Can antibiotics cure your cold?
Moonless nights for November 2012 Leonid meteor shower
What is the world’s leggiest creature?
Antarctic ozone hole shrinks to second smallest in 20 years
Satellite data shows that this year’s Antarctic ozone hole was the second smallest recorded over the past 20 years. Scientists attribute the small size of the ozone hole this year to warm atmospheric temperatures. Full recovery of the Antarctic ozone layer due to the phase out of ozone-depleting substances is not expected to happen until the latter half of the 21st century.
Extent of the Antarctic ozone hole on September 22, 2012. Image Credit: NASA.
EarthSky 22: Pleiades star cluster
Pleiades star cluster, aka the Seven Sisters. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Song of the Week:
The Echocentrics‘s “Down Under.”
Featured This Week:
The Pleiades Deborah Byrd and Michael Brennan talk about observing the Pleiades star cluster.
Shakey Graves‘s “Roll the Bones”
Cleveland Volcano Michael Brennan speaks with USGS geophysicist Rick Wessels about the activity of the Cleveland Volcano in Alaska, and monitoring volcano activity.
Song of the Week:
The Echocentrics‘s “Down Under.”
Featured This Week:
The Pleiades Deborah Byrd and Michael Brennan talk about observing the Pleiades star cluster.
Shakey Graves‘s “Roll the Bones”
Cleveland Volcano Michael Brennan speaks with USGS geophysicist Rick Wessels about the activity of the Cleveland Volcano in Alaska, and monitoring volcano activity.
A famous variable star in the constellation Cepheus
The constellations Cepheus the King and Cassiopeia the Queen sit high in the northern sky on November and December evenings. Once you find Cepheus, you can locate Delta Cephei, a famous variable star. With clock-like precison, this faint star doubles in brightness every 5.36 days.
Read the full articleLeonid meteors peak before dawn Saturday, November 17
The radiant point for the Leonid meteor shower is near the star Algieba in the constellation Leo the Lion. The 2012 Leonid meteor shower is expected to present the greatest number of meteors before dawn on Saturday, November 17. So tonight is your best time to watch! What’s more, Sunday, November 18 may offer a decent sprinkling of meteors as well. If you have a dark sky – far from city lights – you might see as many as 10 to 15 meteors per hour.
Read the full articleItaly recovering from large floods
This month, a series of disturbances produced widespread rainfall across portions of northern and central Italy. The city of Venice was hit hardest hardest as flooding reached the sixth-highest level since records were kept 150 years ago (1872). Many areas actually received over half an inch of rain everyday for about five days in a row. These heavy rainfall totals added up and produced widespread flooding that affected thousands of people across Italy. As of today, at least four people have died from the extensive flooding, and the country is recovering this week as water levels begin to dwindle down.
Melt water on Mars could sustain life
New research suggests that water has played a more extensive role than previously envisioned, and that environments capable of sustaining life could exist on Mars.
Image credit: NASA
Can antibiotics cure your cold?
Image Credit: Tony Fischer Photography
With the profusion of holidays in late fall, it’s easy to miss an under-promoted event like “Get Smart About Antibiotics Week”, the Centers for Disease Control’s good-hearted though inelegantly titled campaign to improve our troubled relationship with these essential medications. While I do wish the CDC could have come up with a snappier name for its effort (perhaps we’ll try improving on that a little later) a better understanding of how antibiotics should be used is urgently needed if we want to retain their benefits (trust me, we do). And look, we’re in the middle of the event right now (Nov 12-18)! Let the smartening begin!
Read the full articleMoonless nights for November 2012 Leonid meteor shower
This is a famous woodcut of the 1833 Leonid meteor storm. No Leonid storm is expected this year, but if you watch in the next few mornings you might see some Leonid meteors!
The young crescent moon will set soon after sunset tonight (November 15, 2012), leaving dark skies for this year’s November 2012 Leonid meteor shower. Tonight is not the peak of the shower. The peak should come between midnight and dawn on Saturday morning, November 17. But you’re likely to see Leonids tonight, too, as the shower climbs toward its peak.
Read the full articleWhat is the world’s leggiest creature?
Female Illacme plenipes with 618 legs. Click to expaaaannnnd.
It’s a millipede with up to 750 legs, twice as many as any other known millipede species. The video in this post shows all these legs moving together.
Read the full articleX-rays from a reborn planetary nebula
Images of the planetary nebula Abell 30, (a.k.a. A30), show one of the clearest views ever obtained of a special phase of evolution for these objects.
This composite image shows a planetary nebula, Abell 30, located about 5500 light years from Earth. Image credit: NASA/CXC/IAA-CSIC/M.Guerrero et al