needed but suffered silently.

Only trouble I’ve found with it is that it won’t allow me to import my hundred-or-so custom locations.  I’m having to feed them in individually, longitude, latitude, elevations, each freaking one!  The Location Manager’s designed so I can’t even copy and paste them.

And when I luckily installed it on the old machine first, just in case, it over-wrote my old location manager.  Freaking erased it spang off the damned computer.

Damned pointee-headed astronomer bastards.  Rot in hell.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Country Life, Nature, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Science, Senior Citizens, Survival, Texas

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First Observations – Brush Berms and Rock and Brush Dam

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 1 comment

One of you expressed an interest when I was describing the project, so I’ll add a bit of detail on initial observations.

The effort appears to be doing exactly what it’s intended to do, the floating cedar leaves doing a better job than the Pinon I used in New Mexico.  The fresh cuts on the berms don’t appear to be doing much, but those where the leaves have dropped are blocking with dead leaves, slowing the water enough to cause it to release the silt.  And the dead leaves are sealing the parts of the berms where that’s far enough advanced to allow it.

Meanwhile, a rock and brush dam I constructed last week in the arroyo to the east is performing well, also.

The steel grille used to lie on the scoured bottom so’s to allow a truck to cross without blowing a tire on the rough bottom.  I stood it up and included it in the dam because earlier efforts have filled the bottom voids with silt enough to provide a comparatively smoother ride across, making the grille redundant as a bottom surface.

The brush and leaves on the right were what was left of the earlier effort, prior to the most recent rainfall.

Depending on the intensity of the coming runoff events, the grille might actually be knocked down and require some remedies if the water level goes high enough to put leverage on the top, but if it doesn’t I believe the bottom will catch enough to provide stability.  Those rocks are heavy enough to withstand water to a level of a couple of feet, catching more brush and dropping more silt.  Higher than that, they’ll probably wash downstream.

My thought is that the bottom might fill with enough siltation ahead of the dam to need that grille, again, to keep truck tires from going up to the hubs in mud, anyway.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Science

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Cacahuate Japones and Other Weirdness Among Townees

Posted on April 26, 2012 by | 11 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  This is the real, honest-to-goodness, 2012, worn down to a small nub ‘me’ coming to you this morning from the Middle of Nowhere.

I’m a bit stiff and sore, slow getting moving this morning, so I’m stalling the inevitable by sharing a few bits and pieces of a reality that’s becoming decreasingly real.  The package above might save me a lot of words, say it more succinctly than anything I could contrive.  It’s no surprise those things ended up hanging on a rack in the Dollar Tree store.  Maybe the lousiest marketing strategy for a food item in the history of mankind.

Then there’s this:

I’m the sort of person who naturally does everything bumper stickers tell me I ought to do.  Keeps me following a straight and narrow path in one hell of a lot of mutually exclusive directions.   So when I saw all those blue plastic drink cups pushed into the chainlink fence across from one of the thrift stores in Kerrville, I immediately resolved myself to quit using AB, whatever the hell that is.  I figured it must be the latest recreational drug of choice.

I thought on it a lot driving back to the Middle of Nowhere, tried all manner of words beginning with A and B, certain there was something out there I needed to quit using.  Got on the Internet when I arrived home and did a Dogpile dot com search on AB Use.  Couldn’t find a damned smidgen about it.

But I swear to you, if I ever do find out what it is, I’m dropping it out of whatever it is I’m doing with it.

As for everything else, I’m having a fine old time devising and constructing a watershed management plan here the likes of which very few of me in my past lives have ever done.  I’m tackling that runoff water from rainfall if we ever get any, making it stand up on its hind legs and whinny, then behave itself.

I’ll probably post a few pics of some of it, though it’s just mainly a matter of persuading water to treat the thin soil here with more respect than it’s done in the past, explaining to it about how the damned cattle aren’t fighting over every blade of grass anymore.  Showing it the error of its ways.

Other major events around here worth mentioning won’t bowl you over more than that.  The invader cat’s decided to demand a lot of petting when he’s here, which pisses off all the other felines.  But he’s only here Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, nearly as I can figure.  There’s a ranch woman a mile or so to the west feeding him sometimes, Gale’s heard, and I always see him coming out of the woods to the east.  Makes a series of stops, I reckons, trying to keep everyone happy.

Then there’s the other project, the subtle energy investigation.  Major steps forward, lots of learning, mind openings, having to go back and recalculate a lot of areas because previous premature assumptions stopped me before they were thoroughly tested.  But the doors are opening more daily and the corridors behind them are narrowing.

Any day now I expect to have a lot better understanding of the mechanism.  But it’s clear it involves reflective light from unlikely celestial bodies, and evidently includes interactions between the axial tilts of various objects and that of the sun.  With complications resulting from Old Sol’s communistic notion he doesn’t have to spin at the same speed at his equator as he does in his other body parts.

That’s about all worth mentioning for the moment.  Thanks for the visit.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, Animals, Astronomy, Human Behavior, Science, Solitude

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While the Finest Minds in the US Dribbled Basketballs

Posted on April 1, 2012 by | 7 comments

Keeping in mind that this object didn’t exist in our reality until a few days ago:

http://spaceweather.com/

Just an afterthought, readers, to fill the gaps between the spectator sports, the Men Who Want to be King, and my own head-spinning attempts to establish clearly what’s not happening when.  

APRIL 1st ASTEROID FLYBY: Newly discovered near-Earth asteroid 2012 EG5 is flying past Earth today about halfway between Earth and the Moon. There’s no danger of a collision. At closest approach on April 1st, the Dreamliner-sized space rock will be about 230,000 km from Earth. This morning in Brisbane, Australia, amateur astronomer Dennis Simmons photographed the incoming asteroid.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/outdoor-articles/astronomy/asteroid-2012-eg5-to-pass-clos/63486

The asteroid 2012 EG5 will pass close to Earth on Sunday morning at 5:32 a.m. EDT. 

Asteroid 2012 EG5 is about 150 feet wide. While it will pass within 0.6 lunar distances (143,000 miles) of Earth, NASA reports that there is no danger of the asteroid striking the Earth.

Astronomers discovered the asteroid on March 13 while searching for large space rocks close to earth.

A second asteroid, 2012 FA57 was discovered by astronomers on March 28. Asteroid 2012 FA57 will pass by Earth on April 4. It will safely pass outside of the moons lunar distance.

The asteroid 2012 EG5 will be the third asteroid to pass close by Earth within a week.

Two smaller asteroids pass by Earth on Monday. The closest asteroid 2012 FS35 passed within 36,000 miles.

These [other two] space rocks were small enough that they would not survive a trip through Earth’s atmosphere.

If more people would watch TV election rhetoric or spend more time watching spectator sports this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.  NASA and all those people looking at the sky are beginning to present a serious threat of creating something catastrophic happening.

A bunch of jockstraps  chasing one another around a stadium are comparatively harmless compared to what these folks are doing.  An asteroid the size of an airliner falling on, say, Washington, D.C., might injure innocent human beings who just happened to be passing through on their way somewhere else.  Some degree of collateral damage seems inevitable, though maybe acceptable, overall.

In any case, that one passed a bit more than mid-way between the moon and earth.  It only has to miss an inch higher than the highest obstruction to be completely harmless.  Space is big and the odds are good any next ones will miss us at least an inch.

Just saying.

Old Jules 

 

 

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Astronomy, Science, Solitude, Survival

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