Ian O'Neill

Moon, Venus, Jupiter Conjunction Dazzles California

Tonight is a very special night. Three celestial bodies clustered together in the sky, signifying a rare conjunction between the Moon, Venus and Jupiter. If you missed it, you’ll have to wait five years until the natural satellite of the Earth and two planets align in a similar pattern again in 2013.

Having been a frustrated astronomer for many years, I decided to get outside to investigate the conjunction over California for myself. Sure enough, from dusk, I could see a bright, thin crescent Moon with two very bright dots to the right and below in the southwest. The same scene has been repeated across many nations, but from my perspective I was able to capture the moment with some basic equipment and a very steady hand (plus some folded business cards)…
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Addendum: Astroengine Live Email Address

Woops, it looks like I’ve been quoting the incorrect email address for my Astroengine Live radio show. Disregard the contact email address I have been quoting and update your address books with astro@wprtradio.com.

So, huge apologies for that, if you have sent any tips/research/articles/questions to any other email address apart from astro@wprtradio.com, I probably haven’t read it. So please re-send it to this correct address.

Remember, my live show will commence on Wednesday at 7pm EST (4pm PST) for it’s third episode! I will post an update later in the day about the content of the show.

If you have anything you want me to read/investigate/shout out on air, feel free to email me on astro@wprtradio.com and I will be sure to give you a mention.

Thanks and sorry again for the wrong address–it seems the tech gremlin that hit my laptop on my first show has crept into my brain too, hence the correction!

Hopefully speak to you soon!

Cheers, Ian

Carnival of Space Week 81 – Tiny Mantras

For this week’s “Happy Thanksgiving” Carnival of Space, we jet over to the excellent Tiny Mantras website, hosted by Tracy Zollinger Turner. Be sure to check out all the space blogosphere has to offer; everything from buried glaciers on Mars, Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-126 space station “home improvements” mission, using Uranus as a source of energy, to Astroengine’s musings about whether the “search for life” is a worth-while cause. Be sure to check it out, there’s way more cosmic goodness where that came from!

Enjoy! Cheers, Ian

Blogosphere Canadian Fireball Updates

University of Calgary graduate student Ellen Milley poses with a fragment of a meteorite in a small pond near Lloydminster, Sask. (AP)

Although I am still in Las Vegas enjoying the Thanksgiving aftermath, I wanted to give an update of the Canadian fireball that dramatically exploded over the Saskatchewan skies last week.

Having read though some of the updates across the space blogosphere, I thought it would be good to give the event a brief run-down via the pile of space blogs that have been following this surprise explosion and resulting discovery of meteorite fragments near Lloydminster, Saskatchewan…
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Apollo Astronaut Highlights Threat of Asteroid Impact

In a renewed attempt to bring the concern about a potential asteroid strike to the world’s attention, former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart briefed UN officials on Tuesday about a report entitled “Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response.” The report has been drawn up by the International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation (IPATM), formed by space explorers and scientists in an effort to put a contingency plan into action to limit the devastation caused by a theoretical impact.

The key point here is that the IPATM is not predicting an immediate catastrophic asteroid collision, it merely wants the UN to recognise there is a danger out there and to enact procedures to save lives and possibly remove the threat all together…
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Listen to Astroengine Live Today at 4pm PST

On Tuesday night I was resigned to the fact that episode #2 of Astroengine Live would be more Astroengine Recorded Yesterday.

The original plan was to drive to Las Vegas to spend Thanksgiving with family, heading out today. Therefore I’d miss doing Astroengine Live and I was working to record the show on Tuesday. All was fine… until it rained. Two hours later, the meaty storm hadn’t passed and we began getting newsflashes that it’s not a good idea to be driving anywhere, let alone 5 hours cross-state! So we decided an early morning road trip on Thursday might be a better plan.

So, Astroengine Live is back on and we’ll still make it to Vegas on time to eat turkey!

Tonight’s invigorated show will have a variety of space news and indepth topics of interest (with an extra special focus on the space blogosphere), so be sure to tune in to WPRT Radio at 4pm PST (7pm EST or midnight GMT)!

Listen to Astroengine Live!

If you listened to episode #1, you probably noticed a few technical glitches my end. Since then, I’ve slapped Windows Vista around a bit to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again. We will be in for clear airwaves and a show stacked with space science goodness, even if it is pouring outside. This time, I will actually record an archived version of the show…

As always, send me your titbits of news, especially if you find any small institution research you think I’d like. Fire an email to: astro@wprt.com and I’ll try to feature your stuff!

Cheers, Ian

The Search For Life, What’s the Point?

Another mission, another brave “search for life”…

Is it me, or does virtually every robotic foray into space have some ET-searching component attached? In the case of Mars exploration, every lander and rover’s prime directive is find life, evidence of past life, potential for life or the building blocks of life. Even the very first man-made artefact to land (crash) on the planet, the 1971 Soviet Mars 2 mission, was designed to find organic compounds and… any sign of life.

On writing an article yesterday (“Wasteful” Sample Storage Box Removed from Mars Science Laboratory), I started to think that we might just be trying a little too hard and spending too much money on this endeavour. Perhaps there’s another way for us to work out if we are, indeed, an interplanetary (possibly intergalactic?) oasis, or a component of a biological cosmic zoo…
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Carnival of Space Week 80 – Starts With A Bang!

There is a decidedly festive theme about this week’s Carnival over at Ethan Siegel’s astrophysics blog. Somehow, he’s managed to associate each blog’s CoS posting with something from Thanksgiving – from turkeys to beer to homemade baked macaroni and cheese to a sickly-looking dessert… it’s all there with each post from around the space blogosphere scattered like tinsel over the proceeds.

If anything, go to Starts With A Bang! with your notebook ready, you’ll get some fine cooking tips. And if you don’t know what a Turducken-style turkey is, you’d better read on… it’s a feast for the eyes and I’m suddenly feeling very, very hungry!

Back to the space stuff, for Astroengine’s part, I sent the announcement about my new radio show, Astroengine Live. In fact the next show will be the day before Thanksgiving, but I won’t be trying to compete with Ethan’s Carnival, it looks like he’ll be having way too much fun!

Cheers, Ian

Another Exoplanet Candidate Identified by ESO

It would appear that yet another extrasolar planet has been directly observed!

Only last week, the Hubble Space Telescope released news that it had spotted an exoplanet orbiting the star Fomalhaut. This is the first ever direct observation of an exoplanet in optical wavelengths. On the same day, joint observations by the ground-based (adaptive optics-powered) Keck II and Gemini infrared telescopes discovered a collection of three large alien worlds orbiting a star catalogued as HR 8799.

Today, a completely different observatory appears to have discovered yet another exoplanet orbiting the hot star Beta Pictoris (in the constellation of Pictor). European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers have directly imaged β Pictoris b, an alien planet orbiting 8 AU from its host star.

A phenomenal achievement considering β Pictoris is over 63 light years away…
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