Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Comet Elenin is still out there!


Here is a video from STEREO A HI1.  Download this AVI video.   I wanted to post this to my Youtube but Youtube compresses it and once compressed you cannot see it. What is it? Comet Elenin, traversing quickly, center right of screen and moving from right to left.  You can see it just barely!  But it is there!  This was from the 14th of September to the 22nd where it then goes off the field of view of STEREO A HI1.  We cannot see it on SOHO because it is too dim for SOHO cameras, it's there though.


To see for yourself how I made the video go here.

Fill out the form as shown and click search.


Once the 161 images load in click the faster button a few times to get it playing fast and look for comet Elenin starting out in the center of the screen on the 14th and moving to the left and out of frame on the 22nd.

I am still hopeful that we will have an outburst, see my last blog for info about my CME hypothesis, but for certain we are going to see what's going on with comet Elenin when we see it in a few days via our most powerful telescopes.  Stay tuned for updates!




Thursday, September 22, 2011

Is comet Elenin disintegrating or is something else happening?


I've been thinking about the CME event that contacted comet Elenin on the 19th of August and have wondered if the CME somehow caused the decrease in observable activity as well as the elongation of the inner coma seen for a few days after the event. Had there been no CME event I would, like everyone else, assume that what we were seeing was the result of an ordinary breakup and disintegration. However, with the CME in play something completely different could be happening. This started me thinking about what would happen if a polarized CME contacted a comet in such a way that the nucleus became either negatively or positively charged. Would the charge prevent the normal formation and visual activity of the coma and or tails? Is this what has happened with comet Elenin? Could this also be an explanation for the two known spectacular outbursts of comet Holmes?

Let's say that because a CME originates at an area of intense magnetic fields, that those magnetic fields at the moment of ejection sometimes cause a separation of charge on rare occasions, such that, a cloud of charge, both negative and positive flows out with the normal plasma ejecta. And then, this charge cloud contacts the nucleus of a comet in such a way that only the positively or negatively charged part of the ejecta cloud makes contact. How would this contact occur dynamically and what would be the effects of this charge residing on the surface of the nucleus?

There are numerous dynamic electric field and magnetic field interactions that can be envisioned, but I want to propose an interaction that covers the elongation of the inner coma of comet Elenin as a start. A negative charging event would have less inertia and would be very different from a positive charging event having more inertia and to get a good visualization of the dynamics a numerical simulation would be needed, however, one effect that might occur is the slowing down of the alpha or beta charges as a result of colliding with the coma, thus forming a magnetic field. This magnetic field would either have a focusing of charge on the nucleus or a deflection of charge, depending on whether the charge cloud was negative or positive. Once the nucleus was charged the resulting electric field would then begin to effect the normal flow of the solar wind in various ways depending on whether the nucleus ended up being negatively or positively charged. This solar wind flow interaction with the electric field would need to be such that the nucleus could not be readily neutralized either by means of the effects of a electric field and inertia or the effects of magnetic field and inertia.

The Roland experiment is a means for charge on the nucleus producing a magnetic a field. If you haven’t heard of the Roland experiment, take a look at section 5 of this PDF:


Basically, Henry Rowland was a Hopkins university scientist who did experiments where he rotated a dielectric disc with charged conductive sectors and detected a magnetic field as a result of the rotating charge. So if the nucleus had enough rotational speed a magnetic field could result and if of sufficient strength could be a means for deflection of the solar wind.

There would need to be a large deflection of the solar wind so as to explain the appearance of decreased activity as well as the initial stretching out of the coma as in the case of what may have happened with comet Elenin. The deflection of charge could for example act in such a way so as to curve charge around the nucleus and concentrate the coma into an elongated shape.

Once a nucleus was sufficiently charged, I would like to propose that it not only stays charged but the electric or magnetic fields deflect the solar wind in such a way as the coma and or tails are unaffected and consequently do not show up much in normal observations. Also that, the nucleus continues to remain active via thermal interaction, but that gasses and dust remain near the nucleus until an event occurs that ignites one of the volatile gasses with oxygen liberated from water via UV degradation. The ignition could occur as a result of a meteoroid or asteroid impact or a superheated green house effect or other event that sufficiently heats any accumulated volatile gases to the ignition point.

Is there any direct evidence for this whatsoever? Nothing obvious that I can think of at this time. However, if come the beginning of October when we'll get a good look at comet Elenin with some of the larger telescopes in the Northern hemisphere and there is no visual sign of either a break up or disintegration, then we'll need to start thinking of some kind of CME related explanation. I did notice that the Hubble image of the inner coma of the comet Holmes outburst appears as an anisotropic hourglass shape.







This same hourglass shape is seen in some supernovae remnants such as the ant nebula.



This hourglass formation could be a result of charged ejecta material moving more readily along magnetic field lines as opposed to across magnetic field lines and something similar could have happened during the comet Holmes outburst.

Sometime tomorrow we will get a little more data from the NASA spacecraft SOHO when comet Elenin will move into its field of view. Then, three days later comet Elenin will be directly between the earth and the sun and will start to then move away from the sun allowing a view from earth. There is the possibility, if I'm correct in what I've proposed, that we could see a flareup of comet Elenin any time between now and the end of the year. If I am wrong, we will see with our most powerful telescopes that comet Elenin did in fact breakup and disintegrate, starting strangely at the same time the CME made contact with it.



Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Is NASA spacecraft observatory STEREO Behind HI-1 camera watching comet Elenin fade?

Over the last week or so the astronomical community has been abuzz about comet Elenin and its apparent fading as imaged from earth. Currently best observed from the Southern hemisphere, a small number of Australian observers have reported a diffusion and decrease in brightness of the inner coma. This is a sign that comet Elenin is running low on the volatiles necessary to keep it actively visible and may consequently completely lose its coma and tail. 


Meanwhile, NASA spacecraft STEREO B has been watching nonstop from the 14th to the 26th and seems to confirm this fading. I say seems, because, comet Elenin is heading away from the spacecraft very rapidly by the 24th as it heads for perihelion in just under two weeks from now. Comet Elenin appears to the HI-1 camera to be slowing down by the 24th when in fact it is speeding up. This is due to comet Elenin moving more directly away in close to a straight line and consequently this could be resulting in it becoming more and more faded in brightness. It appears brightest as it shows up in the normal field of view of the STEREO B HI-1 camera because of its range and also because of its coming out of conjunction with the sun, which causes it to light up a little more due to forward scattering. As of the 19th when a coronal mass ejection hit comet Elenin, which can be seen as a slight tail forming and then violently being ripped off and twirled about, there was a dramatic decrease in brightness and the central condensation that would normally be considered the inner coma became an elongated diffused blur as seen from earth based observers. The STEREO B HI-1 camera however is showing no decrease whatsoever in the days following the 19th, but does show a decrease by the 24th. The question is, is this due to the thermal imaging attribute of the HI-1 camera or is there something else happening? And the slight fading seen through the 24th to the 26th, can this be attributed to the rapidly increasing range or is this the actual fading that is being observed from earth? We will learn the answers in just a week or so from the time of this writing!



Saturday, August 13, 2011

ALERT! ALERT! EARTH IS PASSING THROUGH THE DEBRIS TRAIL OF A COMET!


2010 Perseid Meteor Shower Composite

Just kidding!  =D  There's nothing to be alarmed about!  Some doomsayers have stated that we are going to go through the debris trail of comet Elenin, we're not, but even if we were I just wanted to take a moment to say that we do that all the time.  We go through the debris trails of comets dozens of times each year.  Right now we are going through the debris trail of comet 109P Swift-Tuttle.  This happens every year at this time and is what's known as the Perseids meteor shower.  The peek activity is currently happening at the time of this writing and this meteor shower is one of the better ones that happen each year as far as the level of activity.  If you're reading this and it is nighttime wherever you are you can go out and see the meteoroids hitting the upper atmosphere right now.  The meteoroids are mainly sand sized particles from the tail of comet Swift-Tuttle.  When these meteoroids hit the atmosphere and burn up from friction we change the name to meteors and if any are big enough to make it to the ground, rare, we call them meteorites.  The moon, as you'll notice, is reflecting a lot of light right now so this will make it hard to see most of the meteors, but give it a shot and see what you can see.  I'll be out looking too, off and on tonight.  If you're in the daylight, that's ok, got ya covered with this live shot of the sky complements of NASA.


Oh, and if you're in the US and you see a sparkly light going pretty fast moving from horizon to horizon, that is not a UFO, that's the International Space Station.  =)




Tuesday, August 9, 2011

An enhanced animation from the STEREO B comet Elenin data of August 7th.





I wanted to see how it would look with the coma and tail enhanced and enlarged.  You can barely see it but comet Elenin is just starting to show a tiny tail.  =)



Friday, August 5, 2011

How to download and process your own STEREO data of comet Elenin


Just today the STEREO data for comet Elenin started being officially published and I wanted to show how and where to go to get it for those interested. The images are stored at the Solar Heliospheric Activity Research & Prediction Program section on the United States Naval Research Laboratory servers and the search form can be found here.

As you can see there are a lot of parameters that can be setup to do various kinds of searches, but we are mostly interested in comet Elenin so we can ignore most of the settings.


To set the time you can either download a whole day worth of images and look through them for comet Elenin or you can enter the time when you know the spacecraft took the images. To find the time go here, to find out what the schedule is and any changes that might have occurred. For example, in the minutes posted on August 2nd we see,

* The 135 degree rolls on Behind to observe comet Elenin started yesterday
(Aug 1). The rolls will be between 8-10 UT each day, except for Aug 5 and
Aug 12, when the rolls will be between 10-12 UT.

Ok so lets enter that time, 8 to 10 hours universal time. Notice that the day is set by default to four days in the past, that's because it takes four days for the data to be processed before it appears on the servers for downloading by the public. The first images taken of comet Elenin occurred four days ago so we do not need to set the day at the time of this writing, which is August 5th.

Then it's just a matter of setting the camera to HI-2 and the spacecraft observatory to B for behind and that's it! Clicking search brings up the images we want.


The jpegs are just small images to get an idea of how the larger fits format images will appear. What's needed next is to process the fits images into a format you can use. Fits is an image format that is well known to the scientific community. You'll want to get software that can do the processing and that can be found here.  The Fits Liberator also comes in a plugin format for Photoshop if you use one of the newer versions of Photoshop.

That should get you started finding, downloading and processing your own STEREO images nearly directly from the STEREO spacecraft.



Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Comet Elenin as imaged by NASA spacecraft STEREO B

After much planning, a spacecraft that normally looks at the sun called STEREO B was rotated downward and caught comet Elenin with one of its onboard cameras.  Comet Elenin is the fuzz ball moving in the center of the animation.


                                          This gif animation is in the public domain

STEREO B is one of two NASA spacecraft launched on October 26, 2006 to study the daily activity of the sun.  STEREO is an acronym for Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory.  These two spacecraft obit along with the earth at the same distance from the sun as earth, one about three months ahead of earth and one about three months behind earth.  STEREO A is ahead of earth and STEREO B is following behind earth.

Purely by chance, comet Elenin on its inbound leg is currently passing very close to STEREO B and so NASA took advantage of this and pointed this spacecraft to look at comet Elenin as it is passing by.  Comet Elenin is going to start picking up speed as it swings around the sun and we will get to watch its tail develop as it does so on the various STEREO cameras.  For updates and more information go here:  http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/item.php?id=selects&iid=154

Friday, May 20, 2011

Is Nostradamus' Mabus referring to Ray Mabus and comet Elenin or was it pope Clement XIII and the great comet of 1769?


When I was 13 years old, now 46, I experienced an event where I was able to see the future. I was in woodshop class and a person across the room from me was sawing a piece of wood on a table saw. Then an increasingly loud roaring jet like sound came into my mind as I was looking down and sanding a spice rack that I was making with an electric sander. The jet like sound increased in intensity over a period of about 5 seconds and I stopped what I was doing and stood still as the sound increased to a terrifying roar. Then, involuntarily, I turn my head to the left a bit and looked directly at the saw blade on the table saw cutting through the wooden workpiece being sawed. It was as if all of my ability to focus was focused on that blade! I watched the blade sawing through the wood for about 3 seconds and after a second or so I had this powerful feeling that something was wrong! DANGER! DANGER! I FELT DANGER! And in that instant my knees involuntarily gave way and I started to fall strait down in the spot where I was standing. And as I started to fall strait down, from my knees collapsing, I had an powerful feeling of knowing that I had to duck down and so I also started bending down too to get down behind the heavy workbench table I was in front of. And just as my head dropped down past the top of the table I heard a loud explosive crashing sound over the top of the loud jet like roaring sound. And then, the jet like roaring sound slowly subsided, sounding very similar to the sound you hear when a turbine engine running at full power is turned off and slowly ramps down to a stop. And while still down behind the table, I slowly started hearing the commotion of the woodshop class as the roaring jet sound in my mind faded out. This all transpired over about 20 seconds.

What was the explosive sound and the resulting commotion? The wooden piece being sawed on that table saw grabbed the blade in an event known as a kickback! A kickback occurrence on a table saw is a rare event that occurs when nearly all the rotational kinetic energy of the blade is transferred to the workpiece ejecting the workpiece at high velocity. The workpiece shoots back toward the operator with such a force that the operator can be impaled by the workpiece and consequently severely injured.

The thing is, I knew something dangerous was going to happen in association with that saw blade BEFORE it happened! The workpiece did not eject in my direction, so it wasn't like some kind of divine protection happened, it ejected in the opposite direction. It missed the operator and crashed into some steel lockers causing a huge dent in one of the lockers. This is one of the top three most profound moments in my life so far, that ethereal turbine jet engine noise I heard in my mind still fascinates me to this day as I recollect.

So at an early age I learned that it is somehow possible to actually see into the future. I have always been naturally highly interested in how things in the universe work and I have a theory for everything you can think of, but this I have never been able to come up with a natural way that it can happen in the universe. Reason being, one cannot see the future because in any given instance the future hasn't happened yet. The only explanation that I have ever been able to come up with is that it's someone with a kind of ultra technology that is calculating what the future will be and then disbursing that information for whatever reasons back to us humans. We calculate the future all the time. For example, if you were holding a ping pong ball in your hand and I asked you what would happen if you dropped it, you would calculate the future based on your rudimentary knowledge of how the universe works and you would tell me about the future of what would happen after the ball is dropped. “It's going to drop down to the ground and bounce a few times and then come to a rest.” Is what you would probably say. And so well, what if you had the ultra technology to know what every electron, proton and neutron of every atom in this area of the universe was going to do? You could, to an extent, tell me all kinds of things about the near and distant future. You could also run the calculations backwards and render out what happened in the near and distant past. But as you can imagine, this level of technology would only be available to the likes of Gods. So maybe the Gods have this ability and share bits and pieces of the future with us from time to time for whatever reason.

Needless to say, because of my extraordinary teenage experience and other experiences related to seeing the future for various events throughout my life, I have always been interested in anything having to do with prophesy. I have always been interested because I have always known from my experiences that there is in fact means for seeing the future. Which brings me to Michel de Nostradamus. Like most everyone else these days that have an interest in prophesy, Nostradamus is my favorite! I've always found Nostradamus to be very fascinating, and at the very least, when trying to decipher the quatrains, its beneficial in that it is great brain exercise! I know I don't need to explain to you who Nostradamus is and what the quatrains are being that the quatrains have nearly continuously been in print for over 450 years, and so, consequently, just about anybody knows all about it.

You may have even ran into this quatrain before.

C. II LXII
Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra
De gens & bestes une horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengence on verra
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete.

Century 2 Quatrain 62
Mabus then will soon die, will come
Of people and beasts a horrible rout,
Then suddenly one will see vengeance
Hundred, hand, thirst, hunger when the comet will run.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's because this quatrain is one of Nostradamus' more famous quatrains. Scholars of the quatrains have been trying to decipher it for 456 years. Who is Mabus everyone has always wondered.

How about Ray Mabus? For years people have speculated that Ray Mabus could be the Mabus Nostradamus wrote about. And this has never been more likely being that he has been in the mainstream news in recent days. He is the United States Secretary of the Navy and as you know Navy seals just recently killed Osama Bin Laden. And so if jihadists wanted to get revenge, what better person to take out than the Secretary of the Navy. “Then suddenly one will see vengeance.”

And the comet? Well, that would be comet Elenin of course. It hasn’t had time yet to show us whether or not it's going to be an amazing comet or just an ordinary comet, but people are certainly talking about it.

And then there is Osama Bin Laden whom has also been attributed to Mabus in the form of an anagram decipherment. See John Hogue's site for more on this.

Consequently, Ray Mabus should have his security beefed up pronto! Right?

Well nah, he'll be just fine I'll bet.  He'll be just fine because I'll bet no one in Al-Qaeda believes that Osama was killed by navy seals. They're most likely going to believe that he died of natural causes years ago. Even Iranian officials are stating that the assassination of Osama was staged by the Obama administration.
Not that I'm connecting Iran as a whole to Al-Qaeda, I'm merely stating that Al-Qaeda members would most likely agree with what people in their corner of the world are saying as opposed to anything else.

As for comet Elenin, comet Elenin is a wimp! HAHAHA! =D Nah, just kidding, we don't actually know without a doubt what comet Elenin will do. The reason I say that is because we have been fooled before by comets that seamed as though they would be nothing special and then turned out to put on a fantastic visual show and vice versa. I'm referring to Yeomans of NASA/JPL and his recent terming of comet Elenin as “wimpy.” =D The odds are in his favor though, being that only a very small fraction of comets put on a spectacular display.

There is no famine either that we can readily point to. We have famine around the world that we are currently working on to combat in various ways, but nothing like the great famine and drought of 1769.

1769? Yeah I think this is the time Nostradamus was actually referring to.

Like John Hogue and many others, I too have spent decades trying to figure out the meaning of this quatrain and while looking into the possible connections to comet Elenin I made a realization. In the last line we have. Hundred, hand, thirst, hunger when the comet will run. The hundred comma hand part has always stumped me. Years ago I thought it might be referring to a very large horse, being that horses are measured in hands and a hundred hand horse would be a very large horse as I imagined for the horses of the apocalypse as you can see here.  But then, being that I had astronomy and comet Elenin in mind in connection with this puzzle, I remembered a common method that astronomers use to measure things in the sky. We measure things in degrees. The whole sky from horizon to horizon is 180 degrees and an outstretched hand at arms length is about 20 degrees from the tip of the pinky to the tip of the thumb for the average size hand.



You'll see degrees commonly being referred to whenever size is concerned. Also time. We measure time in degrees too. The sun moves across the sky at a rate of 1 degree every 4 minutes for example.

And so, notice that he wrote hundred comma hand and did not write hundred hand without a comma. Paying attention to that comma makes for a much better interpretation as compared to my interpretation of years ago. The subject is astronomy being that he mentions a comet, 100 is the amount in degrees and hand tells the method of measurement as it relates to astronomy. Also, if you look at your hand, what do you see? Five fingers. Five. Five hands across is 100 degrees. Consequently, this started me looking for a significant comet that had a measurement of 100 degrees.

This would have had to have been a huge comet because a tail of 100 degrees or five hands across would cover more than half the sky! There is a type of comet designation we have for particularly spectacular comets and we call these comets great comets. Out of the thousands of comets that have been discovered to date only a handful were spectacular enough to be designated as great comets. Searching through the list of great comets looking for comets that had a tail of 100 degrees and also anything in history related to the corresponding year of the comet we find the great comet of 1769.

The great comet of 1769 was discovered by the famous French astronomer Charles Messier, on the 8th of August. Written accounts from around the world for the time it was plainly visible in the sky vary in the description of its size. One observer though, La Nux, observing from the Isle of Bourbon, present day Réunion island, described the tail as being 97 degrees on September 11th.

Observations with the unaided eye for the tail size of a comet depends on how well a person can detect dim light since the termination of the tail extent fades into blackness. So a person who might report 97 degrees could have another person standing right next to them that reports 100 degrees, it all depends on how well a person can see, so 97 degrees is close enough to 100 in my opinion. Also, the great comet of 1769 is the only one of two comets with a tail approaching 100 degrees and appearing after the Mabus quatrain was published in 1555. The other comet was the great comet of 1861, yet, checking the history around that year reveals nothing pertinent to the rest of the quatrain that I could find. Scrolling through the list of historic events for 1769 however was different.

The first thing I came across was a horrific drought and famine that occurred in Bengal India that killed 10 million. It started in about September of 1769 and ended some time within the year of 1773. Livestock and whatever wildlife that could not migrate to areas where water was available for drinking also perished.

Ok, but what about mabus I wondered. I found that the most significant person to die that year was pope Clement XIII, but it took me days of thinking before I realized what Nostradamus was hinting at. Most Latin words end in the letters u s. Like for example the Latin name for the common brown rat is Rattus norvegicus. A Latin professor once told me the Latin name for my pet brown rat when I was a teen and I always remembered that. So I started looking for meanings in Latin being that mabus ended in the letters u s.

And amazingly, I found this. The Latin words for the numbers 10 and 3 can be decima tribus. Do you see mabus in there? Nostradamus is famous for this kind of word play encryption. Deci and tri are by themselves numerical prefixes, decimeter for example or tricycle. Decima is Latin for tenth and tribus is Latin for the dative inflection of trēs or three. And so converted to roman numerals we get XIII. Which, of course is referring to pope Clement XIII who died on February 2nd 1769.

But wait! Now we're getting to the interesting part, because there is a conspiracy theory! Notice the third line of the quatrain says, “Then suddenly one will see vengeance.” Ok, the reason he wrote that is because of the conspiracy theory that people have been whispering about for 242 years. It mainly involves pope Clement XIII, the Jesuits and the successor to pope Clement XIII, pope Clement XIV.

On the left pope Clement XIII, in the center the IHS emblem of the Jesuits and on the right pope Clement XIV.

Basically, the Jesuits were not liked very well for various political reasons and were expelled and suppressed from several countries at the time. Political pressures caused Pope Clement XIII to agree to suppress them too and consequently he scheduled a public event where the official announcement of abolition would take place on February 3rd. Yet, on the night of February 2nd he died in a fit of convulsions and it is rumored that he died of poisoning. “Mabus then will soon die.” Soon, as in before the major event. So then his successor, pope Clement XIV receives the same kind of political pressure and holds back for a few years, but eventually gives in and goes through with papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor, the abolition of the Jesuits on August 16th 1773. The Jesuits are then effectively abolished, but soon afterwords plot revenge. Shortly after the abolition they put a sign on one of the Vatican walls with the letters I.S.S.S.V. Pope Clement XIV, while returning from a trip via horse and carriage notices the sign and tells those riding with him the meaning of the letters. He stated that the letters stood for, I Settembre, Sara Sede Vacantå, meaning, in September the see will be vacant. The see being the holy see, which can be thought of as the Vatican if keeping in mind that the term holy see has been around hundreds of years before the Vatican came into being in 1929. He was able to figure out what the initials meant because of the bible verse of John 19:19 where John stated that when Jesus was crucified Pontius Pilate had a sign affixed over the head of Jesus that read in Latin, Iesus Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm, which in English means, Jesus of Nazareth the king of the Jews. Then in later years, when it came to the design of symbolism representing the crucifixion or crucifix, meaning in Latin cruci fixus, one fixed to a cross, the wording was shortened to the initials I.N.R.I. And the Jesuits adopted their own version of the well known initials to their version in Latin being, Iustum Necar Reges Impios, which, translated to English means, to exterminate the impious kings, governments. For the Jesuits at the time, it symbolized revenge for what was done to Jesus and this was well known at the time by anyone who had studied up on the details of the Jesuits and this would have been especially known by pope Clement XIV who had just abolished them. And so a year later, on September 22nd, he died, and under mysterious circumstances too, circumstances concerning being poisoned, the poison being administered in a cup of chocolate flavored coffee.

So then, we have, “Mabus then will soon die.” Pope Clement will die before he can abolish the Jesuits. Then, “will come of people and beasts a horrible rout.” The great famine and drought of Bengal India 1769 to 1773. “Then suddenly one will see vengeance.” The next pope, Clement XIV, abolishes the Jesuits in 1773 and they immediately get revenge by posting an encrypted sign forecasting the assassination of pope Clement XIV and placing it where he would be able to see and knowing that he would be able to decrypt it. “Hundred, hand, thirst, hunger when the comet will run.” Telling us when in time this relates by pointing us to the great comet of 1769.

Yeah, I think this explanation for Nostradamus' famous mabus quatrain shows that it may have already have been fulfilled and Ray Mabus will be fine.