Monthly Archives: July 2009

apollo 11, Lunar exploration, lunar landing, NASA

Remembering Apollo

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And What It Stands For

... and liftoff of Apollo 11! Courtesy of The Big Picture at www.boston.com. Click to embiggen.
... and liftoff of Apollo 11! Courtesy of The Big Picture at www.boston.com. Click to embiggen.

This week marks the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the Moon. Accordingly, the Big Picture over at the Boston Globe has a wonderful image retrospective of the mission. Some of these images haven’t been seen for a long time.

Boy, do those pictures take me back!  It gives away my age to say that I was alive at that time and able to remember that launch and mission vividly. I had just entered high school and was looking forward to living on the Moon by the time I finished college.

The mission was amazing, not just because we landed on the Moon, but also because it lifted our national (and world) attention away from the everyday life joys and sorrows and focused our collective vision on a world beyond our own.  People around the world watched for a week as the three astronauts climbed into the rocket, took off, and then settled a lander onto the surface of our nearest neighbor in space.   That mission made many things seem much more possible — living and working in space, going to the Moon, visiting Mars — you name it.

It seems like that was only a short time ago — yet, I see by the calendar that it’s been 40 years since that mission.  A lot’s been learned and accomplished in that time — missions to Mars (not by humans, but by human-controlled robots and orbiters), missions to the outer planets as well as the inner ones.  A flock of satellites that tell us about everything from the tiniest burp from the solar surface to the flickerings of star birth back at the earliest epochs of cosmic time.

In terms of distances and travel time, a trip to the Moon seems like a quick jaunt compared to the distance that light from the first stars that we can study has traveled (more than 13 billion light-years).  Still, that first step for a man, as Neil Armstrong tried to say, was a big one in our understanding in what it takes to explore the cosmos and, indeed, to understand what we see in the distant reaches of space.  That step was not just a step onto another world — it became an inspiration for all the research and exploration done since then — sometimes done by humans in space, sometimes done at an office desk with a computer much like the one I’m writing this on.  It has been done by persons who were could have been inspired by Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins and their accomplishments. That inspiration is equally as important as the scientific and technological achievements of their mission.  Kids (like me) who were directly influenced by that mission have taken that inspiration and used it to excite new generations of scientists who are taking further steps to explore the cosmos.

Exploration by inspired people — that’s what the achievements of Apollo 11 and her crew stand for and always will.  So, go enjoy the pictures and marvel at what humans accomplished 40 years ago.  If they hadn’t done it, where would we be in our understanding of the Moon?  Our own planet?  The cosmos? Think about it!

atmosphere, atmospheric science

Cloud Watching

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Eyeing Noctilucent Clouds

Noctilucent clouds seen over Blair, Nebraska. Image by Mike Hollingshead, as seen on Spaceweather.com. Go on over there for more gorgeous images. Click to embiggen.
Noctilucent clouds seen over Blair, Nebraska. Image by Mike Hollingshead, as seen on Spaceweather.com. Go on over there for more gorgeous images. Click to embiggen.

Folks lucky enough to be outside the past night or two in parts of North America and Europe have been treated to fine displays of noctilucent clouds.  These are ghostly looking clouds that seem to glow in the sky long after the Sun has gone down. People in northerly latitudes see them quite often, but it has been rare to see them as far south as France, for example, and certainly very rarely over southern Nevada and other mid-latitude locales.

Noctilucent means “night-shining” and nobody’s quite sure exactly what causes these glowing apparitions. They first appeared about the time of the eruption of Krakatoa in the 1885, and they are likely related to the distribution of fine dust in the upper atmosphere. But, where that dust comes from (it’s tough to waft dust from volcanoes UP to where these clouds form) is still a topic of great discussion among atmospheric scientists. It’s possible that dust from space is involved in some way.  The clouds themselves are made of water ice crystals that have formed around tiny particles of dust. They seem to be occurring more frequently now, over wider ranges of latitude. It’s very possible that their spread is related to global warming — also a topic under a lot of discussion these days.

Want to know more about these clouds?  Go here and here to read about what some atmospheric scientists have to say about noctilucent clouds. And, by all means, go outside tonight (and maybe the next few nights) and keep an eye out for glowing, wispy clouds like the ones in the picture above.

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Thanks to everyone who has written to wish us well during our recent move back to Colorado.  We’ve made it in fine shape and are settling in nicely.  It’s good to be back online and sharing science with y’all!