The national weather service now provides a Current Weather Conditions xml feed. It's really cool.
Entries with tag "science"
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National Weather Service XML Feed
Posted by on August 19, 2005
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Astronomy Software
I found two really cool astronomy software available to install from Fedora Core's package manager. So I thought I might get back into amatuer astronomy again. The first is a sofisticated desktop planetarium for Linux,OSX, and Windows called Stellarium.
My Meade telescope came with planetarium software however it was only for Windows and not Linux so it was nearly unusable. Stellarium is cross-platform and chock full of really cool features. I really like the rendering of the atmosphere.The second application is called Celestia. While Celestia is not very helpful with amatuer astronomy. It is good for nights when you need your astronomy fix and it's raining outside. What Celestia does is very cool.
Where Stellarium and other planetarium software keeps your feet planted on the ground, Celestia puts you in a virtual spaceship and allows you to span the known universe in real time. It is pretty spetacular. You can see what the Earth looks like at night. You can see what a solar eclipse looks like from space. Travel to Mars and see a martian sunrise.
If you go to the supplemental archive of addons at Celestia Motherlode, you can download extra models like Columbia and Atlantis. You can even add fictional spacecraft from Star Wars and Star Trek if you want.
Keep Looking up! - Jack Horkheimer
Posted by on July 9, 2005
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Deep Impact
This is amazing, Nasa is smashing one of their space craft into the comet Tempel 1 in hopes to see what is inside it.
I heard this on NPR this afternoon. They were interviewing a reporter from Sky and Telescope. Apparently if you live west of the Mississippi River you will be able to see the impact on July 3rd at around 10:53pm with your naked eye.
It's a shame I'm on the east coast :'( the comet will be under the horizon when impact is to occur. It would of been a damn good excuse to dust off my ol' Meade ETX-70.
All is not lost for us eastside geeks, however. The reporter at Sky and Telescope said that we will be able to see the aftermath of the impact on the Forth of July... yeah, ok, sure bud...
All sarcasm aside, the Article at Sky and Telescope gives westsiders directions on how to locate the comet. For the eastside? There are also links to several webcasts of the event at the end of the article.
Posted by on July 2, 2005
Tags: science
