tingilinde

a lesson in latent heat

 

a tip of the hat to Greg

for that exotic hobby

amateur radio astronomy

a camera-trap for your home

Study birds and wildlife.

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I’m a wildlife conservation pho­tographer used to roaming the Catskill Mountains around my home in Upstate New York, but a couple winters ago I was rendered homebound by a persistent foot injury. I spent hours upon hours watching my backyard birds, which is fun—but I needed to try something new.

Then I happened on an idea for an experiment—connecting my camera to an infrared sensor and setting the sensor out near my bird feeder, so the birds triggered my camera’s shutter instead of me. It’s a remote photography technique called camera trapping.

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dyi geneticist

This was linked back when it came out, but it came up in conversation yesterday and is fascinating if you haven't seen it.  An amateur geneticist, an olympian and a rare genetic disease.

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TWO YEARS AGO, I WROTE A BOOK called “The Sports Gene” that examines the intersection of genetics and athleticism. I expected my mother to buy a dozen copies and invite me to her book club and that would be the end of it. (She did.) Instead, I was almost immediately bombarded with emails from people wanting to know if their kid has Serena Williams’ genes. One coach emailed, wondering how one would get athletes involved in genetic experimentation.

They were coming so quickly, and many were so unhinged, that I took a brief break from opening them.

And then I got one that had this subject heading: “Olympic medalist and muscular dystrophy patient with the same mutation.” Now that caught my attention. I wondered if it might point me to some article or paper in a genetics journal about an elite athlete I’d somehow missed.

,,,

The Sports Gene, btw, is fascinating.

 

 

 

bronze age rock art

An impressive passion hobby.

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The thrill of the hunt has naturally led them to speculate on the carvings’ meaning. Because the petroglyphs tend to be more visible in the slanted rays of dusk, or with angled artificial lights, Tangen said he believed that their creators had made deliberate use of shadow and light in their work. Thanks to the sun’s changing angle, petroglyphs can look different depending on the hour of the day, or season, he explained. “I think the images have to do with the awakening of people’s minds to time,” he said.

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and this on a possible very old writing scheme

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A primitive writing system used by ice age hunter-gatherers appears to have been uncovered by an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old markings were a form of lunar calendar.

The research suggests cave drawings were not only a form of artistic expression but also used to record sophisticated information about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.

Ben Bacon spent countless hours trying to decode the “proto-writing” system, which is believed to predate other equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years.

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perihelion!

Perihelion is at 11:17 am Eastern Time today.   We're at the closest approach to the Sun in our slightly elliptical orbit - about 5 million kilometers closer than we are at aphelion in early July.  The solar disk appears to be about seven percent lager than at aphelion.  Enjoy it, but don't look directly at the Sun .. after all, what kind of bonehead would do that?

 

 

a rare all at once!

The planets.

 

spotting (very) near-earth asteroid

Katie Mack on the Southwest Ontario event a few weeks ago.

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Within half an hour of the alert, it became clear that the asteroid, now known as 2022 WJ1, was definitely going to hit, and soon. Some of the key data came from members of the Northeast Kansas Amateur Astronomers’ League, a group of volunteers operating out of a small, self-built observatory on the grounds of a high school in a small town outside of Topeka.

Near-Earth object discovery is one of the areas in which amateur-professional collaboration is most valuable. A government-run research observatory can only monitor a small part of the sky at any given time, limited by field of view, weather conditions, and the position of the observatory on the Earth; sometimes they’re bound to be looking in the wrong direction.

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apod today

It's constructed, but a nice illustration of the Leonid meteor shower.

 

finding snoopy

The landing module from Apollo 10 has probably been located.

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On May 23, 1969, astronauts aboard Apollo 10 jettisoned the Snoopy lunar module and headed for Earth. That's the last time humans set eyes on Snoopy — now, astronomers may have rediscovered this fascinating artifact of space history.

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