Ewan's Corner

Archive for the ‘Local’ Category

South Africa’s second satellite – Sumbandila (“lead the way” in Tshivenda) – has produced its first official images from orbit (see left).

Launched on 17th September 2009 from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket, Sumbandila is a small 81kg low orbit (500 km) solar-powered satellite with a Butane propulsion system successfully fired in January. It carries a 6 spectral band imager (6,25 m × 6,25 m resolution) for ground photography and video (agriculture, mapping of infrastructure and land use, population measurement and the monitoring of dam levels etc), as well as an amateur radio transponder (SA-AMSAT) among other experiments.

See the Sumbandila mission blog for details, as well as the Wikipedia article – there is also a Facebook group.

A video taken of Earth from orbit (13th October 2009, moving over Namibia).

From Ionian Enchantment – the latest version of the African science and skepticism blog-roll, or a list of “those dedicated to science and reason on the African continent”. I am proud to be included. Definitely something thought-provoking for everyone – and quite a few reasons to get vocal and involved, no matter what your viewpoint is on science, pseudo-science, skepticism, religion, homeopathy, maths, vaccines, general woo-woo etc.

The latest Carnival of Africans – the Phoenix Edition – is well worth a read.

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
• Amanuensis
• Ambient Normality
• ASSAf Blog
• Botswana Skeptic
• Bomoko and other nonsense words
• Communicating Science, the African Way **new**
• Defollyant’s AntiBlog
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan’s Corner
• Geekery
• Grumpy Old Man
• Hello Universe, This is Nessie
• Ionian Enchantment
• Limbic Nutrition
• Lenny Says
• McBrolloks **new**
  
• Nathan Bond’s TART Remarks
  
• Orion Spur
  
• Other Things Amanzi
• Pickled Bushman
• Psychohistorian
  
• Reason Check
• Retroid Raving
• Scorched
• Shadows Hide
  
• Stop Danie Krügel
• Subtle Shift in Emphasis
• Synapses
• Tauriq Moosa
  
• The Science Of Sport
• The Skeptic Black Sheep
• The Skeptic Detective
• Turn 2 Reason
• Word of the Blog

Kulula‘s paint work for their new Boeing 737-86N (January 2010).

Another image – a great closeup of the detail on the left tail section.

Not your average boring airline.

All images matching a search for Kulula on jetphotos.net.

Posted from Ewan’s posterous

The first solar eclipse of the year is happening today. Twitter is buzzing, you can see photos being added to Flickr, Google’s real-time search results are brilliant. Almost makes up for not being able to see it myself – we only saw a tiny 3.5% coverage here in Durban this morning (07h30 SAT) – or would have if it wasn’t cloudy!

Path details and animations for almost every city are available at the excellent UK Eclipses Online site (doubly useful since the NASA eclipse page seems to be down, probably buckling under the extra traffic – google cached version is available though). Wikipedia as usual has excellent info.

• Some great photos from Nairobi, thanks @paulakahumbu

Update:

• * MailOnline’s report – some great photos and a great video.
• * NASA’s MODIS satellite caught an image of the Moon’s shadow over India and the Bay of Bengal (a roughly 300km wide shadow).
• * SpaceWeather.com has a great gallery of eclipse photos (and commentary for most of them) – well worth seeing
• ESA has a beautiful animated image of the eclipse as seen by their Sun-watching Proba-2.

Here’s a little perspective for you, updated for 2009:

Africa has a population of one billion, making up about 14.7% percent of the world’s human population.

Africa covers about 30.2 million km² – about 6% of the Earth’s surface and 20.4% of the total land area.

“(the continent of) Africa is larger than (the countries) China, the USA, Western Europe, India, Argentina, and the British Isles… combined!”

Image source: constantflux (via lots of others)