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This week will be dominated by a “Blue Moon,” the second full Moon of the month, which rises at dusk on Saturday’s Halloween. It will be the first full Moon to do that since 1944. However, before we get treated to a “Halloween Hunter’s Blue Moon,” our satellite will glide close to the bright red planet Mars. It’s still so bright because it was recently at opposition, the closest to Earth that it gets. The weekend also sees the opposition of Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, which will just about be a naked eye sight for those lucky...

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has developed a concept for a new Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) engine and delivered it to NASA. Claimed to be safer and more reliable than previous NTP designs and with far greater efficiency than a chemical rocket, the concept could help realize the goal of using nuclear propulsion to revolutionize deep space travel, reducing Earth-Mars travel time to just three months. Because chemical rockets are already near their theoretical limits and electric space propulsion systems have such low thrust, rocket engineers continue to seek ways to build more efficient, more powerful engines using some...

This has already been one of the most bizarre presidential election seasons in U.S. history, and it gets stranger with each passing day. So it seems appropriate that nature is getting into the act as well. Some very unusual natural events are happening, and many are speculating that some or all of them may have some sort of deeper meaning. For example, there will be a “blue moon” on the Saturday before the election, and of course Halloween just also happens to fall on that particular Saturday. The following comes from the Jerusalem Post… The events of 2020 have been...

This week stargazers will be able to see up to 25 shooting stars per hour fly across the night sky as the Orionid Meteor Shower puts on its annual show. These meteors streak across the sky each October, through until November 7 – but peak viewing is expected on Wednesday, October 21 around midnight. This cosmic event happens when Earth passes through stream of debris left behind Comet Halley – the parent comet of the Orionid shower. You should be able to see the shooting stars from whatever direction you look, but they will appear to come from the constellation...

"There are 11 meteor showers peaking in October every year. Here the brief description of these awesome space events that will light up the autumn sky of October. Keep your eyes to the sky and enjoy!"

Open source RF hardware has been under development for several years, a boon for ham radio operators and academics. Open Research Institute anticipates that the Commerce Department will find that these technologies are unrestricted under the carve-out for open source in the EAR.

The Uranus reversal begins a backward journey that will carry through early January 2021. Our surprises are about to get more baffling, random, disparate and mysterious. This is also very thrilling, as it provides the sort of work that requires making sense of the nonsense. Life is a puzzle, the solving of which will be extremely satisfying....

A superbolide was recorded flying over the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, Brazil on October 1, 2020. Trajectory Preliminary analyses show that the very bright fireball began to shine at about 89.5 km over the rural area to the east of Caxias do Sul and travelled north, at 16.9 km/s (60,900 km/h) at an entrance angle of 44° to the ground The bight meteor disintegrated during 6 seconds, easily overcoming the full moon’s brightness and finally exploded at an altitude of 22 km over the city of Vacaria, also in Rio Grande do Sul state. A...

In the bizarre year that’s 2020, another highly unusual event is headed our way. This year’s Halloween full moon will be visible to the entire world, rather than just parts of it, for the first time since World War II, astronomy educator and former planetarium director Jeffrey Hunt says. “When I was teaching, my high school students thought a full moon occurred every Halloween,” said Hunt. Not quite, though pop culture decorations sure make it seem that way. The last Halloween full moon visible around the globe came in 1944, he said. He’s written about the event on his web...

China’s new space plane returned to Earth on Sept. 6th. But it left something behind in orbit, an item of unknown character called “Object A” by the US military. Last night in the Netherlands, Marco Langbroek tracked it across the sky using a hand-pointed video camera. “It showed slow but marked brightness changes, between magnitude +4 and invisible (fainter than +7),” says Langbroek. “The light curve shows two brightness peaks, and two major fading episodes. Peak-to-peak period is about 80 seconds, so if this is due to a tumble, it is a slow tumble.“ Object A is also a source...

It stands just over 18 metres tall and weighs 25 tonnes. And, after years of painstaking work, a life-size Japanese Gundam robot has just proved to its legions of fans that it really can move. Modelled on one of the robots from the hugely popular 1970s anime series Mobile Suit Gundam, the huge machine was put through its paces this week at its new home in the the port city of Yokohama. The humanoid was due to become the centrepiece of Gundam Factory Yokohama, south of Tokyo, on 1 October, but the virus pandemic means it will not be officially...

Some early Speed Tests have been released by Starlink about their performance from beta testers.. It's not mind blowing but something that is very exciting to me.... this video is not from SpaceX or Starlink just a guy running a YouTube Channel... I'm hungry for information and will continue passing it along..

Leonard Susskind interview - If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different, human beings wouldn't, and couldn't, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities.

Time to reconnect with customers

In an article over at Space.com, Leonard David describes a new development in the efforts by humans to contact extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the galaxy. While the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been in operation for decades, the results thus far have been mostly disappointing. There was a brief flurry of excitement in 1977 when “the WOW signal” was received, but in later years even that one has been called into question. Now, however, there’s a new player in the game. China has constructed the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world and they are reportedly gearing up...

In this Episode, we will take a look at the ongiong work by SpaceX in Boca Chica. We will look at Starship SN4 & SN5. Progress is continuing at an incredible rate. We will also take a look at the newly contracted Lunar Landers by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX. NASA has chosen to give the private sector an opportunity for their own Moon shots. SpaceX is contributing the Lunar Starship, which has quite a few differences compared to the Earth based variant!

The Pentagon has declassified three previously leaked top-secret U.S. Navy videos that show “unexplained aerial phenomena” and that some believe could show Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in an effort “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos,” said a Pentagon spokesperson. “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified'”, the spokesperson added. “The Department of Defense has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in...

I never have posted an original thread or vanity, but I thought some might be interested in following the mission of Apollo 13 in real time. https://apolloinrealtime.org/13

Tonight's pink moon must have not gotten the memo about social distancing; the moon will be the closest to Earth today than any other day of the year, making it the largest full moon of 2020...You can see the moon rise in the sky this evening (in New York, that happens at 7:05 p.m. local time). But the moon won't appear full until 10:35 p.m. EDT (0235 GMT), according to NASA. If you miss it, fret not — the moon will appear full on Wednesday night, as well...Today's moon has one other claim to fame — it's known as the...

Starting tomorrow, Sunday, March 8, the days will get one hour longer. No more driving home from work in the dark until October. One extra hour of daylight! This is one of my favorite times of the year and the first true sign that spring is upon us. Now I will have time to sit outside on my patio after work and watch for signs of the coming summer with a beer in my hand and a steak on the grill. I just want to give thanks to an otherwise horrible president, Lyndon Johnson, who did do one good thing...