Samwise rides again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPMVWUhW1Rs

Louise explains some of the advantages of life in Hawai’i and it’s potential for the future of space travel.

Alasdair got interviewed for the Guardian Science Podcast this week. He is talking about Google Sky and what it will mean to researchers. I am looking to talk to Alasdair over a couple of beers when I see him next month at ADASS about similar things as he has been hacking Google Sky to work with PLASTIC.

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As mentioned on this blog here and here, Google have for a while now been extending their GoogleEarth software to point out into the sky.

Well, as metioned here and here it’s now available in beta form for your enjoyment.

Cool.

Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.

Imagery for the system came from six research institutions including the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, the Palomar Observatory in California and the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre.

While we are doing the ol’ Astronomy news today, Aunty are reporting on the status of SCUBA-2, an instrument which, hopefully, will be joining us in Hawai’i soon ;O)

The patented new technology could also have applications in fighting terrorism and detecting cancer.

… but primarily for doing submillimetre astronomy.

UPDATE : Alasdair gets a nice mention on the Ogle Earth blog …

Here’s why Google Sky is going to change astronomy as we know it: Because an astronomer like Alasdair Allan can spend an afternoon converting an astronomical events feed into KML, and suddenly millions of Google Earth clients can spatially visualize these.

From AstroDyke …

Mary Masterman, 17, from Oklahoma just won the Intel science fair’s top prize, a $100,000 scholarship. For her science fair project, she built a Littrow spectrograph at home for under $1000, to do Raman spectroscopy of household solvents.

Cool.

FYI from maryspectra.org …

What is Raman spectroscopy?

When molecules interact with incident radiation, most of the radiation is scattered elastically (Rayleigh scattering). However, certain molecules channel some of the incident radiation into vibrational modes, resulting in the scattering of a small part of the radiation (on the order of 10-7) at different, longer wavelengths (this is called Stokes Raman scattering). Since Raman spectra are unique, they provide a sort of chemical fingerprint for unknown compounds.

The earth is alive
You have been lucky, thus
Sleep with one eye open

As reported by Brad, we are all on high alert about the possible arrival of Hurricane Flossie, no relation to my cell-mate, who I don’t think finds the comparison funny regardless how many people point it out, and quite right too.

However last night while watching Doctor Who … ¡ ¡ E A R T H Q U A K E ! ! … stick the caps lock on, put in as many !’s as possible.

I am a very happy chappy, having missed the big one last year I have been waiting for another good one for a while, and it wasn’t too bad, few aftershocks, and it went on long enough that I started to become concerned, precariously balanced items fell, great stuff.

The last big earthquake to hit the Big Island caused a huge storm far more devastating than the earthquake itself, so I am curious wether or not a storm will be caused by this one and meet with the hurricane, kicking-it-up-a-notch. Sorry, apparently I got the expression “kick-it-up-a-notch” from the side of a pasta sauce jar.

Either way, it is considered serious enough that I am being sent home from work at 11:30, the office is expected to be open tomorrow unless we hear otherwise, though tomorrow may be worse. I am ill prepared for a severe hurricane. It’s funny actually, I tried to do some shopping after work yesterday and everywhere I went the queues were horrendous, didn’t occur to me at the time that people were stocking up. Of course, I say it’s funny, now.

I do however know that my neighbours have plenty of booze, but I ran out of tea last night, well I say I ran out, I have herbal teas left by many well wishers, so for all intents and purposes I have no tea, however I am well stocked up on Marmite and Vegemite.

More details to follow ….

UPDATE : I was looking at the satellite pictures and it looks as if Flossie will be closer to the islands tomorrow and Thursday than it will be today, it also is larger than the entire state of Hawai’i. Apparently it is a Force 4 hurricane according to the front page headlines of one of the local papers.

UPDATE : 1:48pm : “Still just a potato”

UPDATE : 2:57pm : 0.1 on the Horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse scale.

UPDATE : 4:55pm : what sort of rubbish is this ?

UPDATE : 9:43pm : so I’m going to leave this now unless something actually happens. Hurricane Flossie has been largely unimpressive so far, and I think it’s pretty much pau. I know the schools are closed tomorrow, and many people are off work. There is still the possibility that we will be off but I doubt that, still I think it may be a skeleton crew like today as those who live out of town will be disinclined to make the journey in. We shall see. Regardless, if memory serves both our telescopes are closed, though I have heard rumour some others are looking to open, not knowing much about such things all I can say is it’s probably just being optimistic as it’s generally quite crappy up there at the moment.

UPDATE : 10:04pm : Yeah, right at the end of the animation from UKIRT’s webcam I saw a car going up, didn’t look nice up there. Good luck to them.

UPDATE : 10:10pm : Haha ! there is seriously, like one frame in the middle of that animation that is blue sky, idillyc, where the wind blows out the clouds, every other frame is thick fog and rain. Oh dear.

UPDATE : Well that pretty much is it, incredibly disappointing after so much promise, one and a half inches of rain instead of five to ten, wind speeds of up to … *gasp* … 45 knots. However the hype has already meant that many businesses are closed, schools are closed, non-”operationally essential” state workers are off, which sort of means a lot of other places are closed also, Friday is a public holiday, everyone is stocked up on essentials, and probably plenty of non-essentials after panic buying. In retrospect it’s all seems a bit mad, however if a Hurricane like that had hit Hawai’i full-on, I get the feeling somewhere like Hilo would just be devastated. I wonder however if, and this is purely hypothetical, wild speculation, but I wonder if the earthquake from the other night may have caused enough change in the weather to dissipate the hurricane, possible but probably improbable. I have a book somewhere ….

UPDATE : It just keeps coming …

from NOAA …

A TSUNAMI ADVISORY IS ISSUED FOR THE STATE OF HAWAII EFFECTIVE AT 0220 PM HST.

AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS

ORIGIN TIME - 0141 PM HST 15 AUG 2007
COORDINATES - 13.5 SOUTH 76.7 WEST
LOCATION - NEAR COAST OF PERU
MAGNITUDE - 7.9 MOMENT

EVALUATION

THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER HAS ISSUED AN EXPANDING
REGIONAL TSUNAMI WARNING AND WATCH FOR PARTS OF THE PACIFIC
LOCATED CLOSER TO THE EARTHQUAKE. AN EVALUATION OF THE PACIFIC
WIDE TSUNAMI THREAT IS UNDERWAY AND THERE IS A POSSIBILITY THAT
HAWAII COULD BE ELEVATED TO A WATCH OR WARNING STATUS.

IF TSUNAMI WAVES IMPACT HAWAII THEIR ESTIMATED EARLIEST ARRIVAL TIME IS

0214 AM HST THU 16 AUG 2007

All caps, gotta love it.

UPDATE : More of the same …

THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER HAS CANCELLED THE REGIONAL TSUNAMI WARNING AND WATCH IT ISSUED FOR OTHER PARTS OF THE PACIFIC. BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA THERE IS NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII AND THE ADVISORY FOR HAWAII IS ALSO ENDED.
HOWEVER… SOME COASTAL AREAS IN HAWAII COULD EXPERIENCE SMALL NON-DESTRUCTIVE SEA LEVEL CHANGES AND STRONG OR UNUSUAL CURRENTS LASTING UP TO SEVERAL HOURS. THE ESTIMATED TIME SUCH EFFECTS MIGHT BEGIN IS 0214 AM HST THU 16 AUG 2007 THIS WILL BE THE FINAL MESSAGE ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS ADDITIONAL DATA ARE RECEIVED.

UPDATE : Earthquake woke me up last night, only a 3.8 apparently, thought I’d dreamt it. There was one the night before too, measuring 4.4, but I must have slpet through that one, or it was really short.

Hawai’i by night

Originally uploaded by samh101.

Following up on the previous post, I think these are the better images with the above being taken from this image.

For comparison, below is the relevant population density map from Wikipedia.

Just thought I would share this one with you.

Since starting work with my present employer, I have been enthralled with a couple of framed pictures they have of the Earth taken from space at night.

While watching a presentation on light pollution recently I spotted these same images in one of the slides and looked up the referenced URL, which turned out to be from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day 11 / 27 / 00.

High resolution images are available here for all your wallpaper needs, or for printing if you have a printer big enough, or you could always print them in chunks and stick them together.

UPDATE : Updated here.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet, but the online magazine Living Space have posted a podcast that features UKIRT and JCMT about ten and a half minutes in apparently.

The JCMT section probably has to do with the recent press release regarding HARP and ACSIS, and the UKIRT section probably has to do with the recent news about the coldest solitary Brown Dwarf ever seen.

Chris Lintott who presents the program is also a presenter on the Sky at Night, and is due to observe at JCMT in the near future.

You can listen to it embedded, download or subscribe to the podcast from this page.

There will probably be an update to this post when I get a chance to listen to it myself.

UPDATE : Well I had a listen, both recent press releases are mentioned about ten and a half minutes in. The program itself lends itself very much to the BBC style of presenting, and has the pace and banter of a BBC children’s program such as Newsround or Blue Peter, this is more evident when they speak to guests who are not used to this style of presentation. The presenters themselves seem to know what they are talking about but put it over in a way that doesn’t alienate the listener, no pun intended, honest. The program is easily accessible and I would definatly recommend it to kids or those who are new to astronomy, it certainly isn’t as stuffy as many similar offerings.

UPDATE : Forgot to mention that at the end of the program they mentioned that they will be doing another from JCMT in a few weeks time, this probably coincides with the observation run that Chris Lintott will be performing at JCMT.

Follow up to Nebulae.

The actual press release can be found here.