Dogs have that wonderful ability to savour the moment and just enjoy the present. Seems to me that there is just a bit too much going on at the moment in the big wide world and we could do a lot worse than take a chair out into the garden, or wherever, and enjoy the majesty of one of the light shows that the universe can put on.
But first an acknowledgement to Mike Shedlock, more details here. I subscribe to his daily newsletter and it was there that, rather uncharacteristically for an economic blog, I saw the reference to the Perseids meteor shower which, annually, provides vivid viewing for us earth-bound creatures this time of the year.
A celestial traffic jam may be on tap this week as two meteor showers combine forces to put on a brilliant sky show.
One of the best shooting star events of the year is the annual August Perseid meteor shower. (See Perseids pictures.) However this year’s peak, on August 12, happens to coincide with a bright full moon—drastically cutting down the number of meteors visible to the naked eye.
Yet while the main event might be blocked out by the blinding moonlight, the opening act promises to be much better.
This year the lesser known Delta Aquarid meteor shower is expected to peak on Friday night, when the Delta Aquarids’ more productive Perseid cousin is just starting to ramp up.
Together the showers will produce anywhere between 15 and 30 shooting stars per hour under clear, dark skies.
If this tickles your fancy then go to that article and read how best to view this wonderful sky show.
We haven’t seen them from this part of the world (i.e. Payson, Arizona), but down in South-West England it was easy to get up onto the moors (Dartmoor). Sunset at this time of the year down in Devon is around 7pm local time and by 8pm there was often a beautiful cloudless night sky.
Wikipedia has some good background information on the Perseid meteor shower including, what I didn’t realise, that,
The Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, with the earliest information on this meteor shower coming from the Far East. Some Catholics refer to the Perseids as the “tears of St. Lawrence“, since 10 August is the date of that saint’s martyrdom.
I think most people are aware, again from Wikipedia, that,
The shower is visible from mid-July each year, with the peak in activity being between August 9 and 14, depending on the particular location of the stream. During the peak, the rate of meteors reaches 60 or more per hour. They can be seen all across the sky, but because of the path of Swift-Tuttle’s orbit, Perseids are primarily visible in the northern hemisphere. As with all meteor showers, the rate is greatest in the pre-dawn hours, since the side of the Earth nearest to turning into the sun scoops up more meteors as the Earth moves through space.
But to come back to the National Geographic piece, as above, this year could be better than normal. As I wrote,
This year the lesser known Delta Aquarid meteor shower is expected to peak on Friday night, when the Delta Aquarids’ more productive Perseid cousin is just starting to ramp up.
Together the showers will produce anywhere between 15 and 30 shooting stars per hour under clear, dark skies.
So I know it could be a tough choice – politics or standing in awe under a night sky – but, go on, force yourself!
The wonderful combination of paragliding and flying with hawks.
Thanks to Dan Gomez for passing me a short video about this amazing activity. It was a matter of moments to find out the background. But first a picture.
Copyright Scott Mason
There’s a full description of the history of parahawking, as it is called, on WikiPedia.
Parahawking is a unique activity combining paragliding with elements of falconry. Birds of prey are trained to fly with paragliders, guiding them to thermals for in-flight rewards and performing aerobatic maneouvres.
Parahawking was developed by British falconer Scott Mason in 2001. Mason began a round-the-world trip in Pokhara, Nepal, where many birds of prey – such as the griffon vulture, steppe eagle andblack kite – can be found. While taking a tandem paragliding flight with British paraglider Adam Hill, he had the opportunity to see raptors in flight, and realized that combining the sport of paragliding with his skills as a falconer could offer others the same experience. He has been based in Pokhara ever since, training and flying birds during the dry season between September and March.
The team started by training two black kites, but have since added an Egyptian vulture and a Mountain hawk-eagle to the team. Only rescued birds are used – none of the birds has been taken from the wild.
There’s an interesting website for those that want to take a closer including more details about Scott Mason and his team here.
Just some wonderful pictures of people and their pet dogs!
It’s 2pm Mountain Time on the 28th. I wanted to get a deeper post written for tomorrow (today as you are reading this!) but somehow too many things have been happening today.
So I’m ‘cheating’ and using a recent email sent to me by Cynthia Gomez, Dan’s lovely wife, that was called When your dog is your best friend. It contained some fabulous photographs of people and their pet dogs. A quick Google search showed that they came from a website devoted to finding homes for pets, Just One More Pet. Enjoy the pics.
Cute dog!Even matching helmets!Makes your heart skip as well!A team of two.Cool rider, man!Difficult to resist!I love a good frisk!A beautiful bond - always!
Thanks Cynthia for sharing those – heart-melting stuff!
A focus on Tim Bennett’s movie, What a Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
We first came across this film, made by independent film-maker Tim Bennett, on the Top Documentary Films website, see here. The title to this article comes from that introduction, from which is quoted,
Tim Bennett, middle-class white guy, started waking up to the global environmental nightmare in the mid-1980s. But life was so busy with raising kids and pursuing the American dream that he never got around to acting on his concerns. Until now…
Bennett journeys from complacency to consciousness in his feature-length documentary, What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. He reviews his Midwestern roots, ruthlessly examines the stories he was raised with, and then details the grim realities humans now face: escalating climate change, resource shortages, degraded ecosystems, an exploding global population and teetering global economies.
Now to be honest, this is a film that is both captivating and, in parts, pretty grim. A couple of trailers and other background material were posted on Learning from Dogs back in February.
The film also has an excellent web site What a Way To Go Movie which contains much background material including the opportunity to watch the film for free, click here. Or a quick YouTube search will bring you to here.
My own view is that this is a ‘must see’ film. Not because I want all of you to wallow in doom and gloom, far from it, but because, as Paul Gilding writes in his book, The Great Disruption, the quicker that mankind recognises the massive levels of denial presently in place, the quicker that mankind will commit to the scale of change that is required. That’s where Paul Gilding’s approach differs from the movie, The End of Empire. Gilding is optimistic that man will bring about change simply because fairly soon, in just a few years, it will be obvious at all levels in our societies that there simply is no choice!
I subscribe to Naked Capitalism, as many of you will be aware, and in their 20th July release were the following photos,
In fact, a quick Google search reveals that the photographs have been widely circulated over recent years and in all probability the source and original story are long lost by now.
I love taking photographs but this takes the cake!
(Note: there’s an option in WordPress to insert a ‘read more‘ link, the effect of which is to limit what you, dear reader, can see when you first come to a Blog article. I prefer normally not to insert that link. But for reasons that will soon be very obvious, it has to be used in this Post.)
It is a stunning image and one that is bound to be reproduced over and over again whenever they recall the history of the US space shuttle.
The picture was taken by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli as he left the International Space Station in May in a Soyuz capsule to return to Earth.
Safety procedures mean the Russian vehicle would never normally be in transit when a shuttle is present.
It makes this the first-ever image of an American orbiter docked to the ISS.
Endeavour sits firmly on the bow of the station, which is moving across the surface of the Earth at a speed of 27,000km/h (17,000mph) and at an altitude of approximately 355km (220 miles).
Nespoli’s camera is looking along the ISS’s truss, or backbone, which carries the four sets of giant solar wings. The stern is occupied by Europe’s robotic freighter – the Johannes Kepler ship.
The pictures were acquired on 23 May but were only released by the US space agency (Nasa) on Tuesday [7th June, PH]. They had been eagerly awaited by space fans.
Nespoli had spent a lot of time during his 159-day stay at the station taking pictures of Earth and life aboard the international outpost. Many of these images were posted on his mission Flickr account. It was widely expected therefore that the European Space Agency astronaut would get some excellent shots during the unique departure.
Enthusiasts on the ground with telescopes routinely try to snap a shuttle attached to the ISS, and some of the results have been very impressive. But none of these pictures compares to the majestic portrait acquired by Nespoli so close to the orbiting complex.
The timing and subject are also perfect. Endeavour is seen here making her final sortie into orbit, making the last big US assembly item delivery – a $2bn particle physics experiment known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The seven-tonne machine now sits on top of the platform.
Endeavour was also the orbiter chosen to take up the first American segment of the platform when the project had just got started in the late 1990s.
The youngest of Nasa’s shuttles returned to Earth on 1 June and will now be prepared for public display at a science museum in California. Sister ship Atlantis stands ready on the launch pad in Florida for a swansong of her own in July. Once her mission is done, no orbiter will ever fly again.
Nespoli’s crewmates in the Soyuz were Russian cosmonaut and Expedition 27 commander Dmitry Kondratyev; and Nasa astronaut Cady Coleman. Apart from the photo opportunity, their departure was a standard ISS crew rotation flight.
Their replacements blasted off from Kazakhstan on Tuesday in another Soyuz vehicle. Nasa astronaut Mike Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa are scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Thursday, raising its complement once again to six individuals.
The venerable Soyuz will be the only way for astronauts and cosmonauts to reach the platform in the years following the retirement of the shuttle fleet.
Nasa hopes some US commercial carriers will become available in the middle of the decade.
The NASA weblink attributed above is here, from which can be read,
This image of the International Space Station and the docked space shuttle Endeavour, flying at an altitude of approximately 220 miles, was taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking on May 23, 2011 (USA time). The pictures taken by Nespoli are the first taken of a shuttle docked to the International Space Station from the perspective of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Onboard the Soyuz were Russian cosmonaut and Expedition 27 commander Dmitry Kondratyev; Nespoli, a European Space Agency astronaut; and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman. Coleman and Nespoli were both flight engineers. The three landed in Kazakhstan later that day, completing 159 days in space.
Do go to the NASA website here as there are a total of 40 stunning images.
Tens of millions of stars, the glowing factories of newborn ones, and a rich tapestry of dust all floating on a stage of unimaginable proportions.
The image is from the Photopic Sky Survey website. From which also comes the following,
What do you see? This was the anthropic question of a year-long photographic project dubbed the Photopic Sky Survey, meant to reveal the entire night sky as if it rivalled the brightness of day. In it we see tens of millions of stars, the glowing factories of newborn ones, and a rich tapestry of dust all floating on a stage of unimaginable proportions. I hope you enjoy this new view of our place in the universe as much as I have enjoyed making it.
The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.
Well done, Nick Risinger, for all your efforts and for presenting such a magnificent detailed view of the heavens above.
Plus, more or less the same time, this came to my attention, from the BBC News website.
A Hubble classic: The Crab Nebula is about 6,500 light-years from Earth
The Crab Nebula has shocked astronomers by emitting an unprecedented blast of gamma rays, the highest-energy light in the Universe.
It seems to have come from a small area of the famous nebula, which is the wreckage from an exploded star.
The object has long been considered a steady source of light, but the Fermi telescope hints at greater activity.
The gamma-ray emission lasted for some six days, hitting levels 30 times higher than normal and varying at times from hour to hour.
While the sky abounds with light across all parts of the spectrum, Nasa’s Fermi space observatory is designed to measure only the most energetic light: gamma rays.
These emanate from the Universe’s most extreme environments and violent processes.
The Crab Nebula is composed mainly of the remnant of a supernova, which was seen on Earth to rip itself apart in the year 1054.
At the heart of the brilliantly coloured gas cloud we can see in visible light, there is a pulsar – a rapidly spinning neutron star that emits radio waves which sweep past the Earth 30 times per second. But so far none of the nebula’s known components can explain the signal Fermi sees, said Roger Blandford, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, US.
Beautiful images that will make appreciate the majesty of wild animals.
First a big thank you to Mary and Ed G. for passing me an email that contained fabulous photographs of the polar bear playing with a husky dog. From that email it was the matter of a few moments to find more on the Internet.
Let’s start with a YouTube video of a short talk by Stuart Brown called Animals at Play.
Then another YouTube video that is from FirstScience TV, which appears to be a defunct website.
These charming pictures were taken by renowned nature photographer Norbert Rosing, whose work has appeared inNational Geographic and other magazines, as well as several books including The World of the Polar Bear (Firefly Books, 1996), in which Rosing recounts the story of how these particular photographs came to be taken.
The location was a kennel outside Churchill, Manitoba owned by dog breeder Brian Ladoon, who kept some 40 Canadian Eskimo sled dogs there when Rosing visited in 1992. A large polar bear showed up one day and took an unexpected interest in one of Ladoon’s tethered dogs. The other dogs went crazy as the bear approached, Rosing says, but this one, named Hudson, “calmly stood his ground and began wagging his tail.” To Rosing and Ladoon’s surprise, the two “put aside their ancestral animus,” gently touching noses and apparently trying to make friends.
Just beautiful!
If you want to watch the whole sequence of photographs including background notes to each picture, click here.
Learning from Dogs 