We were at the Sun n Fun Airshow in Lakeland, FL yesterday. The last mile to the parking lot took us 90 minutes, the grounds were soft from days of rain and sure enough we got stuck in the parking lot mud till help arrived 90 minutes later. So, I was arranging for our tickets when the Thunderbirds show had already started. With my back to them, I was left shaking like a leaf by the loudest sound I have ever heard. So was Margaret 30 feet away and everyone else around us.
The Thunderbirds had flown directly over us in their F-16s. They can technically reach speeds of Mach 2 though in airshows they stay below Mach 1. But it sure felt like a sonic boom had hit us. And Major Schlichting, in her first year as a Thunderbird is the right wing pilot in the diamond foursome formation. It's precision flying - she is often only 18-inches from the lead jet. 2 other solos make up the aerobatic team of 6.
Two weeks ago, I had the chance to see the US Navy’s Blue Angels in their F-18 Super Hornets - see my write up here. Each has their fans. Navy v Air Force. Super Hornet v Fighting Falcon. My wife likes the Thunderbirds jet livery more.
This video is a nice compilation of both the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels. Mercifully, they rarely fly together – imagine those roars if they were to try to out-hotdog each other.
The company, formally East Japan Railway, will begin safety testing on the two-car Hybari train in late March. Plans are to start commercial service in 2030.
Hybari runs off hydrogen fuel cells and batteries. Hydrogen is supplied from tanks to a fuel cell system, and a chemical reaction with oxygen in the air generates electricity. The batteries store energy generated when the brakes are applied.
China is developing a hypersonic airliner capable of transporting 10 passengers to anywhere in the world in less than an hour.
The 148-foot-long (45-meter) plane is about a third the size of a Boeing 737 and has delta wings identical to that of Concorde, the world’s first supersonic airliner, but with the tips pointed skyward, reported the Daily Mail.
Officials hope to build a fleet of the jets by the end of 2035 and to increase their capacity to 100 people by 2045 – although their exact purpose is yet to be revealed. Owing to its intricate construction, the plane will be able to travel at a speed of Mach 5 or more than five times the speed of sound.
Disc golf and woods, woods and disc golf. They were meant for each other. One such location where you can find an abundance of both of these things is Finland. They have seen a steady rise in course implementation, PDGA events, and PDGA membership since the early 2000s. Their numbers are so high that they currently hold the record for the most disc golf courses per capita. They have over 800 courses for nearly 5.5 million people (that’s one course for every 6,875 people). They also have more disc golf courses than ball golf.
Here is a TED talk on how the sport helped the country during the pandemic
That’s because last week Amtrak quietly unveiled the first deliveries from a previous order with Siemens dating back to 2017. While some interior modifications may occur, this is essentially the same product that will roll out throughout the country over the next decade.
The Points Guy has a detailed review here on the Amtrak Venture class coach
National Geo has greenlit an epic documentary detailing the successful search and discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s sunken Endurance ship near Antarctica, helmed by British historian Dan Snow.
The doc will chart the successful search by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust for famed explorer Shackleton’s shipwrecked Endurance, which sank in 1915 near Antarctica.
Led by Polar Geographer Dr. John Shears and Marine Archaeologist Mensun Bound aboard the South African icebreaker Agulhas II, a crew of scientists and archaeologists teamed with filmmakers and Snow to document the events in real time leading up to the discovery.
Margaret and I drove from Las Vegas, NV to Joshua Tree National Park in CA recently. Saw an amazing variety of solar farms in the desert landscape.
Off US-95, south of Boulder City we saw miles and miles of solar panels. They included the Copper Mountain Solar Facility, a 802 megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant (see some of the panels in video below). It is next to the 64 MW Nevada Solar, the 150 MW Boulder Solar, and the 300 MW Techren Solar projects.
This complex adds up to half of the generating capacity at the nearby Hoover Dam, which has powered Las Vegas’s bright lights for decades.
The nearby thousand acre Townsite Solar + Storage uses a Tesla Megapack whose capacity is rated at 360,000kWh.
Off I-15, near the CA/NV border, we saw Ivanpah which uses mirrors to focus the power of the sun on solar receivers atop power towers. The video below describes the design and some of the problems the site has encountered
Impressive what you can do with cheap land and free sunshine.
While we were at Joshua Tree National Park in California last weekend, Margaret and I went to the monthly Dark Sky Program at the nearby Sky's The Limit (STL) Observatory and Nature Center in Twenty Nine Palms
We had a bit of cloud cover that evening but Ann Congdon, President of STL, kindly shared with me couple of photos of spectacular skies other guests have captured above their dome.
Nonetheless, it was a thrill to get a tour of the skies by Allen Schiano, who has a doctorate in Astronomy and Astrophysics and teaches at Irvine Valley College in Irvine. He previously worked at UC Irvine as a Director of Instructional and Research Computing. He was on stage with John Hill who is the Technical Director at the Large Binocular Telescope operated by the Steward Observatory of U of Arizona.
With their laser pointer as guide, us amateurs got to see
Sirius, the brightest star in the sky
The three stars in a straight line in Orion’s Belt
The Big Dipper and the North Star
The open star cluster, Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters
They answered a bunch of questions including how the recently launched James Webb Space telescope will be able to look farther back in time than previous telescopes using infrared light and will allow scientists to look through dust to see stars forming inside.
But the highlight was an experiment they ran as the clouds cleared. Allen describes it:
“It's a long story but the video at the end is worth the time it takes to read what it's all about.
My buddies John Hill and John Hoey and I had a crazy idea to try to see something with a 14 inch telescope that had only been seen with telescopes larger that twice that size. And we didn't use the method usually employed - a spinning disk in the focal plane - since it requires more equipment and expertise than most people could achieve. That was our goal- something simple others with amateur telescopes could do.
What were we trying to do, you say? We wanted to see the Crab Nebula pulsar 'pulse' on its close to 30 Hz frequency by taking 30 second images at the scope. Those could easily be shown to people watching with current amateur level equipment.
We rigged my Celestron C14HD SCT telescope with 'woofer' speakers and pumped nearly 30 Hz signals into speakers we had taped to its side (Data from the Jodrell Bank, UK ephemeris of the Crab were used to calculate the exact frequency which is critical). We aimed the scope at the Crab Nebula, specifically at the pulsar in the nebula which is the remnants of the star that exploded in a supernova which people saw on Earth in 1054 AD. The neutron star is 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and is about 10 km in diameter. It spins at a dizzying 30 times per second. Like a lighthouse, with every rotation it sweeps a beam of light past us. We see it as a 30 Hz pulse. That's too fast to detect visually for most people.
This video consists of four frames captured while aimed at the pulsar and with the speakers vibrating the scope just below 30Hz. You can see the stars bouncing around while the pulsar remains stationary. The pulsar does bounce around in the same direction as the stars since the location of the pulse is defined by the exact timing of each frame which we did not control.
As far as we know, this is a brand new technique for capturing the pulses of the pulsar and requires only a modest investment in equipment that almost any amateur astronomer could afford.
Instead of seeing it blink on and off this video captures its image as it vibrates 30 times per second. All the stars and background bounce back and forth as does the pulsar. But the pulsar is only lit for a brief moment every 1/30 of a second so it seems to stand still.
The images aren't perfect. This was our first attempt. But this definitely proves this concept works. And that is totally cool!
Tech Specs: Celestron C14HD at f11/Mallincam DS10cTEC camera/30 sec exposures at gain=110/160 and bin=1/image processing by GIMP (cropping, rotation), Topaz Labs DeNoise AI (noise reduction), and PixInsight (animation)
In preparation for the trip, Margaret had tried out several monocular lenses to attach to her iPhone. Assembly turned out to be a bridge too far in the dark. So it is a bit embarrassing to see how deftly Allen assembles his 250 lb. telescope.
Talking about the dark, Margaret did bring along a tactical flashlight with red/green/blue lights. We used the red light to walk around and not spoil the viewing for others. Red light has a wavelength of around 650 nm. That can be detected by cone cells, but not rod cells in our eyes. Cone cells dark adapt much quicker than rod cells.
BTW, even a day trip to STL is worthwhile. It has an Orrery – walkable model of the solar system at 20 billion-to-1 scale, trails with desert flora and a variety of sculptures. It is off the grid thanks to eight solar panels plus a bank of reclaimed batteries donated by the USMC which has a large base in town. This system provides the power for computers, projectors, a weather station, and more.
Hurd, a falconer, and Cheddar, a juvenile Harris’s hawk, are contractors hired by Tampa International Airport to visit a few times a month and deal with unwanted guests.
It’s a 3,000-year-old, human-devised method for fighting a 100-year-old, human-made problem.
Airfield operations compliance manager Brett Bell is the guy driving the truck.
Planes take off and land at Tampa International Airport each day carrying thousands of passengers blissfully unaware of what’s happening in the giant, grassy fields below. Bell and his small team are the specks down there, looking out for the even-smaller specks — herons, egrets, turkey vultures, pigeons, gulls and so on — threatening to damage or bring down airplanes.
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