The Dole Air Race, also known as the Dole Derby, was a tragic air race to cross the Pacific Ocean from northern California to the Territory of Hawaii in August 1927. Of the 15-18 entrant airplanes, 11 were certified to compete but three crashed before the race, resulting in three deaths. Eight eventua...
Roman mythology, Portunes (alternatively spelled Portumnes or Portunus) was a god of keys, doors and livestock. He protected the warehouses where grain was stored. His festival, celebrated on August 16, the seventeenth day before the Kalends of September, was the Portumnalia, a minor occasion...
X-51A Waverider: Hypersonic jet plane tested Hypersonic jet WaveRider is to undergo another test flight above the Pacific Ocean aiming to reach Mach 6. At this speed - more than 4,300 mph - it could travel from London to New York in about an h...
Australia has announced plans to build the world's biggest solar power station as part of a radical rethink on climate change.
The government on Wednesday said that it would contribute A$75 million towards the cost of the photovoltaic solar power plant.
The 154 megawatt power station will cos...
Recreating a Slice of the Universe Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands o...
Deep Sky Objects: The Best And Brightest from Four Decades of Comet Chasing Veteran comet hunter and eloquent popular astronomy writer David H. Levy takes amateur sky-watchers on a fascinating journey into deep space in this enthusiastic and informative survey of the many far distant yet observa...
Title: Metal-poor Galaxies in the Local Universe Authors: Eva K. Grebel (ARI/ZAH, Heidelberg University) A galaxy's mean metallicity is usually closely correlated with its luminosity and mass. Consequently the most metal-poor galaxies in the local universe are dwarf galaxies. Blue compact d...
Title: High Resolution Near-Infrared Survey of the Pipe Nebula I: A Deep Infrared Extinction Map of Barnard 59 Authors: Carlos G. Román-Zúñiga, Charles J. Lada, João F. Alves We present our analysis of a fully sampled, high resolution dust extinction map of the Barnard 59 complex in the Pipe Nebula...
Title: SN2002bu -- Another SN2008S-like Transient Authors: D. M. Szczygiel (1), C. S. Kochanek (1,2), X. Dai (3) ((1) Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, (2) Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, The Ohio State University, (3) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uni...
Standard deviation, or lower case sigma, measures the spread, or deviation, of data about a central tendency, such as the mean or the median in a data set or group, with a Gaussian (bell curve) distribution. Standard deviation is a widely used measure of variability or diversity used in statistics a...
New research out today reveals that the Alpine Fault - a strike-slip fault running almost the entire length of the South Island - is surprisingly "well-behaved" in its regularity. But good behaviour, in a scientific sense, may not bring much comfort to South Islanders. In earthquake te...
How to get Earth observation data How do you go about obtaining ESA Earth observation data products for your own use? The answer depends on the type of Earth observation data needed. Free dataset Most of the ESA Earth observation datasets are available on the Internet free of charge. Access is gran...