First Underwater Volcano Eruption Video

Ares

As part of the Constellation Program, in a move to make the heavy-lift vehicle more robust (predicting an increased launch thrust requirement) to send four astronauts, a lunar lander plus supplies, NASA has announced the Ares V rocket will be beefed up to cater for our future needs to get man back to the Moon. This huge vehicle is now designed to carry payloads of over 156,600 lb (71,000 kg), some 15,600 lb (or 10%) more than the original concept. Ares V was originally designed to be approximately the same length as the original Saturn V lunar rocket (361 feet or 110 metres long), but to accommodate an extra booster engine and extra payload volume, Ares V will be 381 feet (116 metres) long. This upgrade will be capable of sending far more instrumentation into space, an extra 15,600 lb (7,000 kg, or the equivalent mass of a male African elephant). Ares V had its successful first launch on October 28, 2009.

Photo of Orion

My first picture of stars taken at the tip of the Baja penninsula. The stars identifiable include:

Meissa is a blue spectral type O giant star and is part of the Collinder 69 star cluster. It has an apparent visible magnitude 3.39. Meissa is actually a binary star system. The fainter star is of magnitude 6 and is 4.4 seconds of arc away from the brighter. It is a hot blue-white dwarf of spectral type B0.5 V.

Betelgeuse, known alternatively by its Bayer designation "Alpha Orionis," is a massive M-type red supergiant star nearing the end of its life. When it explodes it will even be visible during the day.

Rigel, which is also known as "Beta Orionis," is a B-type blue supergiant that is the sixth brightest star in the night sky. Similar to Betelguese, Rigel is fusing heavy elements in its core and will pass its supergiant stage soon (on an astronomical timescale), either collapsing in the case of a supernova or shedding its outer layers and turning into a white dwarf.

Gamma Orionis, is known colloquially as the "Amazon Star" and Bellatrix it is the twenty-second brightest star in the night sky.[7] Bellatrix is considered a B-type blue giant, though it is too small to explode in a supernova. Bellatrix's luminosity is derived from its high temperature rather than its radius,[8] a factor that defines Betelguese.

Mintaka garnered the name "Delta Orionis" from Bayer, even though it is the faintest of the three stars in Orion's Belt. It is a multiple star system, composed of a large B-type blue giant and a more massive O-type white star. The Mintaka system constitutes an eclipsing binary variable star, where the eclipse of one star over the other creates a dip in brightness.

Alnilam was named "Epsilon Orionis," a consequence of Bayer's wish to name the three stars in Orion's Belt (from north to south) in alphabetical order. Alnilam is a B-type blue supergiant, despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun as Mintaka and Alnitak, the other two belt stars, its luminosity makes it nearly equal in magnitude. Alnilam is losing mass quickly, a consequence of its size;[10] approximately four million years old.

Alnitak was designated "Zeta Orionis" by Bayer, and is the easternmost star in Orion's Belt. It is a triple star some 800 light years distant, with the primary star being a hot blue supergiant and the brightest class O star in the night sky.

Cursa, also known as Beta Eridani ) is the second brightest star in the constellation of Eridanus, located in the northeast end of this constellation. It has the traditional names Cursa and Dhalim. Eridani has an apparent visual magnitude which varies between 2.72 and 2.80 and a spectral type of A3III. It is approximately 90 light-years from the Earth.[1][2] It may be a member of the proposed Sirius Supercluster, along with other scattered stars such as Sirius itself, Beta Aurigae, Alpha Coronae Borealis, Zeta Crateris, and Beta Serpentis.

Johann Bayer named many of these stars in his star atlas Uranometria published in 1603

Ocean Exploration

In contrast to the excitement of moon exploration and the colonization of outer space, there is less interest in a realm closer to home: the ocean. (Seaquest) Our oceans are less well known than the moon.When will ocean exploration be accessible to more people? When will ocean exploration become tourism? There is so much exploration left to be done, so many canyons, geolocgical strucutres (underwater volcanoes, sinkholes, mountains) and so many species left to discover and understand. There are lots of resources like minerals, energy, underwater forests. New species to be found and geological structures to be understood.

MIR submersibles, for example, can dive to a maximum depth of 6,000 metres (19,685 ft). This makes them two of only seven manned submersibles in the world that can dive beyond 3,000 metres (9,843 ft), the others being the US submersibles Alvin, Sea Cliff and Deepstar 20000, the Japanese owned Shinkai and the French owned Nautile. Up to 98% of the world’s oceans are under 6,000 metres deep.

In the mid 1990s and early 2000s, the MIR vehicles were used by American producer James Cameron to film the wreck of the RMS Titanic, resting at a depth of 3,821 metres, for his 1997 film Titanic and documentaries such as Ghosts of the Abyss, and to film the wreck of the Bismarck, resting at a depth of 4,700 metres, for his 2002 documentary film Expedition: Bismarck. In July 2008 both Mirs initiated a two-year expedition to Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater reservoir. The expedition is being led by the Russian Academy of Sciences.[10] During the expedition around 160 descents are planned to the bottom of the lake, which is largely unexplored to this point.

Another interesting research vessel is the RSS James Cook.

John Delaney at the University of Washington: The approach, dubbed the Neptune Project, would string 10 semiautomated geobiological labs across the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off Washington, 8,000 feet underwater. The approach, dubbed the Neptune Project, would string 10 semiautomated geobiological labs across the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off Washington, 8,000 feet underwater. Each would have cameras, lights, robots, and sensors, all connected to the surface via optical cable to transmit data on everything from the biomass of microbes to the effects of ocean temperature on weather

Astronomy Applets

Solar System
Jupiter

Galaxies

Understanding the motion, shape, structure, density and quantity of galaxies in the universe is the largest scale scientific pursuit of mankind with many questions still remaining.

At the level of the galaxy itself, astronomers have found that stars revolve around the center of galaxies at a constant speed over a wide range of distances from a galaxy's center. This behavior was not expected, assuming a free Newtonian potential. This contradiction has led scientists to speculate on the existence of extra mass called Dark Matter or the need for extra parameters in for Modified Newtonian Dynamics.

Other astronomical models predict that small galaxies in the early Universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing. Recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope have found some of these early galaxies, existing only 100 years after the big bang. Scientists were surprised to see their density so low raising many questions about how the early galaxies must have formed. Three of the galaxies appear to be slightly disrupted – rather than being shaped like rounded blobs, they appear stretched into tadpole-like shapes. This is a sign that they may be interacting and merging with neighbouring galaxies to form larger, cohesive structures. Other observations using wide field telescopes looking back to a time when it was a fifth of its present age have revealed an enormous string of galaxies about 300 million light-years long. This new structure defies current models of how the Universe evolved, which can't explain how a string this big could have formed so early.

Space X Launch

Space X successfully launched into orbit earlier this year, making it the first private industry to do so. I'm just a little late in reporting this.