Unseen World!

Like every time a meteor shower is due or forecasted, viewers and astrophotographers all around the world will have their cameras and rolls ready to capture a moment of this phenomenal display of nature’s artist.

Predictions are coming in from meteor experts & researchers from around the world with regards to the level of activity that will be experienced in different parts of the world. A common consensus for this year is that the Asian continent will witness the brightest galore of shooting stars this time around. Astronomers David Asher from Ireland, Mikhail Maslov of Russia and Jeremie Vaubaillon of France have identified Indonesia and India as prime viewing locations. Even NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office connoisseurs Danielle Moser and Bill Cooke are in agreement with the trio of astronomers.

Becoming visible either on the morning of the 18th or 17th of November (depending on which part of the world you are in), the Leonoid meteor shower is expected to flood the skies with approximately 20 to 30 shooting stars per hour. Not quite the stunning amount of the 1830’s or the early 1990’s where thousands of shooting stars were observed, 2009 is still anticipated to do better than the preceding years.

Mother Earth will be on a flight path through the fragments of meteoric dust from originating the constellation Leo. Since the smaller fragments are understood to be pushed away by the larger ones, one can expect to witness a shooting star with a longer than average trail that could burst into a fireball (called bolides).

During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, you may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, depending on whether you’re in the right place to see tonight’s showy peak, experts predict.

With the highest number of meteors streaking across the skies around 4:45 p.m. ET on November 17, the full Leonids peak will be effectively invisible for viewers in North America and Europe.

But in Asia, the peak happens during predawn hours, so observers there will have a front row seat for this year’s display. (See a NASA map of the 2009 Leonids’ peak visibility.)

Shiloh Pepin, 10, a mermaid girl has died on Friday at the “Maine Medical Centre” in Kennebunkport, United States of America. Pneumonia became the cause of little Shiloh Pepin. She was popular as a “Mermaid Girl” due to her suffering from a condition called “Mermaid Syndrome”. The Mermaid Syndrome is also called as “Sirenomelia” and is very rare. In this rare condition the legs of a patient are fused with each other looking like a mermaid’s tail.
Shiloh Pepin became popular after her appearance in “The Oprah Winfrey Show” recently. However the internet and electronic media were already became the main source of her popularity due to her suffering from this rare condition.

At the time of Shiloh Pepin’s birth, the doctors predicted that the baby will survive only for few weeks but Shiloh survived for ten years mainly due to her strong will power as well as determination.

Shiloh breathed her last at “Maine Medical Centre” after about week time of her admittance to the hospital. She was suffering from a severe fever, when she was admitted to the hospital on 10th October, but her disease could not be controlled which lead to pneumonia afterwards. Initially she was responding to her treatment but after some days all treatment starting to fail which lead to her worsening condition.

In most of the cases, the children suffering from this condition do not survive for long but those children who survive for longer period are generally operated later on to get separated their legs. But Shiloh could not be operated due to various complications and a possible threat of damage of some blood vessel of circulatory system.

However, Shiloh will always be remembered due to her strong will power and determination despite being a special person who became a sign of courage for a million of others in the world.

The word is out now and there many (including me) who are very upset over NASA on their latest mission “Bombing the Moon”. To be honest, I could not really see the point in this experiment. Why would we bomb the moon for water? Are we running out of water? The impact of the two spacecrafts on the moon is a total waste as far as I am concerned. So what if there is water there? So what if there is not? I mean, the money spent on this experiment could have been used on something more relevant to us.

NASA has successfully bulldozed two spacecraft into the moon’s south pole in a search for hidden ice, but without the promised live photos.

First a 2.2-ton empty rocket hull smacked the moon’s south pole at 7:31 a.m. EDT Friday. Then four minutes later the camera-and-instrument laden space probe made its death plunge.

Read more Here

What are the Scientology beliefs?
Scientology teaches that man is an immortal, spiritual being composed of three parts: the first of these is the spirit, or thetan, (from the Greek letter theta, meaning “thought” or “spirit”), the mind, and the body. The body is not the person, and the most important of these three parts is the thetan.
The official Scientology website also states “In Scientology no one is asked to accept anything as belief or on faith. That which is true for you is what you have observed to be true. An individual discovers for himself that Scientology works by personally applying its principles and observing or experiencing results.”
Scientologists believe that the basic command in life is to survive, and this command is broken into eight dynamics, meaning urges or impulses. All activities can be understood and harmonized with each other to increase survival. The dynamics are Infinity (God or Creator), Spiritual, Physical Universe, Life Forms, Mankind, Group Survival, Family, and Self.
“Through Scientology, a person realizes that his life and influence extend far beyond himself. By understanding each of these dynamics and their relationship, one to the other, he is able to do so, and thus increase survival on all of these dynamics.”A principle of great importance in Scientology is the Arc Triangle. Affinity, reality, and communication form an interdependent triangle that adds up to understanding and assists relationships. A Tone Scale in which things are given a number, or a “tone,” and as a person’s knowledge of the Tone Scale increases, so does his happiness, well-being, self-esteem, and other desirable qualities.

Scientology beliefs – Drugs, Reincarnation, Peace
Scientologists believe that all drugs are poisons that inhibit spiritual freedom. L. Ron Hubbard found that drugs and chemical residues are stored in the tissues of the body, and as long as they remain in the body a person’s abilities can remain suppressed. To dislodge the toxins, a person participates in a Purification Rundown which involves sweating in a sauna, mega-vitamin and mineral dosages, extra oil, good nutrition, and adequate rest.
Scientologists also believe in reincarnation and the “truths” that can be learned through past lives. These experiences can affect the thetan positively or negatively. The main way the principles of Scientology can be applied is through “auditing” where the auditor helps a person examine certain areas of their life and get rid of any unwanted influences to heighten ability and awareness. A device called an E-Meter is also used in this process. It measures a person’s mental state and it helps the auditor locate areas of distress.
The aims of Scientology are “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights…”

Find out more about Scientology

Sirius also known as the Dog Star is the brightest star (−1.46^m) in the night sky. This star can be seen from every inhabited region of the Earth’s surface and, in the northern hemisphere, is known as a vertex of the Winter Triangle. At a distance of 8.6 light years, Sirius is also one of the nearest stars to Earth. It is a main sequence star of spectral type A0 or A1 and has a mass about 2.4 times that of the Sun.

In 1841 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel deduced that Sirius was actually a binary star. In 1862 Alvan Graham Clark discovered the companion, which is called Sirius B, or affectionately "the Pup". The visible star is now sometimes known as Sirius A. The two stars orbit each other with a separation of about 20 AU and a period of close to 50 years. In 1915 astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory discovered that Sirius B was a white dwarf, the first to be discovered. Interestingly, this means that Sirius B must have originally been the much more massive of the two, since it has already evolved off the main sequence.

Historically, many cultures have attached special significance to Sirius. Sirius was worshipped in the valley of the Nile long before Rome was founded, and many ancient Egyptian temples were constructed oriented so that light from the star could penetrate to their inner altars. The Egyptians based their calendar on the heliacal rising of Sirius, which occurred just before the annual flooding of the Nile and the Summer solstice. In Greek mythology, Orion’s dog became Sirius. The Greeks also associated Sirius with the heat of summer: the name Sirius is derived from Seirios meaning "the scorcher". This also explains the phrase "dog days of summer".

There are a few unsolved mysteries regarding Sirius. Firstly, it has been suggested that there is a third very small companion star, but it appears that this has not yet been definitely confirmed. Secondly, ancient observations of Sirius describe it as a red star, when today Sirius A is bluish white. The possibility that stellar evolution of either Sirius A or Sirius B could be responsible for this discrepancy is rejected by astronomers on the grounds that the timescale of thousands of years is too short and that there is no sign of the nebulosity in the system that would be expected had such a change taken place. Alternative explanations are either that the description as red is a poetic metaphor for ill fortune, or that the dramatic scintillations of the star when it was observed rising left the viewer with the impression that it was red. A third mystery is a suggestion that the Dogon tribe of Africa knew about unseen companion star(s) before they were discovered in the 19th century, although careful research reveals this was probably cultural contamination on the part of visiting astronomers who went to the region to observe a transit of Venus. This is a source of speculation for UFO enthusiasts and was the subject of the book The Sirius Mystery by Robert Temple.

Some facts about Sirius A

• Parallax: 0.379 arcsecs
• Spectral type: A1 V
• Radial velocity: −9 km/s
• Proper motion: 1.339 arcsecs/year
• Apparent visual magnitude: −1.44
• Absolute visual magnitude: 1.45
• Luminosity: 26.1 Solar Luminosities

Some facts about Sirius B

• Parallax: 0.379 arcsecs
• Spectral type: White dwarf
• Radial velocity: −9 km/s
• Proper motion: 1.339 arcsecs/year
• Apparent visual magnitude: 8.44
• Absolute visual magnitude: 11.3
• Luminosity: 2.4e−4 solar luminosities
• Surface temperature: 25000K

For more detailed information click here

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region of the sky, based on the results of a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known.

By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, and it has been the source of almost 400 scientific papers since it was created..

Then came along “The Hubble Ultra Deep Field”

Here’s a new way to appreciate the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, by flying through the 10,000 galaxies in this deepest of all Hubble images. Watch the whole video if you need the background on the Hubble Deep Field and subsequent Ultra Deep Field. Start at about 3:00 if you just want to see the distances between the galaxies in this image. Nice

For more information click here

Supergiants are the most massive stars.

Supergiants can have masses from 10 to 70 solar masses and brightness from 30,000 up to hundreds of thousands times the solar luminosity.

They vary greatly in radii, usually from 30 to 500, or even in excess of 1000 solar radii.

Because of their extreme masses they have short lifespans of only 10 to 50 million years and are only observed in young cosmic structures such as open clusters, the arms of spiral galaxies, and in irregular galaxies.

They are less abundant in spiral galaxy bulges, and are not observed in elliptical galaxies, or globular clusters, all of which are believed to be composed of old stars.

Currently, the largest known stars in terms of physical size, not mass or luminosity, are the supergiants VV Cephei, V354 Cephei, KW Sagitarii, KY Cygni, and the Garnet Star..

For more information about the topic Supergiant, read the full article at Wikipedia.org

I was browsing through couple of videos on YouTube and came across this video which I should say that “it is amazing piece of work done by Animator Daniel Maas!

Especially I likes the theme he has used for this video! So all you guys who missed out or did not know please go ahead and refresh your self!

Just to give you little briefing about the mission (Mars Exploration Rover Mission) :

The launch periods for each rover were as follows:

Mission	Open	Close	Arrival
Rover A	June 5, 2003	June 24, 2003	January 4, 2004
Rover B	June 25, 2003	July 15, 2003	January 25, 2004

• Mission: MER-A "Spirit"
• Launch Date: June 10, 2003
• Launch Time: 1:58:47 p.m. EDT
• Launch Vehicle: Delta II
• Launch Pad: 17-A

• Mission: MER-B "Opportunity"
• Launch Date: July 7, 2003
• Launch Time: 11:18:15 p.m. EDT
• Launch Vehicle: Delta II
• Launch Pad: 17-B

SCIENTIFIC EXPERTS from around the world are predicting that 3 years from now, all life on Earth could well come to an end. Some are saying it’ll be humans that would set it off. Others believe that a natural phenomenon will be the cause. And the religious folks are saying it’ll be God himself who would press the stop button. The following are some likely arguments as to why the world would end by the year 2012.

Reason one: Mayan calendar

The first to predict 2012 as the end of the world were the Mayans, a bloodthirsty race that were good at two things — building highly accurate astrological equipment out of stone and sacrificing virgins.
Thousands of years ago they managed to calculate the length of the lunar moon as 329.53020 days, only 34 seconds out. The Mayan calendar predicts that the earth will end on December 21, 2012. Given that they were pretty close to the mark with the lunar cycle, it’s likely they’ve got the end of the world right as well.

Reason two: Sun storms

Solar experts from around the world monitoring the sun have made a startling discovery. Our sun is in a bit of strife. The energy output of the sun is, like most things in nature, cyclic and it’s supposed to be in the middle of a period of relative stability. However, recent solar storms have been bombarding the earth with lot of radiation energy. It’s been knocking out power grids and destroying satellites. This activity is predicted to get worse and calculations suggest it’ll reach its deadly peak sometime in 2012.

Reason three: The atom smasher

Scientists in Europe have been building the world’s largest particle accelerator. Basically, its a 27 km tunnel designed to smash atoms together to find out what makes the universe tick. However, the mega-gadget has caused serious concern, with some scientists suggesting that it’s properly even a bad idea to turn it on in the first place. They’re predicting all manner of deadly results, including mini black holes. So when this machine is fired up for its first serious experiment in 2012, the world could be crushed into a super-dense blob the size of a basketball.

Reason four: The Bible says it

If having scientists warning us about the end of the world isn’t bad enough, religious folks are getting in on the act as well. Interpretations of the Christian Bible reveal that the date for Armageddon, the final battle between good an evil, has been set for 2012. The I Ching, also known as the Chinese Book of Changes, says the same thing, as do various sections of the Hindu teachings.

Reason five: Super volcano

Yellowstone National Park in United States is famous for its thermal springs and old faithful geyser. The reason for this is simple — it’s sitting on top of the world’s biggest volcano and geological experts are beginning to get nervous sweats. The Yellowstone volcano has a pattern of erupting every 650,000 years or so, and we’re many years overdue for an explosion that will fill the atmosphere with ash, blocking the sun and plunging the earth into a frozen winter that could last up to 15,000 years. The pressure under the Yellowstone is building steadily, and geologists have set 2012 as a likely date for the big bang.

Reason six: The physicists

This one’s case of bog — simple maths mathematics. Physicists at Berkely University have been crunching the numbers.
They’ve determined that the earth is well overdue for a major catastrophic event. Even worse, they’re claiming that their calculations prove that we’re all going to die, very soon. They are also saying that their prediction comes with a certainty of 99 per cent; and 2012 just happens to be the best guess as to when it occurs.

Reason seven: Earth’s magnetic field

We all know the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that shields us from most of the sun’s radiation. What you might not know is that the magnetic poles we call North and South have a nasty habit of swapping places every 750,000 years or so — and right now we’re about 30,000 years overdue. Scientists have noted that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20-30 kms each year, much faster than ever before, which points to a pole-shift being right around the corner. While the pole shift is under way, the magnetic field is disrupted and will eventually disappear, sometimes for up to 100 years. The result is enough UV outdoors to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches.