Tag Archives: Astronomy

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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Old Sol: “They don’t know nuthin about chickens”

Posted on June 4, 2012 by | 7 comments

http://spaceweather.com/

“‘CH’ STANDS FOR … CHICKEN? A big dark hole in the sun’s atmosphere, a ‘coronal hole’, is turning toward Earth spewing solar wind. According to NASA’s official rubber chicken, it looks an awful lot like a bird.

“Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. A chicken-shaped stream of solar wind flowing from this coronal hole will reach Earth on June 5th – 7th, possibly stirring geomagnetic storms. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.”

Me:  “Morning big guy.  Having yourself a little snack up there, are you?  Something to start the morning off right?”

Old Sol:  “You people really piss me off sometimes.  This isn’t a chicken, doesn’t look anything like a chicken.  It’s a belch building up.  Feels more like a tumor the size of a grapefruit stuck in my gullet than some damned chicken.”

Me:  “Wasn’t me, amigo.  It’s those NASA guys.  They know about as much about chickens as they know about anything else going on with you.  More maybe, even though none of them could name the breed of chicken it most nearly resembles.”

Old Sol:  “Then why do they keep talking all this weak BS?  And what breed of chicken are we talking about?”

Me:  “Looks to me as though it might pass itself off as a Buff Crested Polish rooster if it had more tail-feathers.  But the reason they do it is the same reason we do pretty much everything else.  We human beings don’t feel good about ourselves if we don’t already know everything.  Species self-esteem thing, I reckons.”

Old Sol:  “Sometimes I’d rather just hang back, not even come out and have to face all you tiny damned crawlies.  Never can tell what you’re going to come up with next.”

Me:  “Yeah, right.  But keep in mind nobody down here has a Buff Crested Polish rooster tattooed on his face.  You getting your stuff together?  You’ve got a long day ahead.  Not long before we’ll be expecting great things from you, same as yesterday.”

Old Sol:  “Yeah.  Just give me a few minutes here.  Warm up the engine.  Do a few things on my backside where I’ve got some privacy.  I’ll be along.”

Old Jules

 

 

7 Comments

Posted in America, Astronomy, Chickens, Free-ranging-chickens, Nature, Outdoors, Solitude, Spirituality

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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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They Ought to Add ‘Barbara Allen’ to the Controlled Substance List

Posted on May 18, 2012 by | 5 comments

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

I’m really glad I don’t have free will.  If I’d had free will I’d almost certainly have screwed things up something awful.  I can’t see any way a person making a lifetime of deliberate, conscious choices could have made the necessary ones to allow me to eventually become me.  If I’d had to find my way through that maze all by myself there’s no guessing what I’d have become, what would have become of me.

I’m a firm believer the Universe gave us scorpions, black widow spiders, brown recluse spiders and similar poisonous orthropods to train a man to shake out his trousers and boots before he puts them on.  But he no sooner learns it than he begins to forget slowly, and eventually he’s pulling on his britches or boots same as if the Universe hadn’t blessed us with Brother Scorpion.

But if the timing is good, if the Universe is feeling generous, and if the asteroid Pallas is 85 days since a conjunction with Old Sol and 293 days since an opposition, sometimes the Universe will cut us a break.  A man can slip on his britches, pull up his galluses, feel something crawling up his leg under the cloth, dance around slapping his pants, and shake out a regular big bug carcass instead of the various alternatives.

But I’ve digressed. 

Yesterday I borrowed Little Red and headed to town feeling good, but worn down to a small frazzle from cutting big cedars with my expensively repaired chainsaw, dragging them over piece-by-piece to construct a tasteful aspiring beaver dam.  Made all the feedstore, thrift store, grocery store and dollar store stops grinning like a possum, joking with the store clerks.  Bought a can of Chinese boot wax and asked the clerk whether he could tell it from Shinola, which brought a blank look.

Even bought two packages of this for a buck each at Dollar Tree.  I’ve never seen the stuff before, but my thigh was itching something fierce from that non-black widow earlier.  I was feeling a strong urge to find a restroom and drop my pants for a looksee.

As a backup, in case whatever was going on down there was as full of drama as it felt, I picked up a tube of this, too, at a buck.

But I’ve digressed again.

On the way out of Dodge I swung by the Boys Ranch Thrift Store, second to the last stop.  Not much of interest there except a shopping cart full of hardback books with a sign, “Free Books”.  I nosed around, popped open an anthology, A Treasure of the Familiar.  It opened to “Barbara Allen“, which I haven’t thought of in half-a-century.  Walked out singing to myself, trying to remember the words to “Barbara Allen“, putting the first few stanza together.  Sang it a mile down the road to the dog-catcher thrift store, debating with myself whether to go inside, or just head home.

In the parking lot a joyful sight grabbed me.

The finest off-road vehicle I’ve ever owned was a 1986 Montero.  Thousands of giddy miles up and down mountains, desert and canyons in my old Montero.  That truck would squeeze between any two trees the Universe could invent, climb anything, go through hip-deep water.  But when you got it stuck, it was for-sure, lead-pipe cinch, STUCK.

So I left that place singing “Barbara Allen” at the top of my lungs, pretending Little Red was my old Montero, remembering and flying low to the ground.

Stopped in to drop off a few bags of feed at Gale’s, needing to lift something to bring myself down, but even after unloading a few hundred pounds of sacks, still singing, still flying.

Middling good day, it was.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, America, Country Life, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas, Thrift Stores, Trucks

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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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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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Seven Sisters were enough

Posted on April 4, 2012 by | 3 comments

http://spaceweather.com/

EIGHT SISTERS: For one more night, the Seven Sisters are actually Eight. Look west after sunset to see Venus on the outskirts of the Pleiades star cluster, temporarily adding its bright light to the cluster’s delicate luminosity. Amateur astronomer Doug Zubenel photographed the conjunction last night from DeSoto, Kansas.  The view of Venus, an eighth sister among the Pleiades framed by branches bearing freshly opened oak leaves, was nothing short of mind-blowing!!” he says.

“Tonight, Venus exits the cluster, so this is your last chance to see a meeting that occurs only once every 8 years. Don’t miss it.

 

Orion’s Phallusy

Orion yearned those Pleiades
Dragged
In endless stellar chaste pursuit
Loved them as no mortal man
Ever loved a woman
Who ever caught one
Orion never had to gnaw off that starry arm
That held the club
To let her sleep
While he got out
The morning after
Orion never had to say,
“I’m going out for smokes
I’ll be right back,” at 3 am
When she said,
“I think I love you.”

Old Jules
Copyright 2003 NineLives Press

3 Comments

Posted in Astronomy

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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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Cautiously Optimistic Concerning Various Pessimisms

Posted on March 21, 2012 by | 5 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for you and me coming back for a read this morning.  You, because you’re managing to stay alive in this hostile reality we’ve selected to submerge ourselves in, and me, because I managed to put the chickens up and let them out without getting struck by lightning.  Which seemed a definite possibility while I did it.

 

I don’t mind getting struck by lightning so much, but it seems a bit of an anti-climax, everything else being equal.  I don’t care for the notion of leaving a lot of loose ends lying around for someone else to have to deal with.

For instance, I’d hate to get fried by lightining without telling you about the taurine Jeanne sent me and I’ve been taking.  My thought was that it might replace the blood-pressure meds I have to order from India.  I’m not evangelical about it, and I’m not going to do a complete switch without watching it closely a while longer.  But I’m cautiously optimistic.

Then there’s the Invader Cat.  It vanished around here for a few days and I was cautiously optimistic I’d seen the last of it, but it’s back this morning.  So I’m cautiously optimistic some other way about it, but not so much you’d notice.

The minor erosion mitigation measures I took recently performed well during this deluge and moved things forward a lot further and faster than I’d have dared cautiously optimistically predict.  Just saying, for any of you considering such projects.

Finally, for those relatively few readers who check in here because we used to correspond about the non-randomness phenomenon.  If you’ve got enough RAM on your computers, I’m cautiously optimistic you’ll find it was worth your while to track them every which way and compare the results with anything else you’ve ever tested.  It doesn’t nail things down on all the corners, but it goes a longish way in the right direction.

As for everything else, I think there’s reason to abandon caution and just say to hell with it and be optimistic.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules: Benefits of Reconstruction?

Old Jules, how did the North and South benefit from reconstruction?

5 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Astronomy, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Texas

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Old Sol’s Opinions about the DST Time Change

Posted on March 11, 2012 by | 16 comments

http://spaceweather.com/

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

Those of us stuck with the responsibility for bringing Old Sol up mornings and helping him down evenings try to stay tuned to his moods and political opinions.  Especially the DST time changes, of which he just about has a bellyfull. 

Here’s what he had to say about this one.  You’ll have to listen closely because he recorded it 78 rpm and there’s a lot of static.  If you have trouble picking the message out of the background noise, the general summary of his thoughts is that he’s damned sick of it.

WEEKEND SOLAR FLARE: Sunspot AR1429 is still erupting this weekend. On Saturday, March 10th, it produced a powerful M8-class flare that almost crossed the threshold into X-territory. During the flare, New Mexico amateur astronomer Thomas Ashcraft recorded a series of radio bursts at 21 and 28 MHz:

The roaring sounds you just heard are caused by shock waves plowing through the sun’s atmosphere in the aftermath of the explosion. “There is incredible complexity in the waveforms,” notes Ashcraft. “This is a recording of one of the most turbulent events in all of Nature!”

In addition, the explosion propelled yet another CME toward Earth. According to a forecast track prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the cloud will hit our planet’s magnetosphere on March 12th at 1803 UT (+/- 7 hr), possibly sparking a new round of geomagnetic storms.

After passing Earth, the CME will also hit the Mars Science Lab (MSL) spacecraft on March 13th followed by Mars itself on March 14th. Mars rover Curiosity onboard MSL might get some interesting readings as the cloud passes by.

Meanwhile, those of you who prefer the emotional side of things have probably been looking forward to the disgusting kissee-kissee going on between Jupiter and Venus.

http://spaceweather.com/

All I can tell you is it’s an illusion.  Jupiter and Venus don’t have enough in common to allow a lasting, meaningful relationship.  This is just cheap, physical attraction causing this.  Cheerleader Venus shamelessly wrapping herself around the arm of grotesque jockstrap Jupiter for the duration of a shared climax.

No candlelight dinners and moonlight walks for Jupiter and Venus.  They’ll each drift their own ways and be off flirting with someone else in just about the amount of time it takes to calculate it.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Learning from Nature?

Old Jules, what have you learned from nature?

 

 

16 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy

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