The Geminid Meteor Shower Is Back!

(from SkyandTelescope.com : http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/111588359.html)

Mention “meteors,” and casual skywatchers usually think of the annual Perseid shower on display every August.

But the Geminid meteor shower of mid-December ties or even surpasses the Perseids as the year’s richest and most reliable meteor display. Geminid meteors come from 3200 Phaethon, an asteroid discovered in 1983.

This year the Geminids are predicted to peak on the morning of December 14th around 11h UT, more or less. That’s excellent timing for North America, especially out West. The Moon that night is only a day past first quarter and sets around midnight or 1 a.m. local time, depending on where you live. Even before then, on the evening of the 13th, the moonlight isn’t bright enough to dampen the shower’s visibility too much — and the Geminids, with their radiant near Castor and Pollux, pick up steam as early as 8 or 9 p.m. But the radiant is highest around 2 a.m., so the morning hours are the usually the most productive.

Bundle up as warmly as you possibly can, and lie back in a dark spot with an open sky. You may see as many as two meteors a minute on average if you have a very dark sky and are watching after midnight.

If your sky is not too light-polluted, you might try making a careful meteor count and reporting it to the International Meteor Organization. Such counts by amateurs supply much of what we know about meteor showers’ behavior. For your count to be useful, you’ll need to follow the procedures described on our page or at the IMO’s website.

Don’t forget that the shower lasts more than one night. Counts are especially needed on nights away from the maximum, because fewer people are watching. In any case, enjoy the show!

UPDATE:

I’ve realised that many of you are searching for a good place to watch the meteor shower either in Kuala Lumpur or elsewhere in Malaysia. Just look for a dark area with no light source near you (and preferably away from the city’s light pollution) and you could watch them well. According to my previous experience, the best time would be during the morning hours. Not only the shower is at its peak but the city’s light is not as bright as it is before midnight.

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Blue Chrysanthemums?

The beautiful blue chrysanthemums... aren't they lovely?

It is now no longer a problem for anybody (especially florists) to obtain fresh flowers of any colour they wished for. There is now a technique of dyeing white flowers to other colours; be it pink, blue, black, green or purple.

I remember conducting an experiment when I was in Primary 1. We placed white flowers into a beaker of diluted red food colouring. After a while, the flowers had tints of red on the tips of their petals. Later, we saw that almost the whole flowers had turned red. We then cut the stalks of the flowers and found out that they were red too. We even ‘created’ a mixed-coloured flowers by dividing  the stems and place them in separate jars of dye.

Last Sunday, I came home from Kak Tasneem’s kenduri (click here to learn more about kenduri’ and click here to read about Kak Tasneem’s kenduri) with a bouquet of blue chrysanthemum for Nenek (my grandmother). I showed the flowers to nenek and she stared at them in wonder. She was really amazed by the flowers! She told me that she had never seen blue chrysanthemums before.

Blue chrysanthemums in a vase

Anyway we later found out that the chrysanthemums were actually dyed! As soon as we reached home, I arranged the flowers in a transparent vase and to my surprise, the water turned into a faint shade of blue after 5 minutes. Then, the eczema on my hands became very itchy and rashes appeared as I am allergic to some chemicals like artificial colourings. After replacing the water for four times within 41 hours, the colour of the chrysanthemums are no longer a striking blue but had toned down into a softer shade. Nevertheless, the water were still blue everytime I changed it.

The water is blue although I had changed it about 5 times when the photo was snapped

It is amazing how we can ‘colour’ our flowers into any colours of our choice. It would definitely  be a fun project for kids to enjoy.

Note: All of the flowers in these photos had their colours toned down to a softer blue. Click here to see the original colours of the flowers.

Illusion Science

I’ve always enjoyed playing with optical illusions. Optical illusion occurs when your brain misinterpret the messages sent by your eyes which resulted in making things look different from what they actually are. There are all kinds of illusions stretching from afterimages to colour adapting to impossible objects. The first illusion I’ve ever been introduced to was the ‘arrow illusion’ by my father.

Take a look at both arrows in the picture above. The line (a) looks longer then line (b) although both are actually of the same length. My father introduced this illusion to me when I was 7 from an airplane magazine.

Last week, my dad gave my little brother an ‘Illusion Science Kit’. Knowing the fun of illusions, he was very excited when he received it. He quickly opened the box and pulled out the contents. He took the booklet (from the kit) and started reading it. As a generous brother and a good boy, he shared them with all of his sisters and all of us crowded around him to take a look. There are lots of illusions shown together with the explanations on how they work. Here is my favourite illusion:

What you should do is to try saying out the colours aloud instead of reading the words.

Say out the colours, not the words!

Quite hard, isn’t it? Here is another one (not from the kit): How many f’s (the letter F) can you find in the whole paragraph? The answer is written below the passage (but don’t read the answer yet).

Count the f's in this paragraph.

Did you say 3? Count again… actually there are 6! Like most people, you might missed 3 f’s. Amazing, isn’t it? Our brain only processes important words that gives real meaning and only skid over less important words like ‘if’ and ‘the’. If you counted six in your first try, consider yourself as unusual and amazing 😉 .

There are many more illusions that on the internet. My favourite website is the Mighty Optical Illusions (http://moillusions.com). Illusions are certainly fun to play with and their effects are amazing.

Aurora Mystery Solved?

I found this article linked from Yahoo.com and thought of sharing it with all of you. The article was taken from news.discovery.com. To see it in its original web page, click here.

The mystery shape in the aurora over Andenes, Norway (photograph by Per-Arne Mikalsen)

On Jan. 20, 2010, Per-Arne Mikalsen was photographing a vast aurora erupting over the northern Norwegian town of Andenes.

Because solar activity is on the increase, aurora spotters have many opportunities to see the Northern Lights. On this particular night the aurora was intense, stretching toward the southern latitudes of Norway.

In one of the photographs taken by Mikalsen was an “object” that couldn’t be identified. Although Mikalsen had taken several images at the same location, just one photo showed a mysterious green parachute-like object hanging with the main aurora. (This time, it appears that the Russian military was not involved in the making of this strange shape in the sky.)

At first it seemed easy to dismiss the object as a lens flare or a spot on the camera lens, but after further study it became clear that the answer wasn’t that simple.

The mystery shape in the aurora over Andenes, Norway, wider angle (photograph by Per-Arne Mikalsen)

Also, Mikalsen is no stranger to aurorae, having worked on Andøya Rocket Range (on the island of Andøya) for many years. He’s seen aurorae of all shapes and sizes, but he’d never before seen a structure like this hanging in the sky.

“I have been working the Andøya Rocket Range for 25 years (the 20 last years in the management) and I have become more and more fascinated by the aurora,” Mikalsen told Discovery News. “Photography is a hobby for me.”

According to Mikalsen, as soon as he posted his aurora photographs on the Spaceweather.com Northern Lights Gallery, he received dozens of emails from all over the world requesting more information about the mysterious shape.

So what could it be? In correspondence with Truls Lynne Hansen, lead scientist at the Tromsø Geophysical Observatory, he doubts that the mystery object can be explained by a technical fault.

“Usually such aberrations appear when there is a small and intense source of light in the field of view, or at least so close that the light from it hits the lens,” Hansen explained to me via email. “That seems not to be the case here.”

“Additionally the color of the ‘phenomenon’ is the same as the color in the aurora, the auroral green line from atomic oxygen,” Hansen continued, “so the ‘phenomenon’ is either a genuine auroral feature or a reflection of auroral light somewhere in space.”

Hold on. A reflection of auroral light… in space? That’s impossible.

Or is it?

How an Iridium flare works with sunlight, but the same should be true for other light sources, such as aurorae (astrosat.net)

The structured shape of the phenomenon, plus its distance from any light sources, seems to indicate that this isn’t an equipment problem. There is also no known aurora that could do this naturally. So that leaves the “reflection from space” argument. What do we have in space that could possibly reflect the green light being emitted by the aurora?

“I agree with Pål Brekke [Senior Advisor at the Norwegian Space Centre] that a reflection from a satellite is a candidate,” said Hansen. “It reminds of the so-called ‘Iridium flares’ — reflections of sunlight from the regularly shaped Iridium satellites.”

Satellite flares are well known by astronomers. As a satellite passes overhead, the conditions may be right for the spacecraft’s solar panels or antennae to reflect sunlight down to the ground. The result is a short-lived burst of light, known as a “flare.”

The network of Iridium communication satellites are best known for their flares, since they have three huge door-sized antennae that act as orbital mirrors. Witnessing an Iridium flare is immensely rewarding; the event can be predicted beforehand because these satellites have orbits that can be tracked.

My personal concern about the satellite flare theory is the question about auroral light intensity. Is the light from a large aurora bright enough to bounce off a satellite and appear as an auroral satellite flare as a point? And in turn produce a parachute-shaped, lens flare-like projection in the photo? I couldn’t imagine even an Iridium satellite amplifying auroral light that much (although a stonking-huge orbital solar power array of the future might do a better job).

“The intensity of an intense aurora is not far from the intensity of moonlight, which is 1/100,000 of sun’s light, and the solar Iridium flares apparently are several orders of magnitude stronger than this ‘auroral flare,’ so the intensity does not immediately exclude the satellite reflection hypothesis,” said Hansen.

BIG PIC: See the whole scene as captured by Per-Arne Mikalsen.

A weak auroral flare seems feasible, but as pointed out by astronomer Daniel Fischer via Twitter, the green flare might not have anything to do with reflected aurora light, it could just be the color of the lens coating. The lens flare was therefore the result of internal reflections inside the camera lens caused by the bright lights in the lower left-hand corner of the frame.

“It has the typical caustic shape and it is opposite several bright point lights,” Fischer observed. “Green color could be caused by lens coatings.”

Although more research will need to be done, it certainly seems plausible that Per-Arne Mikalsen serendipitously took a photograph of a satellite flare (possibly an Iridium satellite). What makes this revelation even more exciting is that we’ve never seen an auroral reflection from a satellite before (if it’s not a lens flare, that is). “I have, by the way, never seen or heard of a similar phenomenon,” Hansen said.

If you want to see a bigger version of the phototgraph, please click here. Believe me, the bigger version is just marvellous!