Well tonight was a pretty poor salsa event. The last tango at Oceanen was last Thursday so today I went to Hendricksberg for salsa. Rather few people have been going to Oceanen on Wednesdays for salsa and I was told that they prefer waiting a day in order to go to the club instead of the folkhus. ("community center" in English?)
This evening I went, and nearly everyone was watching the World Cup. Sweden against (... doing research ..) Paraguay. Few were dancing; perhaps 4 couples. It was also about 2-1 men. A couple of the guys did practice stealing a follow, which is pretty rare here.
Hendricksberg is on a small cliff overlooking the river. It has a roof patio. I spent a lot of time just watching the ships going up and down and the sun slowly setting in the north-west. The Volvo Ocean Race is expected to end tomorrow, with events a bit further downriver from that site. The semis were lining up (or the "lorries were queueing up") waiting for the next ferry.
With the sun hanging below the horizon so long I figured there should be some good satellite spotting. I read that ISS would be visible most nights for the next week. Looking it up just now I see that I read it perhaps because it's unusual to see ISS. No, that doesn't make sense. The orbit hasn't changed. Ahh, but the orbital plane stays constant while the Earth moves around the Sun.
In any case, there are very few satellites brighter than mag 3.5. I switched to brighter than 4.5 mag and that was a bit better. As I should have expected, they are nearly all Russian. US launches from Florida don't usually have a tilt this far north. Takes more energy. Russia launches out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome which is 46 degrees north, or about 12 degrees south of here. ISS comes this far north because it's supported by the US and Russia. Good thing too (kinda) since Soyuz does the resupplies while the shuttle is out of business. Kinda because I don't see the point of ISS, at least from a scientific or exploration standpoint.
I tried looking for a 4.0 magnitude Cosmos rocket just now. It was supposed to be high in the sky but 4.0 isn't that bright against a twilight sky and I couldn't see it. ISS is around 0.3-0.5 mag so I'll try again around 12:30am Saturday morning.
Lacrosse 4 will be visible at 3.8 magnitude about midnight (30 minutes earlier). That's a US reconaissance satellite. Rather, a "widely believed to be" reconaissance satellite. There was an interesting interview with Dr. Jonathan McDowell by Slacker Astronomy on the topic of amateur satellite trackers. McDowell recounted how the various officials refused to say that some military mission launched a new satellite. The tracker asking the question pointed out that they could look up and see it, in the same orbit as the shuttle which launched it.
BTW, Sweden won 1-0.
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5 comments:
" Kinda because I don't see the point of ISS, at least from a scientific or exploration standpoint."
Aww c'mon, it's fun to justify, and it works a bit like the fortune cookie game, you know, where you add "... in bed' to the end of every fortune cookie. But instead you just add: "... in micro-gravity" to everything.
Why the space station? Because we've never seen how these enzymes interact... in micro-gravity. Because we've never seen how bones mend... in micro-gravity. Because we've never had food fights, in micro-gravity (umm, scratch that... that weightless spiraling banana was pretty well documented). But we've never played Jenga in microgravity... yeah, that's it... we still haven't had micro gravity Jenga, or Twister, or... " and there you have it, a research agenda to justify the decaying and dangerous project for a good decade or so. :-)
Or the heyday of the dot com era - take a business plan and add "... on the internet". Or the early days of movies: "a man sneezing .. as a movie!"
It would be nice to debate the usefulness of various bits of "X ... in microgravity" except most of the time the astronauts are working on the spaceship and doing science that could as easily (and more cheaply) be done without highly trained people requiring expensive and heavy life support.
I think a lot of science is done by accident, meaning, "what? I didn't expect that!" along with the followup. Most of the time the followup is "duh!" but sometimes it's a new and interesting. I don't think there's enough science going on, or undirected time, for that to happen on ISS. Politics driven science almost requires guaranteed and hence rarely interesting research.
Circ de Sole ... in microgravity!
Jai Lai ... in microgravity!
You know, these might be interesting. Would require a bigger space station.
what is "stealing a follow"?
- Christy
Suppose I am dancing with someone. There are different sorts of connections. One is called closed position, which is the normal dance pose. My left hand holding her right and my right hand behind her back, with her left arm on my right arm.
There are only a few things I can do in close position. Other moves require us to open up the position. This may be a two-handed open connection, or one-handed or zero-handed.
Suppose I'm in a one-handed open position leading her into a turn. When she's facing the other way during the turn, someone else could come up and get into a closed dance position with her before she's finished and is facing me.
In other words, someone has just stolen my follow. I'm no longer the leader. It's like "may I cut in" execept without the asking. Though usually it's done between people who know each other as otherwise there may be bad tempers.
There are other ways to steal. For example, in a two-handed open position the stealer could deftly time things to duck down and come up between the arms, between the people.
Then there are dance circles, where one person is in the middle and the others make a circle. One volunteer from the circle comes in to dance with the person of honor. After a bit, a new volunteer comes in to replace the old one. This may be done through a steal or through a "may I break in" request, or by knowing that the point of the circle is to have many people dancing with the one and it's time to shift to the next person.
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