Category: Environment & Weather

Earth is entering a stream of dusty debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, the source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Although the shower won’t peak until August 11th and 12th, the show is already getting underway.
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For sky watchers in North America, the watch begins after nightfall on August 11th and continues until sunrise on the 12th. Veteran observers suggest the following strategy: Unfold a blanket on a flat patch of ground. (Note: The middle of your street is not a good choice.) Lie down and look up. Perseids can appear in any part of the sky, their tails all pointing back to the shower’s radiant in the constellation Perseus. Get away from city lights if you can.

There is one light you cannot escape on August 12th. The 55% gibbous Moon will glare down from the constellation Aries just next door to the shower’s radiant in Perseus. The Moon is beautiful, but don’t stare at it. Bright moonlight ruins night vision and it will wipe out any faint Perseids in that part of the sky.

NASA

According to the Brazilian environmental organization SOS Mata Atlantica, a household that flushes its toilet one less time per day saves more than 1,100 gallons of water per year. So the organization has launched a TV ad campaign encouraging Brazilians to avoid a flush by peeing in the shower.

Freakonomics

NewMexiKen is taking the day off to celebrate the blog’s sixth anniversary.
The posts today are being written by readers just like you. This is from Mrs. A.

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I seriously wanted to participate today but I’ve been too busy trying to keep from drowning. Six inches of rain in 90 minutes this morning. A three hour respite. Now it’s at it again. Stay tuned for rainfall totals. Time for me to make my way home now. Glad I was on the swim team in a former life.

It’s August 1st in Leadville, Colorado, and you know what that means.

Fall!

It’s 34 degrees with a thick frost. Wind chill 30.

Click image for larger version (and you should see this) and to learn more.

Once again I can’t help thinking that one of the worst ways we’ve polluted our planet is with light. Look at the magnificence we miss.

New Mexico weather forecasting should become more precise. The Weather Forecasting Office in Albuquerque proposes 40 zones to replace the 22 they’ve been using.

“WFO Albuquerque proposes a reconfiguration of the Public Zones that more effectively corresponds to climatological and topographical regimes currently in place over northern and central New Mexico.”

You can click on these links to see maps of the zones. (The maps are point of this post.)

Current 22

New 40

The area involved is larger than all of New England including Maine.

Earlier today, the moon passed directly in front of the sun, causing a total solar eclipse that crossed nearly half the Earth – through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. Today’s was the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, lasting as much as 6 minutes and 39 seconds in a few areas. Despite cloudy skies in many of the populated areas in the path, millions of people gathered outside to gaze up and view this rare event. Collected here are a few images of the eclipse, and those people who came out to watch. (33 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Before today we’d had about 4 inches of rain so far this year. As you can see, we’ve had 1.73 inches this evening. I’ve rarely ever seen it rain any harder.

Update 9:15 PM: About 2 inches total rainfall so far with light rain still falling. One-third of the whole year’s rain has fallen in the past five hours.

Spectacular Wide-Field View of Eagle Nebula in High-Res. Photo taken from Earth.

What a striking picture.

… Death Valley.

On this date in 1913, the hottest temperature ever reported in North America was recorded at the Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California. 134º (56.7ºC) … in the shade.

On Saturday (the 4th) the Earth (that’s us) was its furthest from the Sun for the year.

I was thinking the Sun was acting a little distant lately.

(Not distant enough. It’s 90º at 10 am.)

From The Arizona Daily Star, a story without a happy ending.

At first Stewart Loew was excited by the sight: a mountain lion on the family’s farm near Amado.

In 40 years on the Agua Linda Farm, Loew said this was first large cat he had seen when it appeared in the donkey pen about a month ago.

But soon, his animals started to turn up mauled or dead. First there were four sheep. Then, on June 15, an awful sight: 16 pygmy and nubian goats — all the mammals in the farm’s petting zoo — were killed. Only the geese were spared.

You see the sky rocket explode, but the boom doesn’t come for seconds. The lightning flashes, but the thunder is moments behind. The reason, of course, is that sound moves much, much, much slower than light.

Light is so fast — 186,000 miles per second — that everything we can see on Earth, we see almost instantaneously. Sound, however, travels at just 1,125 feet per second (more or less, depending on temperature, altitude, humidity). The source of the sound doesn’t need to be very far away for us to sense the lag.

Rule of thumb, it takes just less than 5 seconds for sound to travel a mile. If lightning flashes, count the seconds until you hear the thunder to calculate how far away it struck.

A bolt of lightning can be over five miles in length, have temperatures of 50,000 degrees F., and contain 100 million volts.

In 2007, 45 people were struck and killed by lightning in the U.S.; hundreds of others were injured. Of the victims who were killed by lightning:

• 98% were outside
• 89% were male
• 30% were males between the ages of 20-25
• 25% were standing under a tree
• 25% occurred on or near the water

The reported number of injuries is likely far lower than the actual total number because many people do not seek help or doctors do not record it as a lightning injury. People struck by lightning suffer from a variety of long-term, debilitating symptoms, including memory loss, attention deficits, sleep disorders, numbness, dizziness, stiffness in joints, irritability, fatigue, weakness, muscle spasms, depression, and an inability to sit for long.

National Weather Service

That’s funny, I don’t remember being struck by lightning and I have all those symptoms. Oh wait, including memory loss.

… is at 11:46 tonight Mountain Daylight Time. (1:46 AM Sunday EDT, 12:46 AM Sunday CDT, 10:46 PM Saturday PDT and AT).

According to this story at the Santa Fe New Mexican, snowfall is hampering the search for a missing police helicopter in the mountains east of Santa Fe.

Here at Casa NewMexiKen the temperature this June morning is just 59º at 10:45 am. The normal high temperature for June 10th is 89º. We may make it to 70º today.

“Throwing orange peels, coffee grounds and grease-stained pizza boxes in the trash will be against the law in San Francisco, and could even lead to a fine.”

SF Gate has the blue cart, green cart, black cart garbage sorting rules.

Here at Casa NewMexiKen we don’t even have recycling (unless we take it ourselves). We’re told it would be too expensive. Hello! What’s too expensive?

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Don’t give up on this too soon. Wait for it.

As if animals in zoos aren’t stressed enough, we mess them up in the wild, too.

The only jaguar known to still be living in the wild in this country was euthanized late Monday afternoon after being recaptured and found to have advanced kidney failure, state officials said.

The cat, known as Macho B, age 15 or 16, was euthanized at the Phoenix Zoo a few hours after he had been captured Monday afternoon in Southern Arizona’s oak woodlands. That recapture had occurred 12 days after the state Game and Fish Department had first captured the animal inadvertently in an undisclosed area southwest of Tucson as part of an effort to catch and study mountain lions and bears.

Stress from the original capture could have contributed to the kidney failure, a federal agency spokesman said late Monday. A Game and Fish official would not comment on that possibility until the results of blood tests taken on the animal at the time of the first capture are reviewed.

www.azstarnet.com [emphasis mine]

Interesting info about the sun from Bad Astronomy, including this:

“Technically, the Sun is white. This is easy to show: a piece of paper held up to sunlight appears white, as do snow and clouds. If the Sun were yellow, those would look yellow.”

That’s Venus in the evening sky. Don’t miss it.

And on Saturday, Venus and the Moon will be in the sky together, worthy of a stroll where you can see the sky on a late winter, early spring evening. If your sky is clear, take a walk.