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Bell Rock Lighthouse

the Bell Rock Lighthouse was lit for the first time. Using 24 lanterns, it began flashing its warning light, 11 miles out off the east coast of Scotland atop a white stone tower rising over 30m (100ft) high. It was built by Robert Stevenson on a treacherous sandstone reef, which, except at low tides, lies submerged just beneath the waves. Since then, no repair has been necessary to its stonework. It is the oldest sea-washed lighthouse in existence. It was Stevenson's finest achievement, regarded by many as the finest lighthouse ever built, the most outstanding engineering achievement of the 19th century. In the centuries before, the dangerous Bell Rock had claimed thousands of lives, as vessels were wrecked on its razor-sharp serrated rocks.

Ceres observation interruption

In 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi made a 24th observation of the position of Ceres, the asteroid he discovered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on 1 Jan 1801. It was the first and largest of the dwarf planets now known. After this, it moved into the light of the Sun, and was lost to view for most of the rest of the year. To mathematically relocate Ceres, Carl Gauss, age 24, took up the challenge to calculate its orbital path, based on the limited number of observations available. His method was tedious, requiring 100 hours of calculation. He began with a rough approximation for the unknown orbit, and then used it to produce a refinement, which became the subject of another improvement.. And so on. Astronomers using them found his results in close agreement as they located Ceres again 25 Nov-31 Dec 1801.«

Jupiter sets in the west before dawn’s first light

Venus to rise in the east about two hours before sunrise.

Venus, for this world will shine at its brilliant best as the morning “star” in mid-February.

European Space Agency's engineers will use burnt bone charcoal to protect its solar probe from the harsh glare of the Sun.

Burnt bone charcoal, also used in prehistoric cave paintings, will be used by scientists in the titanium heatshield of ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

will help in protecting the Orbiter from the strong glare of the Sun

Glenn in orbit

In 1962, John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three-orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approx. 162 miles and an orbital velocity of approx. 17,500 mph. He spotted Perth, Australia, when that city's residents greeted him by switching on their house lights in unison. A four-cent U.S. stamp was put on sale the same day, making it the first U.S. stamp issued on the day of the event it commemorated. Glenn returned to space 36 years later, making 134 more orbits as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery (29 Oct - 7 Nov 1998) for investigations on space flight and the aging process.

In 1986, the Soviet Union launched into orbit Mir, a new space station. Mir, the Russian word for peace, had six docking ports and special laboratories for scientific research. Weeks later, a veteran crew was sent to man the 56-ft-long and 13.6-ft wide station. The core module provided living quarters for the cosmonauts: galley/table, cooking elements and storage, individual crew cabins and personal hygiene area. They also had a working compartment for monitoring and commanding the core systems supported by an electric power system, thermal control system, computer systems, environmental control and life support, communications and tracking systems. Five additional modules were launched between Mar 1987 and April 1996

In 1924, Edwin Hubble wrote a letter to Harlow Shapley, which he concluded by saying, “...the distance [to the Andromeda nebula] comes out something over 300,000 parsecs.” Hubble discussed in the letter his measurement of the magnitudes of the Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda nebula he had found and confirmed. He used their measured characteristics to calculate their distance, definitely about a million light years from our Solar System. This was the evidence that Andromeda was a separate galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way. This was the first proof of an “island universe.” After collecting more data, Hubble sent a paper read on 1 Jan 1925 to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Meanwhile, Shapley remained unconvinced, as when he debated Heber Curtis on 26 Apr 1920.

Hubble notifies Shapley of Andromeda distance

Ever since the first relay for the 1936 summer Olympic games in Berlin, Olympic torches have traditionally been used to carry a burning flame

from Greece to the host country’s stadium

On Nov. 6, 2013 (Nov. 7 UT) a Soyuz TMA-11M rocket launched

Meteor explosion over Russia with 1,000 injuries

In 2013, a meteor exploded in the sky over Russia's Ural Mountains. It produced a shock wave so intense that about 1,000 people were reported injured, mostly by flying glass fragments. To view the meteor streaking across the sky, many people were at their windows when the sonic boom shattered the glass panes. The meteor was estimated to ;be 2 meters in diameter, with a mass of about 10 tons. It entered the Earth's atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph when it was viewed by residents of Chelyabinsk (a city of 1 million about 930 miles east of Moscow) at about 9:20 am local time, just after sunrise. They saw a thick, white contrail and an intense flash of light ending with a loud thundering sound as the shattering of the meteor blew apart with several kilotons of energy (equivalent to an atomic bomb)

Sound on film

In 1923, the Phonofilm, the first motion picture with a sound-on-film track was demonstrated at a press conference. It was developed (1920) by Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the radio tube (1907). Dancers and musicians were shown on the film with music, but without voice dialogue. The sound was imaged in a narrow margin alongside the picture frames on the film. (De Forest's process came several years before the 1928 film, the "Jazz Singer," but that film used the Warner Vitaphone system. The Vitaphone system attempted to synchronize its sound from a record player turntable connected to the film projector.) The de Forest process read a series of light and dark areas on the film itself, using a photocell to convert to audio.

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and Reading University have demonstrated that, after over 1,500 years frozen in Antarctic ice, moss can come back to life and continue to grow

The team,

observed moss regeneration after at least 1,530 years frozen in permafrost

four recently detected radio signals disappeared only milliseconds after arriving at Earth

only the second detection ever of radio bursts emanating from beyond the Milky Way

Picked up by an international team of astronomers at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia

NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors, lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision

since late July and already has analyzed three million images, identifying 1,500 types of objects in half a million images and 1,200 types of scenes in hundreds of thousands of images

sometimes, what NEIL finds can surprise even the researchers

as ISON got closer to the star

Analyses of light captured by NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft seemed to show the comet growing dimmer

Next, pictures from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which should have captured ISON on its closest approach to the Sun, showed absolutely nothing

a chemical essential for the creation of plastic on Earth has been found in

Saturn's largest Titan

NASA's Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn, found that the atmosphere of Titan contains propylene

Seeing Comet ISON: A telescope guide

If you really want to try to see Comet ISON for yourself, you'll need two things

A dark sky.

In March 2011, a devastating tsunami struck Japan's Tohoku region

Now, researchers have uncovered the cause of this tsunami, shedding light on what displaced the seafloor off the northeastern coast of Japan

Learning more about the 2011 tsunami and its causes is an important step for monitoring future events.

Curiosity

has passed the milestone of 100,000 shots fired by its laser.

The 100,000th shot was one of a series of 300 to investigate 10 locations on a rock called "Ithaca" in late October

team fed ordinary silkworms mulberry leaves that had been sprayed with fabric dyes. Out of seven tested dyes, only one worked, producing a thread that reminded me of pink-dyed hair.

the worms themselves take on some color before they weave their silk cocoons. Their colorful diets did not affect their growth

coloring fabric normally uses enormous amounts of fresh water

An international team of astronomers

has discovered the most distantly orbiting planet found to date around a single, sun-like star

11 times Jupiter's mass and orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance