Episodios

  • 369E-401-Night Vision

    369E-401-Night Vision
    Dec 30 2025
    Many people in our modern world rarely if ever experience night vision. To achieve this interesting state of sensory awareness you cannot look at your cell phone or any other source of bright light for 30 to 45 minutes. Your night vision comes about over time because the rod sensors in the retina of your eye undergo a chemical change when they are placed in total darkness. The process starts immediately but takes 20 to 30 minutes to get 80% of maximum sensitivity. The night vision process can be reversed in seconds by exposure to a bright light. In it's most sensitive state your eye can function with a billion times less light than is present in strong sunlight enabling you to see a candle flame from 1.6 miles away.
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    2 m
  • 881-Dangerous Comets

    881-Dangerous Comets
    Dec 26 2025
    It is possible the object creating the Tunguska event in Russia 1908 which knocked down 80 million trees over an area about twice the size of New York City was a fragment of a comet or asteroid. The International Asteroid Warning Network 2025 campaign to track Comet 3L/Atlas prepares the worlds observatories for the eventual time when a comet fragment has our number on it.
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    2 m
  • 368E-400-Roving Venus

    368E-400-Roving Venus
    Dec 23 2025
    Venus and Earth are similar in size, composition, density, and mass. Unfortunately, our sister planet Venus is an example of a place where green house gases have created an extreme situation. Venus's thick carbon dioxide atmosphere has a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth. It would crush a submarine. Additionally, the thick atmospheric blanket holds in the heat causing Venus's surface temperature to be 864 F, hot enough to melt lead.
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    2 m
  • 880-Carrington Anticipated

    880-Carrington Anticipated
    Dec 19 2025
    Just before noon on September 1st of 1859 Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson were making sketches of clusters of sunspots when they were nearly blinded by an intense solar flare. 17.6 hours later a geomagnetic storm thought to be caused by a solar coronal mass ejection traveling at some 1,500 miles per second slammed into the magnetic field surrounding our home planet. We missed being hit with a such large coronal mass ejection by only 9 days in July of 2012. Next time we might not be that lucky.
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    2 m
  • 367E-399-Moons of Florence

    367E-399-Moons of Florence
    Dec 16 2025
    Dr Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory headed up a team of scientists who used the 70 meter antenna at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex to bounce RADAR beams off of the asteroid Florence as it made a close approach to Earth in September of 2017. The RADAR images these researchers obtained reveal that Florence consists of a 2.8 mile diameter primary asteroid which is orbited by two small moons. Florence's two satellites appear to be between three hundred and a thousand feet in diameter and orbit the main asteroid in about 8 and 24 hours respectively. Florence is rare since there are only two other triple asteroid systems among the 16,000 Earth approaching asteroids which asteroid hunters have discovered. We would know more about Florence if Hurricane Irma had not prevented astronomers from using the giant Arecibo RADAR Dish in Puerto Rico to study it. Our curiosity will have to wait since Florence will not come very close again until September 2, 2057.
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    2 m
  • 879-Lurking Asteroid

    879-Lurking Asteroid
    Dec 12 2025
    The Dark Energy Camera on the National Science Foundation’s Blanco 4-meter telescope on Cerro Tololo in Chile is taking near Sun twilight images to search for asteroids, hidden in the glare of our Sun, sneaking up on home planet.
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    2 m
  • 366E-398-Mars Rocks

    366E-398-Mars Rocks
    Dec 9 2025
    At about 2AM on July 18, 2011 several people in near Tata, Morocco saw a bright fireball which was described by one of them to be initially yellow, then turned green, and finally exploded into several pieces producing two sonic booms. In October of 2011 desert wandering nomads began finding very fresh looking dark fusion-crusted stones which were radioactively dated by Dr. John Duke of the University of Alberta to be less than 5 years old. In total 15-24 lbs of meteorites consistent with a very recent fall were found in a strewn field, were whisk away to receive high prices from collectors, and named after the town of Tissint [tee.seent] about 30 miles from their discovery location.
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    2 m
  • 878-Comet Fragment

    878-Comet Fragment
    Dec 5 2025
    My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Vivian Carvajal was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Eridanus with the 90 inch, University of Arizona’s Bok telescope on Kitt Peak when she was treated to an amazing sight. Comet COMET 240P/NEAT with a small version of itself cruising along beside it.It is virtually impossible to predict if Vivian’s fragment 240P-B will survive to make another approach to the Sun in 2033 or so.
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    2 m