I had this gnawing thought ...

OK, I thought this might grab some attention - men don't think, and what about wise old birds, then? So our friend, Kathleen is camera-shy but can read a watch and so around 4pm she told me to get out and photograph "her" porcupine who, as we all know, can read time, especially dinner time.

So I usually do as I am told - being successfully domesticated for some time - and set out to trod where dangerous beasts of the forest dwell - like bear.

I was terrified?  What - me?  No Christmas cake in danger.

I was not an apple so I stood my ground:

(I hid behind an apple tree!)

 

Friendly fellow -

So how did you do carving pumpkins?

WOB

Old Marsh forest colours

In the last entry, 1st photo one could see the colourful trees at the edge. Here are some more - better take your insulin, these shots mostly just reduced in size, are often too much even more a maple syrup lover like myself.

Amazing colour, amazing weather, another day of Thanksgiving.
Oh, and by the way: why do leaves change colour?

W O B

Philae Lander ???

There has been a recent posting on the possible location of Philae. Here - as in "click here"   
is a link from June 11 following the trail. Quoting from this link:

"To address this issue, scientists working with OSIRIS team member Philippe Lamy at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in France began searching for special sets of OSIRIS images.

In particular, they looked for images taken before and after Philae’s landing under nearly similar illumination conditions, to reduce the chances of being fooled by transient surface features glinting. In that way, if something new appeared after landing, it could be Philae.

Scanning a broad area encompassing the expecting landing zone, the team identified a promising candidate that is seen on two images taken on 12 and 13 December, a month after the 12 November landing, but not on an image taken earlier, on 22 October. The candidate is also featured in the montage earlier in the post, at top-left."

 The video can be seen from the ESA link above and going down that page to the "image" with the red overlay labled "CONSERT ellipse", just over half way down the ESA page, separate window. It has an arrow for the video: click and watch, rather impressive. Sorry I could not load my copy of the video; it is 10MB.

"This movie shows a zoom into a 13 December 2014 OSIRIS narrow-angle camera (NAC) imagetaken from a distance of about 20 km from the centre of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. A large number of bright spots are seen: as only one (at most) of them could be Philae, the majority must be associated with surface features on the comet nucleus. The movie ends on a promising candidate located just outside the "CONSERT" error ellipse (marked): this candidate was not seen in 22 October 2014 images, but appears in images taken on both 12 and 13 December 2014."

March Madness

Science is not democratic in that one cannot "vote" to decide whether something is or is not true/factual. Only experiment can decide whether something is so - and that procedure must be written up so that it can be scrutinized and verified as needs be.

Therefore I was shocked when I read that NASA and JPL had organized a vote on the nature of the white spots on Ceres.  6 options are given and "it's anyone's guess what those spots could be." So go ahead and cast your vote. My concern is that this will lead to confusion with real democratic procedures and ultimately with whether one can vote down global warming - and it will go away or go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Or vote on evolution vs creationism.


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OK. There is something else which I found interesting - how to make stone tools, and when. I saw a video demonstration in 2008 in connection with the Nebra Shield in Halle, Deutschland. I was surprised to see that the stone was struck on the opposite side to where the flaking was desired. I can understand it but it was not what I had expected beforehand. So this link to Scientific American  is interesting and adds to our humanity - maybe! Anyway there are lots of videos to help you survive your summer holidays.

Vicki and I expect to be back in Killarney Prov Park Aug 2-ish to Aug 16-ish looking for Perseid meteors, northern lights, sun spots and flares, planet(s), multiple stars and clusters, and may be a galaxy or 2. Hope everyone is well and having a safe healthy Spring leading into summer.

                                                                                                              wob


PS It snowed this morning and there are white-caps on the lake; +3deg C and winds up to 50kmh - for the curious!

Philae trajectories

Philae's Wild Ride Across Comet 67P: The Only Trajectory That Makes Sense

I will try to show real and model images of TD1,  TD2, and where this video shows TD3 at a later date.
I did not want to lose this link in my "den". TD = Touch Down

And the 1:4 model

Amd an Iris instead of Osiris:

Preparation to land on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

ESA has put out a simple video explaining the last couple of months of Rosetta:
Preparing to land