Monday, November 30, 2020
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Interesting Fact: The Planet Uranus Was Discovered Before Antarctica
Discovered by Englishman William Herschel in 1782
Ships captained by three men sighted Antarctica or its ice shelf in 1820: Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (a captain in the Imperial Russian Navy), Edward Bransfield (a captain in the Royal Navy), and Nathaniel Palmer (a sealer from Stonington, Connecticut).
Bella Twin, with the .22 Used to Take the 1953 World Record Grizzly
She shot it through the ear from around 30 feet. They were small game hunting when the grizzly came up. She was afraid It had gotten her scent and took the shot. It was a tough but calculated decision as well as a great shot, as in the ear and into the brain is the only place a 22 caliber could drop a grizzly.
It seems the sun burped out a big solar flare around the corner from us.
Earlier today (Nov. 29th at 1311UT), Earth-orbiting satellites detected the biggest solar flare in more than 3 years. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded this extreme-ultraviolet movie of the M4.4 category blast.
Remarkably, this flare was even bigger than it seems. The blast site is located just behind the sun's southeastern limb. As a result, the explosion was partially eclipsed by the body of the sun. It might have been an X-class event.
The flare also hurled a significant coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, shown here in a coronagraph image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO):
This CME will not hit Earth. It is outside the strikezone for geoeffective solar storms. If, however, it were coming our way, we would be anticipating a strong geomagnetic storm. Maybe next time!
"Next time" could be just days away. The hidden sunspot that produced this major event will rotate onto the Earthside of the sun during the next day or two. Then its ability to spark geomagnetic storms will be greatly increased.
Kettleman City’s Supercharger station, which sits halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is already an immensely popular charge point, but considering Thanksgiving is one of the year’s busiest travel periods, the facility’s 40 charging stalls were insufficient to meet the overwhelming demand.
Kettleman City is an otherwise nondescript small farm town smack in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley on I-5, the major north/south highway.
To make matters worse, simultaneous re-charging slows down the speed of charging for everyone – encumbering a process that can already take up to as long as 75 minutes.
For a Model S Tesla at a Supercharger station, it will take about 20 minutes to charge 50 percent and 40 minutes to charge 80 percent.
Tesla's website says that drivers will have enough to finish their trip on 80 percent, but owners can reach 100 percent fueled in 75 minutes.
This is a problem that can likely be solved for now with new charging stations, but what about when electric cars become more popular, and governments try to outlaw gas engines? Where's the electricity coming from then? Huh?
This is just an echo of problems to come if trends continue.
Saturday, November 28, 2020
I'm about to die of turkey overdose. Two full Thanksgiving dinners in two days is a lot, but I'm not complaining.
And Mrs. CW just made the moistest turkey I've ever tasted.
Your Good News of the Day: Back from the brink of extinction, blue whales return to South Georgia
After being nearly completely wiped out by whalers, new research suggests Antarctic blue whales have returned to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.
Between 1998 and 2018, whaling surveys turned up only a single sighting.
That one loner must have told his buddies, because in February, scientists documented 58 blue whale sightings and recorded dozens of blue whale calls.
"The continued absence of blue whales at South Georgia has been seen as an iconic example of a population that was locally exploited beyond the point where it could recover," lead study author Susannah Calderan said in a news release.
Over the past few years we've been working at South Georgia, we have become quite optimistic about the numbers of blue whales seen and heard around the island, which hadn't been happening until very recently," said Calderan, a researcher at the Scottish Association for Marine Science.
In addition to relying on their own visual and sonic observations, scientists surveyed blue whale sightings by sailors and tourist ship passengers reported to the South Georgia Museum.
Over the last few years, the museum has also fielded photographs of blue whales snapped by seafarers.
So far, 41 blue whales in South Georgia have been photo-identified between 2011 and 2020. None of the South Georgia whales matched the profiles of the 517 whales in the Antarctic blue whale photographic catalogue.
Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V in 1913
Fun fact the Czar of Russia the king of England and the Kaiser of Germany are first cousins through their maternal grandmother Queen Victoria.
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