Early December 2009 saw some of the biggest surf in decades on the north shores of the Hawaiian Islands. The storm-driven waves dwarfed the crazed dudes and dudettes who took them on. This video needs no further comment from me.

Here's more from BillabongXXL.com:

"This week the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center issued an alert confirming that the current El Nino episode had intensified in the last 30 days from "moderate" to "strong," adding that the condition would exert a "significant influence on the global weather and climate in the coming months." And for surfers in the North Pacific basin, that means more enormous waves. According to Surfline.com, major new swell events are lining up in the coming days, impacting the Hawaiian Islands around Monday and the West Coast around Wednesday of next week."

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Cool pictures
        

I know lots of people will point to this as "proof" that global warming is a hoax. But it is such an astonishing image - all of England, Wales and Scotland covered in snow - that I just had to post it. 

With snow and bitter cold over much of the United States this week, and much of the same across northern Europe and northeast China, this is shaping up as a very impressive year for winter weather, and a wonder to behold. Just remember that averages are made up of extremes on both sides of the long-term trend line.

Here's a link to the larger photo file and an article.

Enjoy. 

And if you're interested, here's a link to the site that tracks the Earth's snow cover daily. You can animate the images and watch the snow line expeand and retreat. Fascinating.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)
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Saturday's record-breaking snowstorm has left a mark on the mid-Atlantic states that is clearly visible from space. Here is the image taken on Monday by NASA's Terra Earth Observing Satellite.

The photo-like image was acquired by the satellite's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. Here's a link to a better view, snapped on Sunday. Enjoy.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Some of the biggest surf in decades -30 to 40 feet - is rolling onto the north shore of the Hawaiian Islands. And surfers - crazy? brave? suicidal? You tell me - are all over them. Here is some jaw-dropping footage shot today at Pe'ahi and posted on You Tube by Billabong (www.BillabongXXL.com).

Surf News put it this way: "Sean Collins, head forecaster for Surfline.com, said this swell ranks in the top five biggest ever experienced on Oahu's North Shore, comparable to historic El Niño-fueled episodes in 1998 and 1969. The extreme surf is expected to continue for several days with High Surf Advisories issued for all north-facing shorelines of the entire Hawaiian Chain. The swell is so powerful forecasters expect it to significantly impact the West Coast of North America in the coming days, reaching California on Wednesday and Mexico on Thursday, working its way south throughout the Pacific until finally reaching Chile over a week from now."

Posted by Frank Roylance at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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I was driving to work on I-83 Monday when I pulled alongside this flatbed truck from Locust Point Farm in Elkton, loaded with cages holding dozens of turkeys. It wasn't hard to imagine where they were headed.  Fortunately for these guys, we celebrated early. All turkeyed out. 

Speaking of seasonal critters, anyone else under siege by box elder bugs and ladybugs? They all want to come indoors. Crickets, too.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has assembled a very nifty movie from GOES satellite images of former Hurricane Ida, beginning as the storm entered the Yucatan Channel Nov. 7 and began to threaten the U.S. Gulf Coast, where it is making landfall today.

Have a look here.

From the clip, it becomes clear that the clouds that have overspread our region today formed from Gulf moisture and convection just west of Ida. But that flow of moisture from the western Gulf has now merged with Ida's, and the result is mild, cloudy weather for Maryland.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have snapped a photo of the so-called Arnica wildfire that started burning in mid-September in Yellowstone National Park. It's a striking image, shot Sept. 26 at an oblique (rather than straight-down) angle. It shows several of the late-season fires that were burning in the park, and the tremendous area covered by the resulting smoke. Here's more.

By Sept. 30, the Arnica fire had consumed 10,000 acres. Then the weather began to change and parts of the northern Rockies  began to feel the chill of winter in the air.

A weekend snowstorm has pushed the continent's snow cover (left) well into Montana, Wyoming (including Yellowstone), Colorado and Nebraska, at least for now. The Arnica fire is now "under control," and the fire season there has drawn to a close.

Temperatures in the Denver area dropped to 17 degrees on Saturday. Icy roads became a hazard and a section of I-25 was closed after a fatal accident that may have been linked to icy conditions.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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The flooding in Georgia this week has made for many remarkable photos. But none had the vantage point of orbiting satellites.

Digital Globe, a satellite imaging company, has released an photo of the flooding around the Six Flags over Georgia amusement park, and there's not much amusing about it.

Aside from the still, brown water that had swamped some of the roller coasters and other parts of the park by Tuesday when the shot was taken, what's really amazing is the detail available from cameras gliding by hundreds of miles up.

Can you imagine the detail available from the Pentagon's spy sats? Smile!

Here's the photo. And here's a more detailed version.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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NASA has produced a remarkable video animation of data from Earth-observing satellites that have been monitoring the globe's "cryosphere," especially the polar ice.

You can link to it here. And here is a link to a whole bunch of nifty NASA multimedia stuff.

Also, a study funded by the National Science Foundation has found more evidence that it is the human factor, and not natural cycles, that are behind accelerating polar warming.

In fact, the arctic would likely still be in a 2,000-year-long cooling cycle if it weren't for human activity, the study found. You can read more about that here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Bill Stifler has sent in more weather photos, this time from Friday's thunderstorms. He shoots mostly from locations in Hampden, in Baltimore City, proving that you don't need an exotic location to capture some great weather photos. Okay, for some, Hampden is pretty darned exotic.

Still, you can't argue with good photography. Be sure to visit Bill's weather photo page. Says he:

"These were taken in Hampden - from the roof of my place of 
employment. The ... lightning photos were taken later in the evening - 
one from my house and the others from [a parking] lot in 
Hampden ... I was seconds away from 
some really good lightning images, but these turned out ok. The recent 
pattern has provided good conditions for weather photo geeks like me."

The forecast for Baltimore today says we will have only a small chance for more showers tonight or tomorrow as a weak cold front continues to dawdle on its way east and out of the region.

The rest of the week looks sunny, or mostly so, with temperatures in the mid-80s - just a tad above the norms for this time of year. Overnight lows will be in the 60s.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Steve Zubrick, the science and operations officer at the National Weather Service forecast office in Sterling, sent me a series of radar images shot early Wednesday morning.

They show an odd ring of radar returns (image above) that appears to emerge from the upper Chesapeake, near Pooles Island, and expand across the area.  He thinks it's a flock of birds, rising after dawn and fanning, perhaps to forage for the day. Here's Steve's note:

"For the past several mornings, beginning around 6AM EDT (1000 UTC), our KLWX 88D Doppler radar has shown an expanding ring of higher reflectivity values originating from an apparent point source of the Chesapeake Bay just north of Poole's Island near the mouth of the Bush River.

"I've attached a few images that show this phenomena. It's nothing unusual and happens quite frequently, not only here but in other parts of the country.

"When I've seen these before in this area, they've been mostly originating over land. This appears to originate over water (or marsh?) near the mouth of  the Bush River...or the land areas along eastern Aberdeen Proving Ground.

"Also, the 1021Z images show the reflectivity spike seen by the radar as the sun rises. Interesting."

He may be right. It could be birds. But what kind of birds are massed like that at this time of year? Any watermen or boaters out there who have witnessed anything like this around Poole's Island? What do you think?

UPDATE:  Just received email from Jerome A. Jackson, professor of ecological science at Florida Gulf Coast University. He took a look at the radar images and had this to offer:

"Yes, they are likely birds ... and a good guess would be that they are purple martins. Patterns like this are often produced as purple martins disperse from their communal roosts at this time of year. We are talking about roosts of thousands of martins. It would be very interesting to confirm that they are martins by going to the area shown and watching for them either in the morning as they go out to feed for the day, or in the evening as they return to roost.

"They gather in enormous flocks prior to migrating to the Amazon basin for the winter ... and usually roost near large bodies of water where they then move out to feed on the hordes of insects that are produced in the area."

Thanks to Baltimore Sun photo editor Jerry Jackson, for facilitating the exchange with Dr. Jackson, his dad.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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The new GOES-14 weather satellite launched June 27 has sent back its first picture of the full disk of the Earth. Taken on Monday last week, it shows North and South America, and the entire cloud-spangled western hemisphere.

Once its checkout is complete in December, the satellite will be parked and held in readiness in case one of the three operational GOES weather satellites breaks down or runs out of fuel. The white spot at the center of the picture is the reflection of the sun on the Pacific Ocean off Panama.

The satellite was designed, developed and launched by NASA, the project managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. It will be turned over to NOAA after checkout. It is 22,236 miles above the Earth, in a 24-hour orbit that keeps it over the same spot on the surface. Read more here. 

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Let's see ... How can I make this weather-related? Okay, the sun was shining near Dundee Creek on Saturday and the table was set. So this adult bald eagle decided it would be a fine morning to share an alfresco brunch with two turkey vultures.

The menu included just one item - a dead deer they'd all spotted in an open field, about 150 feet off Graces Quarters Road.

Melanie Cellini was on her way to to Dundee Marina when she saw the trio. 

"I stopped the car, brought the passenger window down just far enough so my dog couldn't jump out, and zoomed in with my camera. "I've lived in the Bay Country development for 20 years and other than occasionally seeing an eagle in the air, I've never experienced what I did that morning."

Ms. Cellini mistakenly assumed the smaller birds were fledgling eagles. But closer inspection of her photos shows they're vultures. The red on their faces identifies them as turkey vultures, I'm told.

"The mother was standing on the deer while the fledglings ate. When we came back home about two hours later, the mother was gone, but the two fledglings were still there. Later that evening, all of them had left and, unfortunately, have not returned to that location."

Ms. Cellini believes the eagle may be one of the pair that were removed from an aerie near Martin Airport last winter after being judged a potential hazard to flight operations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reported that those eagles nested again this spring, a short distance away, and are raising a new family. 

In any event, the picture reveals our national symbol as he is - not always the romantic hunter, soaring high and snatching fish from blue waters. He is also a carrion eater, picking lunch from rotting carcasses. That may be why Ben Franklin preferred the wild turkey for our national emblem.  

(PHOTO by Melanie Cellini/ Used with permission)

Posted by Frank Roylance at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The big fireball meteor that startled residents in Central Maryland and southern Pennsylvania early Monday morning was captured on a security camera video in York Pa. It's about 18 seconds into the 70-second video. Meteorite hunters hope this will be a first clue to guide them to the spot where surviving bits of the meteor - if there are any - may have landed.

The camera was one of about 50 that protect the various facilities of the York Water Company. The president and CEO, Jeffrey R. Hines, said he and his wife live in York and heard the sonic boom touched off by the meteor as it entered the atmosphere at about 1:10 a.m. Monday. But they didn't see anything.

It wasn't until late on Monday that he decided to check the security video to see what the cameras might have seen.

"It didn't take long," he said. The quality isn't great. "It's a security camera, at night."

But the meteor is unmistakable, he said. "You can see the fireball, and see it all ready to burn out, and a number of pieces of meteorite. Probably four or five frames is all it captures."

Even so, Hines said, "It's pretty cool." With two or three more images like this, meteorite hunters hope to be able to triangulate on the meteor's trajectory, and its final seconds before any surviving pieces fell to Earth.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Cool pictures
        

The National Weather Service has begun to receive and pass along eyewitnesses' photos of a funnel cloud that formed in the outer portion of Baltimore Harbor last Tuesday, June 9. The twister formed as a strong gust front passed over the city, along with a thunderstorm and brief, heavy rains.

The same storm was blamed for spawning a small (EF-0) tornado that ripped through a one-mile-long portion of Dundalk shortly after 5 p.m., but it does not appear that the funnel cloud in these photos was the same one that caused the damage in Dundalk, according to Steve Zubrick, science and operations office at the weather service's Sterling forecast office.

The funnel cloud that passed over the outer harbor, just north of the southern portal of the Harbor Tunnel, was captured by at least two amateur photogaphers, at around 5:12 p.m. 

One was Dr. Benjamin Petre, M.D., an orthopaedic surgery resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital. His pictures (one of them is at left)were shot from his home on Bouldin St. in Highlandtown. We use one here with his permission.

He said, "I was taking my dog outside because she is terrified of storms. I saw the clouds doing some funny things and went up to my roofdeck. When I saw the tornado I took some iPhone pictures! It only lasted [about ] one minute. But it was cool to see. I was facing due south towards 1st Mariner [tower]."

Here are Zubrick's comments on the Petre image:

"The pictures Dr. Petre took [were] of a 2nd funnel cloud. It was NOT the same as the tornado that hit Dundalk. Based on a combination of a weak signature in the TDWR/BWI radar and Dr. Petre's image times from his cell phone camera (which I believe to be accurate) ... his images are of a funnel that occurred between [about 5:10 and 5:15 PM EDT (i.e., before the Dundalk EF-0 tornado) ... and this funnel was likely a waterspout."

The second picture sent to Zubrick at the NWS was a video shot from a car that was northbound, approaching the south portal of the Harbor Tunnel. The view is to the east southeast. It was shot by Josh and Jessie Klein. We will post it here when they call us back (or email me at frank.roylance@baltsun.com) and give us permission. It shows the spinning cloud column over the harbor.

Continue reading "Funnel cloud photos from June 9 storm" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Okay, so it was a great night for baseball, after all. Those boys have come alive at last. Here's a shot of the Luke Scott rainbow.

Thanks to reader Amy Gonigam, who caught it as it hung over The Sun building tonight.

Maybe it's a good omen for the newspaper, too.

Anybody else get a shot of the rainbow? Send it along and I'll post it. 

Friday's thunderstorms did some impressive damage down in southern Anne Arundel County, where powerful winds knocked mature hardwood trees onto several homes, dropped power lines and put out the lights for 15,000 thousand BGE customers.

The storm also toppled portions of a steeple on the City Temple Baptist Church on North Eutaw Street in Baltimore. The debris punched through the roof and caused more damage inside.

The thunderboomers dropped more than an inch of rain at BWI airport, bringing the total for May to 8.28 inches. That makes May 2009 the second-wettest since record-keeping began in Baltimore in 1871, and only the second time that May rainfall has topped 8 inches. The only wetter May in Baltimore was in 1989, when 8.71 inches fell at BWI.  

The forecast? Beautiful, at least until mid-week.

Here's another shot of the Luke Scott Rainbow, captured by Sun Photographer Karl Merton Ferron. Amazing! Here's Karl's caption:

"Gorgeous clouds and a faint rainbow hang over the ballpark as Baltimore Orioles designated hitter Luke Scott stands at the plate just before he hit a grand slam against the Detroit Tigers (the scoreboard that hangs in lower center image says two outs in the bottom of the third inning, Scott at bat with the count at 2 balls, one strike, and Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Dontrelle Willis on his 45th pitch) on the night of Baltimore Orioles catcher Matt Wieters's debut in front of 42,704 paid fans - over 15,000 sold since the announcement of Wieters being brought up - at Oriole Park at Camden Yards Friday, May 29, 2009. Scott hit his grand slam two pitches later, on a 2-2 count."

Posted by Frank Roylance at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Two buddies down in Louisiana captured a huge waterspout (not the one at left) on video, and chased it down (after Mom reminded them to be careful). They were, sort of. Then they sent their video to CNN, which posted it here: 

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/ireports/2009/05/19/vo.irpt.waterspout.cnn

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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I watched most of the repairs mission and spacewalks via NASA-TV, on my computer, and I had no idea how much I was missing. Here is a spectacular set of 31 images from the nearly-completed mission. (They land Friday.) 

There are several pictures of clouds and stuff from 350 miles up - my only excuse for using this on the WeatherBlog. Otherwise, it's just way-cool photography for space nerds and taxpayers. Enjoy.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Here's a pretty shot of the Chesapeake in springtime, taken Tuesday by the Modis Rapid Response Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

The region looks very green now as trees reach full leaf and lawns and farm fields green up.

Warm air rising off the land produces lots of fluffy cumulus clouds, but cooler bay water cuts off that warming both over the water and downwind along the western parts of the Delmarva Peninsula.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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The most recent space shuttle mission to the International Space Station included the installation of the fourth and final pair of solar panels on the growing outpost. And that brought the station, finally, to the appearance that we have until now had to rely on NASA artists to provide.

So here it is (above). You can read more about it here. And here (below right) is how the place looked in September 2000.

The ISS is, of course, visible from the ground with the naked eye in the early morning or the early evening after sunset, when the station is in sunlight and the observer on the ground is still in darkness. It's brighter than ever now with its new solar panels. Unfortunately, the next chance to see it from Maryland will be in the early morning hours next week - between 3:45 and 6 a.m. That's too early for my blood. But we will post the next good evening flyovers when they get closer.

Many amateur astronomers love the challenge of capturing recognizable images of the station through telescopes during these flyovers. Some are truly remarkable. Here's one that captured one of the spacewalking astronauts as he worked on the construction project during the recent mission. Amazing.  

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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A while back NASA and the European Space Agency invited people to vote on which of a selection of never-before-imaged (by Hubble) celestial targets they'd like the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph. The voters chose something called Arp 274, a system of three galaxies in the constellation Virgo, 400 million light years from Earth.

The stunt was part of NASA's and ESA's celebration of the International Year of Astronomy, commemorating Galileo's early work with the telescope. Although he did not invent the telescope, as many people imagine, nor was he the first to aim it at the heavens, Galileo was the first to publish the findings of his telescopic stargazing, which had a profound effect on science and man's concept of his place in the universe. 

The Hubble photo was shot over the last two days, and it's now been published on the Web. It's a beauty. Enjoy.

Click here for more Hubble photos

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Frustrated by the quirks, flaws and general squooshiness of the human brain, NASA decided to replace an astronaut's head with a computer. It seems to work just fine, although it could use some additional miniaturization. That's astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper performing a spacewalk with her new head during a mission last November.

Sorry. NASA started it. Happy April Fool's Day from the WeatherBlog.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope last month captured a rare moment as four of Saturn's moons passed in front of the planet (as seen from Earth) within a short period of time.

The moons - Titan Mimas, Enceladus and Dione - each cast their own shadows onto the planet's gassy cloud tops as they drift past. Here's more on the event and the photos.

Saturn's iconic rings appear very narrow. They are approaching a period of edge-on orientation relative to Earth, when they all but disappear from view. They will be precisely edge-on on Aug. 10 and again on Sept. 4. It's something that occurs once every 14 or 15 years, and it's called a ring-plane crossing.

These transits of Saturn's moons across the planet's disk tend to occur during these ring-plane crossings because most of the moons orbit in the same plane as the rings. 

The images were shot by Hubble on Feb. 24, when Saturn was about 775 million miles from Earth. The Hubble folks have assembled views of Saturn into a video of the transits.

Pale yellow Saturn is visible in Maryland skies on clear nights this month. Just past opposition - its closest approach to Earth this year and the best time for a look through a telescope - it is rising in the east around 7 p.m. and is high in the southeast at midnight.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The National Weather Service forecasters at Sterling have posted their map of actual (reported) snow totals from our Sunday/Monday snowfall. It's probably the most detailed tally to date of the storm, which I'll wager will be the deepest of this winter season. And you can compare it with the forecast map posted on Monday.

Or, you can compare it to the real deal, (below) snapped from orbit. Enjoy.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Cool pictures
        

One of the things about people like me who habitually watch the skies is that we see things that we can't explain. It happened again on Sunday afternoon. And I was not alone.

My wife and I were returning from a weekend in Philadelphia. We were headed south on I-95 at about 2 p.m. I was driving and my wife was snoozing in the passenger seat, when I noticed a lot of jet contrails in the skies. That is not particularly unusual along the busy east coast air lanes. But one of the contrails caught my eye.

There was an aircraft that - as near as I could tell - had been headed north, or northeast, probably well east of the Chesapeake Bay. But judging from its contrail, it had just made a wide left (toward the west) turn, leaving a broad arc of vapor that swung around 180 degrees until the plane, by the time I noticed it, was headed south, or southwest. 

It was a complete U-turn, at what looked like a pretty high altitude - maybe 30,000 feet or more.

Now, scheduled airliners don't generally turn around in mid-flight and go back where they came from without first landing and dropping off passengers. It could have been an emergency, but in that case, I would expect the plane to descend and head for the nearest airport. This one did not appear to be doing that.

Another possibility I considered was that it was a military aircraft, on some sort of maneuver, or patrol, or training flight. Perhaps it was an executive jet, and the CEO just realized he forgot his power tie. Or, maybe it was a research, or mapping, or aerial photography flight. That just about exhausted my guesses.

Although my wife slept through the whole thing, I was not alone in my observation. On Monday, I received the following email from Betsy Shade, in Millersville: 

Continue reading "High-altitude U-turn ... What was that about?" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
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Bushfires in southeastern Australia over the weekend have killed more than 130 people and destroyed whole towns. It is the nation's worst fire season ever. The devastating fires and their smoke are being imaged by orbiting spacecraft. That's a shot from NASA's Aqua Earth Observing satellite above. The red markings outline active flame.

Here's some video from CNN.

Australian officials have said there have been as many as 400 separate fires, some of them believed to have been set by arsonists. You can read more here. But weather conditions have played a powerful role. That section of Australia is in deep drought, and summertime temperatures have gone as high as 117 degrees, winds to 60 mph, drying the vegetation and turning it to tinder. Lightning strikes and idiots set it off, and the wind drove the flames hard.

Here's another shot, taken on Saturday:

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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I know. It has nothing to do with Maryland weather. At least not yet. But the rising seismic activity and eruption watch now underway in Alaska at the Redoubt volcano brings to mind the days before Mount St. Helens blew in 1980, as well as the spectacular eruption at Redoubt almost 20 years ago.

That's the one in the Redoubt photo above. The image was one of a series shot by J. Warren, on April 21, 1990. Looks like a nuclear blast, doesn't it? The ash from a December 1989 eruption of Mt. Redoubt was sucked into all four engines of a 747 airliner bound from Amsterdam to Tokyo. All four were snuffed out. But unlike the recent bird-strike incident in New York, pilots of the KLM airliner managed to restart two engines (after dropping 12,000 feet in eight minutes), and they landed safely. At the airport in Anchorage.

The incident occurred despite the then-new, satellite-based system of ash cloud warnings for aircraft. If Redoubt blows again, all airspace around the volcano and downwind may be closed.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory has a fascinating Web site, where anyone can keep watch over the volcano and track its rumblings.

Here's the Web site. There are details on the current activity here.

You can link to a live Redoubt Web cam here. And, you can follow the activity via Twitter, here. 

And there is a gallery of photos of the 1990 eruption here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Cool pictures
        

The "Smog Blog" out at UMBC has posted this very cool satellite image of the snow on the ground yesterday in the Northeast. With any luck (good or bad), we could see this snow field expand and deepen next week.

For a zoomable version, click here.

And here's an animation of the shifting snow and ice cover over North America for the past month.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Cool pictures
        

Sunny skies yesterday allowed a passing satellite to snap a photo of the crowd on the Mall in Washington for the presidential inauguration.

Not sure what time of day the picture was taken. But I was surprised to see that the crowd did not totally fill the Mall, as it appeared on TV. They seem to be clustered around the Jumbo-Tron TVs, with plenty of space in between. Maybe it was very early, and the space was not yet packed.

Nevertheless, it's a very cool image - of a very cold crowd. 

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Forty years ago tonight, three NASA astronauts held the world transfixed as they transmitted a Christmas Eve message from the moon.

It was the Apollo 8 mission - the first manned spacecraft to cross the 240,000-mile gulf from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit. On board were Commander Frank Borman, Command module Pilot Jim Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders.

Their goal was not to land on the lunar surface; that would come seven months later with Apollo 11. Instead, they were to make the first crossing to the moon, enter lunar orbit and spin around the moon 10 times before heading home again. 

On the evening of Dec. 24, at lunar sunrise, the crew went on live TV and sent back eerie images of the gray, forbidding lunar surface, with the blue-and-white globe of the sunlit Earth hanging over the horizon.

Lovell observed: "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth."  The image, and that sentiment, helped to inspire a generation of people to a new kind of thinking about the planet - not as a resource to be exploited, but as a spacecraft on which all of us are passengers, sharing limited food, air and water. Break this, spoil these life-support systems, and we will have no place else to go.

Then Anders said, "For all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you."

He and his mates then took turns reading from the story of the Creation, from Genesis. "In the beginning. God created the heaven and earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep..."

For those of us who listened that night, the effect was electric. Voices, crimped and distorted by tiny microphones and the vast distance, spoke to us from THE MOON! And they spoke of our home planet, and of beginnings, and possibilities for a great human adventure. All this on a night that, for many of us, symbolized hope and our shared humanity. Who could sleep?!

It was Borman, the commander, who signed off that night: "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth."

To watch, and listen to the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast, click here.

WeatherBlog readers: I will be away from the Weather Control Center for a few days to pray for snow and enjoy the holidays with family and friends. The weather buttons and levers will be unmanned until Jan. 5, although I may look in from time to time to post any comments you may offer. Likewise, my mug will be absent from the print Weather Page on Jan. 1-4. My gift to you. 

Posted by Frank Roylance at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Cram more than 100,000 stars into a cluster "only" 150 light-years wide and you get something like this - the globular cluster astronomers know as M-13. This image was assembled from Hubble data recorded during four separate observations from 1999 to 2006. It includes ultraviolet, visible and infrared portions of light spectrum.

M-13 is one of the brightest and best-known (to astronomers) globular clusters in the northern sky. If you're far enough from urban light pollution, it's even possible to spot this object with the naked eye, I'm told, only 25,000 light years away in the winter constellation Hercules. 

Folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore say the density of stars at the center of this cluster is about 100 times the density of stars in our sun's region of the Milky Way galaxy. Imagine the night sky on a planet circling one of those stars! The stars are so close together they sometimes smash into each other, creating new stars called "blue stragglers."

The red dots are older, giant stars. The bluish ones are young, hot stars.

Astronomers have counted almost 150 such clusters in a sort of halo that surrounds the Milky Way's spiral disk. They are believed to have formed before the spiral itself, and contain some of the oldest stars in the region.

Photo credits go to NASA, the European Space Agency and the Hubble Heritage Team at the space telescope institute.  

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A Canadian police cruiser dashboard camera has captured an amazing video of a meteor as it ripped through the atmosphere and exploded last Thursday near Edmonton, Alberta. You can see it, and read more about it, here.

Here's more.

And more.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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The wildfires in the Los Angeles area are sending a pall of smoke westward on the Santa Ana winds, and the streamers are visible far out into the Pacific Ocean. Here is the latest NASA satellite image, snapped on Sunday:

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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There is a spectacular image of the Northeastern United States on NASA's Earth Observatory Website. It stretches from Nova Scotia to Buffalo, and south to Virginia Beach, all bathed on sunshine under clear skies. You can see autumn colors spilling down out of the mountains, and creeping southward.

The image was taken on Oct. 12 - a week ago - by NASA's Terra Earth Observing satellite. It is a "photo-like" image taken by the satellite's MODIS spectroradiometer, and it shows fall colors or orange and green, and the gray sprawl of urban areas, including Baltimore and Washington. You can even spot the Texas limestone quarry in Cockeysville.

It's a huge, high-resolution file and may be a relatively slow download, but worth the wait. The version above doesn't do the whole picture justice. Here's the direct link.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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NASA has posted some spectacular footage of the re-entry of the 13-ton ATV-1 "Jules Verne" spacecraft on Sept. 29. The images were shot from one of two aircraft that carried scientists hoping to witness the re-entry over the South Pacific Ocean. Here is the main page for the re-entry observation project, with lots of stills.

And here is the link to the video. Enjoy.

The ATV, or "Automated Transfer Vehicle," is a sort of robotic cargo ship designed to carry cargo to resupply the International Space Station. Designed and built by the European Space Agency, the first was launched last April. When its work is done, the ATV is guided to a safe (for people on the ground) re-entry into the Pacific. Here's more on ATV.  

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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NASA's Aqua Earth-observing satellite yesterday afternoon snapped this spectacular image of smoke from the California wildfires as Santa Ana winds blew it out over the Pacific.

Here's how it looked from the ground.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A flash from the Wedding Wormhole! Just received this photo of the June 23 double rainbow over Baltimore. Paul M. Novak Jr. shot it from the 13th floor of his building downtown. Wow!

Pretty sure that's Johns Hopkins Hospital at the end of the arcs. They oughta buy this image for their annual report. On the other hand, I believe the long, low building at lower right is the state's troubled Juvenile Justice building. Maybe there's hope for the place, or at least its residents.

Now, back into the Wormhole...

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Those lightning-sparked wildfires that have been plaguing Californians this week are producing enough smoke to be clearly visible from orbit. NASA's Aqua Earth Observing Satellite has sent back a remarkably clear image showing numerous smoke plumes drifting across the state. The hottest spots are sensed by infrared detectors and outlined in red.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Hope. Forgiveness. A beautiful play of refracted sunlight in raindrops. Anyway you look at them, a rainbow is a surprise and a delight whenever you spot one. Sun videographer Karl Merton Ferron captured this colorful and eerie display after a light shower in Baltimore on Monday.

Rainbows are so striking, and unusual, that we long remember where we were and what we were doing when we spotted them. I can recall a rainbow that appeared after my wife and I arrived in Bar Harbor, Maine, for our honeymoon. Seemed like a good omen, and we're still hitched after 38 years. I can remember a spectacular double rainbow that astonished our kids (and us) during a summer camping trip in the 1980s. We were driving south from Flagstaff, across the desert, after a visit to the Grand Canyon. We just pulled over and gawked.

Have any special memories of rainbows you'd like to share? Leave a comment.  

There was a double rainbow yesterday in Washington, and CapitalWeather.com has posted a terrific photo gallery. There's a link in the comments below.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
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A huge tornado (not the one pictured here) struck near Fort Collins, Colo. today, and was captured on video by a local TV crew as it blackened the sky and pelted the camera operator with hailstones. 

Meanwhile, a fledgling storm-chasing organization in Hungary managed to film a tornado there as it formed on May 20 - a comparative rarity in Europe. Click here for that one.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Satellite imagery can help us visualize large-scale events in ways that TV pictures - even those shot from helicopters - cannot.

Here is a satellite view of the smoke from the Florida wildfires, which is easily seen from space. The smoke can have a serious impact on people living downwind who may have asthma or other breathing difficulties. Here's more on the image.

And here is an image developed from radar data gathered from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, with an overlay of quake data from the US Geological Survey.

It shows the sharply contrasting topography of the region of China devastated by this week's 7.9 earthquake. The quake was the result of the continuing uplift of the Tibetan plateau - the high country to the west of Chengdu - as the Eurasian continental plate is rammed by the Indian subcontinent in one of the planet's most dramatic manifestations of continental drift. 

The dots represent the main quake (largest circle) and subsequent, smaller aftershocks to the northeast. Read more here.   

Posted by Frank Roylance at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The terrible cyclone Nargis that swept in from the Andaman Sea onto  the low-lying coastal territories of southern Burma this week killed tens of thousands and left more than a million homeless. It was an impressive storm, even when seen from Earth orbit. Here's more on the image above.

Here's more from AccuWeather,com. And here are some color images shot before and after the storm.

Cyclones are no different than the hurricanes we see each summer in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. But the geographic protocol that applies to these storms states that those that affect South Asia are to be called cyclones.

When they occur in the Atlantioc or the eastern Pacific, they're called hurricanes, and when they spin up in the central and western Pacific, they're called typhoons.

Each geographic locale within those larger regions also gets its own list of names. It's a bewildering array. And, each region sets its own rules.

Our hurricane names run in six-year cycles, so that a list repeats in the seventh year, minus any that have been retired because of their notoriety. The names also alternate between male and female, and mix the cultural origins of the region. 

But the other lists draw from their own ethnic name traditions and cycle with different patterns.

Nargis is the sixth name on List 2 under the Northern Indian Ocean category. The next cyclone out there will be Abe, followed by Khai Muk. Go figure.

Our first three storms this season will be Arthur, Bertha and Cristobal.

Continue reading "Burma cyclone from space" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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                                                                                       Fred Bruenjes - used with permission

Some people will go anywhere to watch a total eclipse of the sun, even to the bottom of the world. The image above was shot Fred Bruenjes, of the Moonglow Observatory, during the Nov, 23, 2003 eclipse in Antarctica.  

Here's more.

The next total solar eclipse that will be visible from the continental U.S. is now just over nine years away, in 2017. Here's more on that one.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Rainfall yesterday and today has done a good job of knocking down last week's sky-high pollen counts. Unfortunately, it has also put an end to the spring blossoms we've enjoyed in recent weeks.

For some, like this driver this morning on Harford Road, it also offers an unexpected decoration for the old gray ride. The picture was taken by Kurt Kocher, spokesman for the city's Department of Public Works. Thanks, Kurt!

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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One reason we're enjoying this beautiful stretch of dry, sunny weather along the East Coast is that the high-pressure system that's generating our delightful conditions is being held in place by a deep low off the coast, to our east.

From space, the big storm can be seen clearly as it spins in this satellite loop, counter-clockwise, almost like a hurricane. It's also churning up the ocean, and sending strong surf ashore along the Carolina coast, where high surf advisories are up.

The storm is slowly moving off to the northeast, and our fine weather will begin to deteriorate late Saturday as the next low moves our way, with rain due on Sunday and Monday. Sorry.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Fifty years ago, in 1958, Flagstaff passed the nation's first lighting ordinance designed to protect the night sky from the ravages of "light pollution." In truth, it was an effort to protect the view into space from the neaby Lowell Observatory. The pioneering work in Flagstaff has subsequently preserved the riches of the night sky for a growing list of observatories situated in the nearby mountains, and thereby encouraged the growth of an important local industry.

This photo shows in a very dramatic way (aided by both a truly light-pollution-free sky and a time exposure) just how glorious the night sky over Flagstaff can be now that outdoor lighting has been shielded - so that it points down, where it's needed, instead of up at the bellies of passing birds. It also happens to save energy and money, since you don't need as much candlepower if you're not sending light where it's not needed.

Here in Baltimore (below), and in most other cities, we delight in urban lighting programs that illuminate our buildings from below, with most of the glare shining up into the sky and erasing the stars ! When was the last time YOU saw the Milky Way?

You can learn more about outdoor lighting ordinances, from the International Dark Sky Association.

The Flagstaff image, credited to Dan and Cindy Durisco, the US. Naval Observatory, the Lowell Observatory and the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition, shows the San Fransisco Peaks beneath the Milky Way and a stationary "lenticular cloud," formed as moist air flows up and over a mountain range, condensing as it cools. Here's an amazing gallery of lenticular clouds.

Credit: The Sun, Thomas Graves, 1998

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Midwesterners might have wished it were spring, but Monday's snowstorm disabused them of any notion that it actually WAS spring for them. The storm whitened the ground across a broad swath, from Nebraska and South Dakota to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When the skies cleared, NASA's Aqua satellite snapped this picture of the results.

That broad brushstroke across the image is snow on the ground. The white patches on the right are clouds. Lake Superior is at upper right.  Here's more.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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That's spring in my book. Lake Erie is now largely ice-free for the first time in months. And the ice pack has broken up and left the St. Lawrence River at Quebec City.  Satellite data still shows a snow cover in upstate New York, but Pennsylvania looks mostly green (or brown, at least) again.

You can watch the snow retreat on this snow-cover loop for the last month. Time to set up the Tiki bars along the Niagara River (below)!

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I have no idea what this TV news interview today was all about. CNN does not provide any context. But we can say one thing for sure: it was taped on one heckuva windy day in Texas. Have a look.

I wonder who the roofing contractor was on that job. Yikes!

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Back doing the NEW journalism this morning after a day doing the OLD journalism and chasing the Goob down in College Park. Got back to Calvert Street and had a chat with Kurt Kocher, the spokesman for the city's Department of Public Works, about the easing drought conditions.

Kurt sent me this terrific photo he shot of a rainbow that appeared over Baltimore during Sunday's wild weather transitions. The location is Belair Road, near the county line.

 The rainbow appeared as a cold front swept across Maryland. A broad gap in the cloud cover allowed sunshine to beam through the departing rain showers, producing the rainbow. Then another bank of clouds and showers moved in.

Here's what the gap in the clouds looked like from space.

Continue reading "Rainbow spectacle over Baltimore" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Sounds like plenty of Marylanders got a look at last night's eclipse, and many have left their impressions as comments on last night's post.

I was as surprised and delighted as anyone when I spotted the full moon on my drive home last night. Somehow there were still some flakes in the air, but the the clouds had cleared out beautifully, providing us with one of the best nights for a lunar eclipse that many of us can remember. Except for the 22-degree cold.

Baltimore's Streetcorner Astronomer Herman Heyn was on station in Charles Village. He reports something close to 100 people stopped by to see the eclipse through a friend's telescope, and Saturn through his. "People were thrilled by both," he said. "It revived my enthusiasm about lunar eclipses." After a series of them obscured by clouds here, "I'd sort of given up on them."

That's stargazing for you. You have to put up with clouds, and cold, and no-show meteor showers. But when everything aligns, as they did last night, the show is spectacular and unforgettable. I hope lots of kids got to see the eclipse last night. Mine are in their 30s now, and they both remember me waking them up one night when they were little, and shooing them to the back door to see a lunar eclipse. Spooky and exciting. 

Anyway, here's a photo shot last night by Hal Laurent from East Baltimore as the eclipse got underway. If anyone else has any good shots, send them to me and I'll post them.

In the meantime, here's a gallery of eclipse photos from around the world.

Continue reading "Eclipse was a hit" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
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Jon Goldberg awoke to a frosty morning in Elkton on Dec. 31. went out to his car, and captured this image of Jack Frost's handiwork on the windshield. Amazing what water vapor, cold glass and ice crystals can do.  Thanks to Jon for sharing it. 

Here are two more.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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On August 2, 2005, NASA's Maryland-built Messenger spacecraft flew past Earth at the start of a series of planetary flybys needed to send it sunward to the planet Mercury. The flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury are designed to use the planets' gravity to slow Messenger down enough to enter orbit around Mercury in 2011.

The Messenger Web site includes this movie assembled from still images taken during the Earth flyby in 2005 - a year after Messenger's launch. It shows an astonishingly beautiful blue planet, rotating in the sunshine as we - aboard Messenger - speed away from our world, and everything - and everyone - we've ever known. Amazing.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Scientists and engineers at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics lab have released the first closeup image of Mercury from Monday's flyby by the Messenger spacecraft. The photo includes some never-before-seen terrain that looks just like, well, the rest of Mercury, first (and last) photographed by the Mariner 10 spacecraft in 1974-1975. It also looks a lot like our moon.

That's okay. There's plenty more to come, and you can be sure there will be some surprises. Here's the release from APL. And here's an approach "movie" assembled from stills shot as Messenger neared Mercury on Sunday and Monday.

More to come. Here's Messenger's home page.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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All those big rain, snow and wind storms crashing ashore on the West Coast have been producing some titanic surf. And a few brave - nay, certifiably crazy - surfers have paddled out to take them on. For a gallery of stupefying photos from this past weekend, click here.

The waves at Cortes Bank, pictured above, occur 100 miles offshore, but surfers take long boat rides out there to get their jollies. Yikes!

Want video? Click here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Vacation is good for the soul, but you miss stuff while you're away. Here are some images that have come across my desk in the last couple of weeks, which need to be shared.

Here's a NASA satellite one of the snow left behind by the New Year's storm that swept across the Midwest and Northeast, missing us.

Continue reading "Cool pictures we missed" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Here's a way-cool photo, shot yesterday by one of NASA's Earth Observing satellites, of the northeastern United States in the wake of the Dec. 5 snowstorm that swept across Maryland's northern counties. It was a sunny day, so the white you're seeing on the ground is snow cover. The white streaks out over the ocean are clouds.

I'm guessing the white on Lake Ontario is clouds, too - lake-effect snow in the air? Too early in the season for ice there.

My only complaint about these images is that NASA always feels compelled to superimpose the states' boundaries. I'd rather see it the way visiting aliens see the place. Here's more.

Continue reading "Our snow cover, seen from orbit" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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There's another big wildfire burning in the Malibu area in Southern California. A NASA satellite has snapped some dramatic pictures of the smoke drifting far off the coast in the northeast Santa Ana winds. Here's more.

And here's the AP story on the fire, with links to photos and video.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The Japanese research satellite Kaguya, now orbiting the moon, has sent back some remarkable movies showing the Earth rising over the lunar surface on Nov. 7. There are some other links from this page to other, very eerie movies taken as the satellite simply cruised above the barren moonscape. (When it asks you to install software for Japanese characters, just click on "cancel." You don't need them.)

These may be the first motion pictures we've seen of such things since the last Apollo astronauts returned from the moon in 1973. Credit goes to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Broadcasting Agency.

The text accompanying the images reminded me of something I'd forgotten:  Astronauts on the moon never see an Earthrise or Earthset. That's because the same side of the moon always faces the Earth. If you can see the Earth from where you are on the moon, that's pretty much where it will always be. It will go through moon-like phases, but it won't set unless you drive far from your base, and keep going until the big blue marble drops below the horizon.

Astronauts in orbit around the moon, of course, will see multiple Earthrises and Earthsets as they fly. And that's how Kaguya managed to get these videos.

But just look at that little orb rising above the lunar horizon. All life, all history that we know (aside from the spacecraft we've hurled off the planet) is contained on that speck. All our differences, all our hatreds, everything we love, everything we hope for in the future, rides on that same fragile sphere. And it is our life-support system. Screw it up, and we can't just pack and go home. That is home.

And here's yet another view of our planet, in true color, snapped last week by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft during a swing past Earth en route to land on a comet.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Scientists have turned the Hubble Space Telescope toward Comet Holmes in an effort to learn more about what caused the once-dim speck to blossom suddenly on October 23 into a naked-eye object in the evening sky. Here's the Web site that explains all, with lots of pictures of the comet and its nucleus - the size of Central Park.

UPDATE: Friday morning. When skies cleared last night I grabbed the binoculars and had another look at Holmes. I was amazed by how much bigger the cloud of dust and gas around the comet's nucleus has grown since my last look a week or more ago. Scientists say it is now about the same size as the sun, although it's a whole lot less substantial.

Holmes has become almost invisible to the naked eye - at least where I was observing - as it's expanded and dimmed. But it was easy to find in the binoculars. I also noticed how much Holmes has moved since my last look. It's rising higher in the northeastern sky in the evenings, closer to the apex of the triangle of stars I used to find Holmes a week ago.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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A visitor from deep space paid a brief visit to Earth yesterday, snapping pictures and then flying off for a landing on a distant comet. The visitor was the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft.

Launched in March 2004, Rosetta was programmed to fly to a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, arriving in 2014. There, it will land - the first spacecraft ever to make a controlled landing on a comet.

Getting to the comet, however, will require a series of planetary flybys to pick up a gravitational speed boost, including two swings past the Earth, and one past Mars.

On Tuesday, Rosetta zipped by our home planet, and scientists used the opportunity to switch on Rosetta's navigation camera and take some pictures. They show Earth and the moon as a visitor from outer space might see them. Looks pretty barren. Not much chance for life there, right? 

Or maybe there is. Here are some Rosetta shots of the nightside of the planet, city lights blazing. Who left the porch light on?

And finally, here is a pair of images taken through a telescope on the ground as Rosetta sped by. One shows the spacecraft as a faint streak across the starry background. The other tracked Rosetta, which appears as a white dot, while the stars are streaked by the long exposure.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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After a disappointing summer for East Coast surfers, Hurricane Noel last weekend finally delivered some of the best, most sustained surfing waves in recent memory, from New England to the Carolinas.

 Here's a link to some astonishing photos. Hang 10 surfer dudes and dudettes! (Click the "next" button to flip through the gallery of 38 photos.) Here are more. Yikes! And here's some kickin' video from YouTube. Those are Outer Banks waves, folks.

The first link provides some pretty savvy discussion of the offshore weather conditions that produced these epic (for the East Coast) waves.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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New pictures are coming in of Comet Holmes, this one an animation comparing the comet's appearance on successive nights, and showing its size relative to the size of Jupiter at a similar distance.

Here's a link to the Holmes photo gallery at SpaceWeather.com.

If you haven't seen it yet, step outside after dinner tonight, and look for a narrow triangle of stars below the (sideways) W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia, but above (and slightly to the right of) the bright star Capella - the brightest in that part of the sky. Holmes is the "star" on the left side of the base of that triangle.

But trust me - it's easier just to scan the sky below Cassiopeia with your binoculars. Holmes stands out because it is NOT just a pinpoint of light like a star. It's a striking gray blob, a fuzz ball. And it really is hard to miss. Or at least it has been all this week.

The Sun will run a story on the comet in Wednesday's paper. The forecast looks fairly good for continued opportunities all this week to see the comet. Don't miss it. And be sure to come back here afterwards and let everyone know what you saw and how you liked it. 

For a telescopic view of the comet, consider the Maryland Science Center's Friday open house, beginning at 7 p.m. Or, try the observatory at Johns Hopkins. Here's more from Chris Merchant:

Hi - I read your article on comet Holmes.  We are actually having a public viewing of the comet ... Wed. Oct. 31st and Thursday Nov. 1st at the Johns Hopkins observatory.

The viewings will be held from 9 p.m. until about 10:30 PM on both nights.  We'll be observing with our 20" telescope.

Info on getting here, etc., can be found from this page: http://www.mdspacegrant.org/observatory

Chris Merchant"

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
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NASA satellites have been snapping pictures today of both the California wildfires (yes, they're still burning) and Tropical Storm Noel, now soaking Haiti and eastern Cuba and menacing the Bahamas. They're very cool and worth a look.

Notice how the winds have shifted over the California fires. Last week they were Santa Ana winds, blowing from the Great basin to the Pacific and carrying the smoke out to sea. Now, they've reversed, and onshore winds are carrying the toxic smoke inland to parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah. Here's another shot, taken on the next orbit, 90 minutes later.

Here's the Noel image. And here's the latest advisory, the forecast storm track and another satellite view.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The California wildfires continue to send huge plumes of smoke out over the Pacific today. Satellite images (below) also show how near relief might have been, had Tropical Depression Kiko taken another course. But the storm, just off the tip of Mexico's Baja California province, is headed west, out to sea. Here's more.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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NASA's Earth-observing satellites have been snapping pictures this week of the devastating wildfires that have scorched southern California and burned hundreds out of their homes.

Here's one showing the smoke plumes streaming out over the Pacific Ocean.

Here's another showing how the fires blossomed in just a few hours on Sunday afternoon.

Here's one shot Monday. Amazing. The red dots show where infrared imagers spotted intense heat on the ground - fire.

And here's one shot today.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Baltimore's OTHER streetcorner astronomer, Darryl Mason, continues to do some marvelous astrophotography from well inside the Beltway. Here's what he describes as his most detailed picture ever of Saturn. The ringed planet is currently visible to the naked eye, in the eastern sky just before dawn. You can find it just to the left of brilliant Venus about an hour before dawn.

Darryl, who grew up off Liberty Road in Baltimore and began stargazing as a young boy, bought his first telescope from KMart when he was in high school, and has since graduated to some very impressive gear. He was elected president of the Baltimore Astronomical Society in 2002.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
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Using a variety of satellite data and imagery, NASA scientists and graphic artists have assembled two striking portraits of our little blue planet. It truly is a jewel. Read more here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A striking cluster of diamond-like young stars, nestled in a colorful gaseous nebula first discovered in 1834, is featured in the latest "Hubble Heritage" photo released by NASA and the European Space Agency.

The cluster, designated NGC 3603, is a relatively close neighbor of ours, located just 20,000 light years away in the Carina spiral arm of our own Milky Way galaxy. The crowded, star-forming region of the galaxy was photographed by Hubble in 2005, and the image was released this week as part of the Hubble Heritage project, a collection of the best images from the 17-year-old observatory.

For more, click here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Last week's launch of NASA's Dawn mission to the asteroid Vesta and "dwarf planet" Ceres came, coincidentally, at dawn on the East Coast. The weather was perfect and the liftoff made for some spectacular photography. This mosaic image is a good example. 

Dawn is now en route to the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Mission managers plan a 2011 rendezvous with Vesta, where Dawn will pause and orbit for six months. From there, it will push on to Ceres. Scientists hope to learn more about the chemistry, minerology and natural history of the two tiny worlds, and from that they expect to learn more about the formation of the solar system.

The flight - 4 billion miles around the solar - system is being powered by an ion propulsion engine. The fuel consists of solar power and 72 gallons of xenon gas. Amazing. Somebody asked me this morning why NASA can't provide that kind of gas mileage for the rest of us here on Earth. It would be nice, but you wouldn't like the acceleration - zero to 60 in four days.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A feelance videographer has shot some really nifty video of a waterspout that appeared off the beaches of Pensacola, Fla. It's posted at CNN.com  Here's a link.

Some waterspouts form when tornadoes form, or move over water. But most have different origins. Here's more.  

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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As you head outdoors this weekend to watch the annual Perseid meteor shower, compare the starry sky you see (assuming skies are clear) with this photo of the night sky at Yellowstone Park in northwest Wyoming.

The difference is light pollution. We have it. They don't. Just as trash obscures the beauty of our landscape, and air pollution obscures the view through our air, light pollution - unshielded electric lighting that is needlessly projected up instead of down where it's needed - obscures that night sky, and nearly all the stars and planets and the Milky Way that our ancestors knew so well.

It's our heritage, and it's been stolen from us. For more information, click here.

The Perseid shower has actually already begun, although the peak won't arrive duntil 1 a.m. Monday morning. Here is a gallery of Perseid photos that have already come in. Watch the gallery site for more. You can read more here. Here's the Saturday Sun story with more on the meteor shower.

And, if you do go out to watch the shower, come back here afterwards and let us know what you saw. Share the experience with those poor slackers who slept in.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Okay, so it's a long way from Maryland. But the weather on Mars is pretty interesting, and we sometimes have better imagery to look at. In this case, it's raging dust storm, and it threatens to obscure the sunlight long enough to rob NASA's twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, of their solar electric power.

That elecricity is vital to keeping the rovers' batteries charged and their innards warm and functioning. Deprived of sunlight long enough, and the two robots, now in the middle of their fourth year on the Martian surface, will die. Read more about it here.

Here are a pair of images from a Mars orbiter showing how the global dust storm has obscured the surface. 

And here is a satellite shot of a dust storm on Earth, over Pakistan and Afghanistan..

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Today is a special day in Manhattan. It is one of just two days each year on which the sun sets directly in the center of all the island's east-west street canyons. The other date is on or about May 28.

Some call the event "Manhattanhenge," suggesting the solar alignments of Britain's Stonehenge monuments. But Manhattan is different. It's tilted.

If the borough's street grid had been laid out precisely north and south, and east and west, the dates of the urban canyon sunrises and sunsets would coincide with the Vernal Equinox and the Autumnal Equinox, the dates when the sun rises and sets due east and west.

But, the city's designers pitched the grid 30 degrees east of due north, more closely aligned to the island's central axis. And that produces these two canyon sunsets a year, and two canyon sunrises (Dec. 5 and Jan. 8).

Baltimore's downtown street grid is aligned more precisely along the north-south, east-west map grid. Streetcorner astronomer Herman Heyn made a study of it all a few years back.

He found that the city's original surveyor, Philip Jones, Jr., used his magnetic compass to determine where north was. He got that right, but he did not correct for the difference between magnetic north and true north (the direction of the North Pole).

Because magnetic north at the time was 3.9 degrees west of true north in 1730, when Jones did his work, (magnetic north moves as the molten metal innards of our planet slosh about, and that shifts the magnetic field.), our streets are not perfectly aligned with true north.

In fact, Heyn found, the original north-south streets run between 2.9 degrees and 3.5 degrees west of true north. Still with me?

But 3 degrees is a far cry from 30 degrees, so our "Baltimorehenge" dates are more nearly matched up with the fall and spring equinoxes. (Because the angle of the sunrises and sunsets change so slowly, a day or two before or after these days would probably still yield a good photo opportunity.) Here are Heyn's calculations:

Sunrises: Sept. 18 and March 25

Sunsets: Sept. 29 and March 12

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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In the risk-taking spirit of its human pioneer forebears, the Mars rover Opportunity is about to plunge into a crater from which it may never return.

NASA's Mars rover program has been so phenomenally successful over the past 3 1/2 years, with both rovers surviving years beyond their original mission profiles, that the space agency has decided to risk half the fleet by sending one of the robot explorers into a steep crater.

Opportunity is preparing to crawl over the lip of Victoria crater, a deep divot in the bleak Martian plains, in the hope that it will survive to plumb the geological history that's written into the crater walls.

"The rovers are getting older," said one mission leader. "It's kinda like sending your grandmother down the steep slope. You think she can make it, but you're a little concerned she might slip and fall and injure herself."

Click here for more. And here's some video about the decision.

You can see MArs with your own eyes if skies are clear and you're willing to step outside in the wee hours of the morning. The red planet is rising in the southeast this week just before 2 a.m. Tomorrow, the 4th, marks the winter solstice on Mars.

For more stellar fireworks in the sky, check this out. It's the latest from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The crew of the International Space Station in April captured an interesting shot of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Southern Maryland. The astronauts like to use the airbase's crossed runways as a sort of test pattern for fine-tuning their cameras. Have a look.

There's another orbital photo of Maryland out this morning. It was taken Sunday by one of NASA's Earth-observing satellites. Click here. It was a beautiful day whether you were looking up from Maryland, or down on it. Here's one more, taken Monday by NASA's Terra satellite. Clear skies all around the state.

Speaking of looking up, here's one of the most amazing pictures ever taken of the International Space Station - from the ground!  It was snapped a couple of weeks ago while the shuttle Atlantis was docked to the station. 

Continue reading "Pax River NAS, from space" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The folks at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics lab have made their first image release from the data collected during last week's flyby of the planet Venus by NASA's Messenger spacecraft. They're photos only a space nerd can love. Venus is shrouded in clouds, and looks pretty much like a billiard ball in visible wavelengths. But scientists have much more than visible-light cameras in Messenger's tool box, and we should learn much more in the weeks ahead.

That said, the images of a receding crescent Venus as Messenger sped away are beautiful, almost cinematic. To a space nerd. Have a look for yourself. And here's more info on Venus. You can see the planet with your naked eye on any clear evening this month. It's the brilliant star-like object in the western sky after sunset.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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NASA's Terra Earth-observing satellite snapped a fine picture of the Southeastern U.S. just after noon on Sunday, showing why most of the region enjoyed clear, sunny skies and mild, dry weather. The snapshot shows some broken cloudiness over Maryland, and the persistent smoke from wildfires in northern Florida and southern Georgia. Click on the photo to enlarge it.

And the picture just gets better as the week progresses. The official forecast looks a lot like the forecast for Honolulu. Maybe better. It calls for mostly sunny skies through Friday, with daytime highs in the 70s and overnight lows in the 50s. (Cooler than Honolulu, for sure, but drier.) 

Enjoy it. This is the weather you'll pine for come July.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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NASA's Terra Earth-observing satellite has captured an astonishing photo of the smoke from wildfires that have been burning for weeks in Georgia and Florida. The smoke has blown south and west, over Florida and out across the Gulf of Mexico. It is quite a sight. Have a look.  Thanks to the folks at Goddard Space Flight Center for the tip.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The quality is not so great - it was dark, after all. But tornado chasers at tornadolive.com managed to capture several glimpses - in lightning flashes - of the huge, F-5 "wedge" tornado that leveled Greensburg, Kan. over the weekend. And their reactions to what they were witnessing convey something of the awe and fear they felt in the face of one of the most powerful tornados to strike the U.S. in years. Click here.

For more on the Fujita Scale of tornado intensity, click here. Here's a list of the F-5 twisters that have struck the U.S., the most recent in 1999. And here's a list of the top-10 killer tornadoes in our past.

The miraculous thing about this F-5 tornado in Greensburg was that it killed so few people - fewer than 10 in a community of 1,500. Modern forecasting and warning systems have reduced the number of tornado deaths in recent years, despite increasing populations and exposure. But the devastation in Greensburg was enormous. Here are some still photos.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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One of the key public Web sites operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute to disseminate news and discoveries generated by the Hubble Space Telescope, has won a Webby. HubbleSite was named the best science Web site for 2007. Webbies are the top international honors for Internet sites.

Here's the release from the HubbleSite. Here's a link to the Webby folks. And here's a link to the HubbleSite itself. And be sure to visit their amazing Gallery of Hubble images.

Congratulations to all the folks at STScI in Baltimore who have a part in putting HubbleSite together each day. It's a winner!

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The wildfires down in Georgia continue to burn and they're sending palls of smoke wafting across portions of Georgia, Florida and out over the Atlantic. The plumes are easily visible from orbit. 

There are actually three fire complexes. The newest is the Roundabout fire, which began Friday and has already charred 3,500 acres of land, threatening nearby homes. The Sweat Farm Road fire to the southeast has been burning for weeks across 50,000 acres. It has already destroyed many homes, and is threatening scores more, although most of the damage has been to timberland and swamp.

The Sweat Farm Road blaze has nearly merged with the Big Turnaround Complex fire, which has burned more than 26,000 acres. 

Fire fighters say there is no end in sight to these fires. The best news would be an extended period of rain. But as this Drought Monitor Map shows quite clearly, southeast Georgia is suffering through a period of extreme drought. The woods are tinder dry. Dare we wish them an early tropical storm? Here's a story on the grim fire weather outlook.

The direction the smoke takes is dependent on the wind direction, of course. Here's a photo taken yesterday by NASA's Aqua Earth-observing satellite. A pair of shots made the day before shows the smoke plume blowing out over the Atlantic.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Astronomers say temperatures on their newly-discovered planet Gliese 581c are within the range in which water would be liquid. It's circling an unremarkable red dwarf star called Gliese 581, and close enough so that even the star's relatively weak light would be enough to keep the planet mild - in the star's "habitable zone."

No evidence available yet to determine whether anything's breathing in Gliese 581c. But you can bet scientists will be doing everything they can think of to tease any hint of life from any candidate planet they find. Anyway, here's what Gliese 581 - the star - looks like from here. Pretty nondescript. I would imagine we look almost as obscure to anyone - or anything - looking back at us. Here's what the place might look like. Here's an artist's view from the surface. Very cool.

For their sake, I hope it's warmer and sunnier there today than it is here. It's 54 degrees at Calvert & Centre this morning, barely a degree warmer than the overnight low. Gray skies and cool weather will continue. Our forecast high today is only 58, quite a comedown from the 80-degree weather we were enjoying earlier in the week.

Look for rain later today, tonight and tomorrow as the next cold front stomps through. We can use it. Hasn't rained in any measurable amounts in 10 days. Here's the official forecast from Sterling. We'll live for the weekend - sunny and 70s.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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As a cool front inches down on us from central Pennsylvania today, the sun will be less and less in evidence. We could even see some showers or thundershowers. But the sun is still up there somewhere, and thanks to NASA's STEREO mission we can now see it in 3-D.

Here's a photograph of the sun as it appears in ultraviolet light, which captures emissions from the hottest regions of the sun's upper atmosphere, or corona - more than 2 million degrees. You'll need red-and-cyan (blue) 3-D glasses to get the threee-dimensional effect. So dig deep into the family junk drawer, find those old 3-D glasses and have a look.

You can find even more 3-D images of the sun at NASA's STEREO site. And you can read today's story in The Sun. Just click here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Were it not for the Virginia Tech story, the top national news this week might well be the beating they're taking in New England from the nor'easter that tromped through here Monday. Here's the Boston Globe story. Be sure to click on the "readers photos" link. There's video linked from this storm coverage page.

The intense low at the center of this storm continues to spin offshore, and we remain under its influence. Early Monday it brought us the lowest barometer reading at BWI in 15 years, and our cool, gray skies since then are coming to us from the north as winds sweep counter-clockwise down the west side of the circulation. Here's the radar loop. Here's the view from orbit.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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There's a big wildfire burning in Georgia, and the smoke plume extends clear into northern Florida. Get a load of this satellite image. Here's how it looks close up. And here's how the Florida Times-Union, in Jacksonville, covered it.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Not a lot to write about when the weather is like this. Sunny, in the 60s, with trees in blossom everywhere. Thought you'd like to see what a beautiful day in Maryland looks like from the other side of the atmosphere. Here's a shot (click on the photo at right), snapped at midday Thursday by NASA's Terra Earth Observing Satellite, showing the eastern United States from orbit. Clear skies prevailed over Maryland. Looks like a bit of ice remaining in Lake Erie. Clouds to our south and west. You can even see the spring green-up moving our way from the South. For a closer look, click here, and then on the image. Rest your cursor over the picture when it pops up, then click on the enlarger button that appears at lower right.

The forecast shows some showers moving in for much of the weekend. The barometer has been falling sharply since late this morning. But temperatures will remain pleasant.

Forecasters looking ahead well into next week, however, see a new invasion of cold air from the Canadian arctic. That's got a few prognosticators watching computer models that suggest a storm system running along the edge of that cold air could bring an Easter snow to the Midwest, or Tennessee, the Appalachians or the Middle Atlantic states. Here's AccuWeather's Henry "Always-Ready-to-Predict-Snow-for-the-East-Coast" Margusity on the prospects. But all that's a long way off. Lots can change.

On the other hand, if you think snow is impossible in Maryland in April, here's something from the NWS you should read:

"April 27-28, 1928:  A late season heavy snow storm struck western Maryland. A nor'easter brought heavy snow, sleet and rain to Frederick, Washington, and Allegany Counties with rain and gale force winds east of there. The Allegheny Mountain highlands received 25 to 30 inches of snow. Oakland reported 16 inches. It all melted within two to three days causing the upper Potomac River to flood. Telegraph, telephone and electric services were completely knocked out. Damages to these services were estimated at $200,000 (1928) dollars. High winds accompanied the storm. In Middletown, Frederick County, a number of houses were unroofed and many trees were uprooted, signs and outbuildings blown down, and the baseball park grandstand was demolished. In Baltimore, the press stand at the stadium was unroofed, several plate glass store windows blown in, signs and billboards blown down, and trees were uprooted."

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Ever wonder about the difference between a tornado and a dust devil?  Well, as we've seen on TV and in The Sun this morning, tornadoes are much larger and more destructive, and they arise from entirely different weather phenomena.

For a taste of what they're like up close, check out this mesmerizing YouTube video of tornadoes. And compare it with this video, my favorite shots of an amazing dust devil in Japan.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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There's no life as we know it on Saturn. The giant, ringed planet doesn't even have a surface. It's composed almost entirely of gas. But NASA's Cassini spacecraft has spied a strange geometric shape at Saturn's north pole. It's a hexagon, and a big one - twice as wide as the Earth. It has formed in the planet's atmosphere surrounding the pole. Here's the story on SpaceWeather.com

It's been spotted before. The Voyager spacecraft sent back photos of the same phenomenon back in 1980. Here's the Voyager image (left), alongside a Hubble photo (right).  But the thing still has scientists baffled. It could be some sort of polar vortex, like Earth's. Except that ours is a circle. The best explanation so far relates the hexagon to a phenomenon noticed in spinning buckets of water. Spin them fast enough, and the water sloshes to the sides of the bucket, leaving an air space in the center which, at increasing speeds, assumes a regular geometric shape.

Just how that relates to Saturn's spinning atmosphere isn't clear yet, but it seems like they ought to be related somehow. One thing seems safe to say: It's not a Saturnian star fort.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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On Thursday morning, NASA's Terra Earth Observing Satellite captured this nice shot of Maryland the the other mid-Atlantic states as we basked in 70-degree weather under hazy skies. You can see today's rainy weather, headed this way, from the west. But notice the gray haze of tiny airborne particles called aerosols smeared across Maryland and the rest of the Piedmont.

Rainfall today, tonight and tomorrow will clear the air. Here's the Northeast radar loop. We're stuck under a stalled cold front, but it should move on Saturday night. We'll see a nice Sunday, and a better week ahead. Look for a very chilly Monday, followed by rapid warming as the week unfolds.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Japan's new Hinode ("Sunrise") solar observatory - sometimes called a Hubble for the sun - is sending back some spectacular, and scientifically important movies of action in the sun's chromosphere. Click here to go to the NASA page that links to the movie. Click once on the photo on the NASA page, then be patient. It took about 30 seconds for it to load on my home computer (DSL).

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Sure the stuff we buy from China is cheap. Low wage rates, plentiful labor, skimpy benefits and rudimentary environmental controls keep prices down. But look at the environmental costs. This is a satellite image, taken this week, of the haze over a part of China on the Yellow Sea. Much of the haze is industrial pollution. You may have lost your union job to a Chinese factory. But at least you don't have to breathe this stuff en route to your job at Wal-Mart. At least, not until their air drifts over here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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And you thought adjusting to an hour's time change was tough? Imagine adjusting to a day that lasted just 10 hours - five hours from sunrise to sunset, and just five hours of darkness.

That's life on Jupiter, if there is any. And now NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft has photographed a single day in the life of the solar system's largest planet. The animation was assembled by scientists working for the $700 million mission, using a series of stills taken as the spacecraft approached the gas giant this winter. It shows one full rotation. (Click on the image to set it spinning. If it's sort of jerky, let it play out, then run it a second time. It should smooth out, depending on your Internet connection speed. Be patient during the download.)

New Horizons is on its way toward a 2015 rendezvous with the dwarf planet Pluto, and last month passed within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter's center. The flyby gave it a gavitational speed boost needed to trim three years from the journey.

Jupiter's diameter is 11 times that of Earth, but its 10-hour rotation is less than half as long as Earth's 24-hour day.

The New Horizons mission is being managed by the Johns Hopkins University's applied Physics Lab near Laurel, and the spacecraft itself is being controlled from the Mission Operations Center at APL.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The Maryland-built and Hopkins-operated New Horizons spacecraft snapped a spectacular photo of the Tvashtar volcano last week as it soared past Io, the innermost of Jupiter's Gallilean moons. It caught the Texas-sized volcano in the middle of a huge eruption, shooting debris more than 150 miles into space. The material - much of it sulfur - from Io's volcanic eruptions coats the little moon. Some of it flies off into space, orbiting Jupiter, falling into its atmosphere and creating aurorae, or getting swept up by the solar wind.

To read more, click here. For a New Horizons photo gallery, click here.

New Horizons, launched in January 2006, is en route to the (dwarf) planet Pluto in 2015, and then off into the icy Kuiper Belt beyond. The $700 million mission is mankind's first to Pluto. It is being managed by the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Here's a God's-eye view of the results of last week's snow and ice storm in the Northeast, from Virginia to Maine, including the Chesapeake Bay and Lake Ontario. You'll have to scroll some to find Maryland, but the satellite photo shows very clearly who got white stuff and who didn't. Click here and enjoy.  Thanks to the Goddard Space Flight Center and to Bruce Sullivan, of COCORAHS.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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AccuWeather has posted a small gallery of photos from upstate New York, where persistent lake-effect snows have buried a swath of countrside downwind of Lake Ontario. It's worth a look. Maybe it will get you in the mood for next week's snow here! Ha!  Click here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Australians who turned out recently for a fireworks display on a beach in Perth were treated to a multi-media show they may never have expected. Comet McNaught appeared through the clouds on the far horizon, and a spectacular burst of lightning provided a striking addition to the display. Click here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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In addition to the lack of snow, Baltimore saw a quite a bit less rain than normal in December and January - about 2.5 inches short of the 30-year average.

That, it turns out, is consistent with the pattern that typically emerges during an El Nino event, the periodic, abnormal warming of surface waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Using its Earth-observing satellites, NOAA has documented the scarce precipitation in the East, as well as surpluses in other parts of the country as a consequence, in part, of the El Nino event, which is now waning. To see, and read, more, click here.

On the map, yellow corresponds with dry weather, green with wet.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Common sense says, when it's slippery, stay home. If it's slippery underfoot, it's probably slippery under tire. Don't drive. Curl up with the newspaper. Take a snooze. Wait for the salt trucks to pass. If you don't, this could happen to you: Click here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Comet McNaught is putting on a fabulous display for the Southern Hemisphere. If you have deep pockets, it would be worth spending the money to fly to Australia for a look. Check this out.

McNaught was visible from the Northern Hemisphere a few weeks ago, and some people in Maryland managed to catch a glimpse. Others tried and couldn't find it (me). But no one saw a display like this. Some say it's even visible in daylight. Wow. Here's a gallery of McNaught photos.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The Heritage team at the Space Telescope Science Institute has released a beautiful image of a cluster of young stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud - a small galaxy in the southern sky that orbits our own Milky Way Galaxy. Here's the image. Click on it to enlarge.

Here's the caption that explains what we're looking at. And here's the Hubble Heritage Web page. Enjoy.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Several readers have complained about the little photo of me that accompanies this blog. Several said I need to get my glasses out of my mouth. Unsanitary, they said. I admit it's not much to look at. So how about this one, instead?  Seems fitting.

(With apologies to Frank Zamfino and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.)

Posted by Frank Roylance at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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This is so cool. A morning TV crew in Denver broadcast live images today of a spent Russian rocket body as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. Surprised and startled, the anchors and a traffic 'copter pilot described it as a "meteor shower." But it was way too slow and dense to be a meteor shower. Click here to link to the video. Then, click on the thumbnail image at the bottom.

Since then it has been identified as the spent booster from a Russian rocket used to launch the French COROT space telescope on Dec. 27.

The debris train reminds me of the images of the shuttle Columbia as it broke up on re-entry Feb. 1, 2003. Meteor showers are never this dense and always much faster. There were no reports of any injuries from the falling debris. It's possible little if any reached the ground, but authorities are looking for some pieces in Wyoming. Here's the ground track for the rocket's final orbit.

Click it to enlarge.

Observers in New Mexico saw it, too. Here's one of their reports, from a satellite observers' list serve:

"The decay was visible from Albuquerque as well. My husband viewed it on his way to work this morning at 6:15 and said it was spectacular and unlike anything he's ever seen before. Other traffic stopped to watch it along I-40. - Becky Ramotowski"

And speaking of stuff falling from space, click here for more.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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OK, here's a second chance for everyone who slept through the dawn launch of that Minotaur 1 rocket last Saturday from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, on Wallops Island, Va. Geoff Chester, of the U.S. Naval Observatory, was in Alexandria, Va. when he shot this amazing photo (click on it to enlarge)

of the rocket's wind-tossed contrail seconds after liftoff. The rocket itself is a barely visible smudge above and to the left of the top of the smoke trail. That's the crescent moon at upper right.

The view is essentially the same as I had from the front window of my house in Cockeysville (except that I was too dumbstruck to grab my camera). The Minotaur, carrying two experimental satellites, for the Air Force and NASA, jumped up from the southeastern horizon atop a column of smoke. We were able to watch one staging event - the shutdown of one stage, a pause, and then the ignition of the next. As the wind began to contort the contrail, the rocket itself remained visible for a time as a spot of bright light, and a comet-like tail, before disappearing. It took a half hour or more for the contrail to dissipate and vanish amid the morning clouds and bright sunshine. Both satellites made it to orbit and are functioning as planned.

Boosters of the regional spaceport are hoping the success will attract more launch business,  and bigger rockets, to the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, where the spaceport is located. If they realize their dream, we should be able to watch many more such launches from Baltimore and Washington. As it is, the next Minotaur is scheduled for liftoff from Wallops in April. Another is planned for October. 

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Still more than 8 1/2 years from its encounter with the planet - er, make that "dwarf" planet - Pluto, NASA's New Horizons mission has captured its first image of the tiny world. It's not too impressive, barely a dot in a dense field of stars. But because the dot moved against that starry backdrop as astronomers predicted Pluto should, they're convinced they've gotten their first glimpse of their mission's target, still some 2.6 billion miles away.

New Horizons was designed and built at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab near Laurel. It was launched last Jan. 19, and is already approaching a February flyby of Jupiter. Its scientific encounter with Pluto is expected in July 2015. I plan to watch from my rocker.

No point trying to spot Pluto from the back yard. It's way too small and distant to be visible without a good telescope. And besides, it's currently in the daytime sky.

But Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Mercury are slowly emerging from the sun's glare, and will soon be visible again - Venus low in the west after sunset, and Jupiter, Mercury and Mars in a tight cluster in the east before dawn. Saturn is rising after 10 p.m. More on this as they become easier to see.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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One of the most striking effects of the events of Sept. 11, 2001 was the rapid grounding of all air traffic over the United States. For a day or two, the skies were absolutely clear of jet contrails, and a remarkably clear blue. Some data suggested that overnight cooling increased measurably after 9/11 as the clear air allowed more heat to radiate back into space. Daytime solar heating also increased.

Last Saturday, NASA's Terra earth-observing satellite captured an image of Midwestern skies, as holiday air traffic crisscrossed the region leaving a web of lingering jet contrails. It's easy to see in the photo how persistent and spreading contrails could impact temperatures - either by trapping heat beneath them, or reflecting incoming solar radiation.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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High school football games under the lights remind me of the night, just before 8 p.m. on Oct. 9, 1992 when a huge meteor swept across the Middle Atlantic states. The spectacular fireball was noticed and captured on video tape by many people who were attending local football games from Virginia to New York State.

Better still, a fragment of the meteor the size of a bowling ball was recovered - after it smashed into the trunk of a parked car in Peekskill, N.Y., doing more than a little damage. The video record - and the recovered meteorite fragment - were a bonanza for scientists. Fourteen years later the video images remain some of the best documentation of a large meteor's entry into the Earth's atmosphere ever captured. If you ever see one of these "bolides" in person, you'll never forget it.

Here is a description of the event. And here is a collection of amazing video clips of the meteor in flight. I recommend the ones from Anne Arundel County, Md., Johnstown, and Saltsburg, Pa.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Cool pictures
        

That was one amazing photo from yesterday's powerful rainstorm - cars sloshing up the JFX in Baltimore, through deep water even on the elevated section of the highway near Monument Street. You hear about flooding on the JFX and you wonder, "Where the devil does the high water come from?" Now you know. It just piles up in heavy downpours, and doesn't drain fast enough.

Anyway, it was a heckuva lot of rain in barely two hours. We clocked 2.07 inches here at The Sun. Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport saw 2.35 inches. We're now running 2.8 inches ahead of the normal pace for 2006, and more than 1.5 inches above the average for November - with two weeks to go.

Here is the link to the National Weather Service storm reports. Just click through all the little numbered reports at the top of the page. It's quite a record of flooding, stranded motorists, downed trees, drowned intersections and other disruptions.

And get a load of these tides: (Click on the graph it if you can't see it all.)