Our connected world meant I could simultaneously follow the eclipse from multiple viewpoints around the world in real time, including getting photos from friends and strangers with far better photographic equipment than mine. Events like this make Twitter truly come alive for me – watching the constant stream of excited tweets (and photos) with the #eclipse hashtag made me appreciate how wonderfully connected our little world is.

My little blog also went ballistic, setting a new all-time record of 1,240 views yesterday for my humble eclipse post, people were clearly searching for information.

My favourite eclipse media as I find it:

• Yannick’s first Eclipse shot as the moon was slowly devoured – http://yfrog.com/khudryaj
• I expect some more amazing shots from him once the post-processing is done and he has some spare time. No pressure.
• Top twitter images for #eclipse – https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23eclipse/grid/photos
• The always amazing Flickr Astrophotography pool (also see Moon Shots)
• Longest Total Lunar Eclipse in 11 Years Thrills Skywatchers (space.com)
• Also Total Lunar Eclipse of June 2011: First Photos (space.com)

A total lunar eclipse is visible from South Africa (actually most of Africa and Central Asia) tomorrow night, Wednesday 15th June – starting at 20h22, with the full eclipse lasting from 21h22 to 23h02 SAT, and the show over around midnight. This is a fairly rare event – the last one visible from SA was in 2008, and the next will only be in September 2015.

Visible across South Africa (weather permitting, but looks good) the full moon will be due East and about 55 degrees above the horizon (see the image to the right – courtesy of the brilliant Stellarium).

Thursday is a public holiday, so encourage your family to get outdoors and look upwards, it will be quite a sight!

• Total lunar eclipse for SA (News24)
• Watch the Flickr Astrophotography group for photos from people with some serious equipment
• Twitter, of course (although you’ll have to ignore the astrologers who will likely jump at the opportunity to spout their own brand of crazy)
• Johannesburg Planetarium

EPOXI (the current mission for the already successful spacecraft Deep Impact) flew past comet Hartley 2 (103P/Hartley) at 4pm SA time today, and shortly afterwards began returning image data.

Deep Impact zoomed past the comet at over 43,000 km/h – and was around 700 km from the comet at closest approach.

Hartley 2 is a fascinating comet, approximately 2km long and 400m wide at the most narrow section, and streaming out jets of gas (it also jetted out huge amounts of cyanide gas in September).

• http://epoxi.umd.edu/
• http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/epoxi/
• Comet Hartley 2 Fires Out Poison Gas as NASA Probe Nears (space.com)
• Collage of the 5 images during the closest part of the flyby (closest approach of 700km).

More data will be released over the next few days and weeks by the teams involved.

This is indeed a great time to be alive and witness to space exploration.

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).

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.

Posted via email from Ewan’s posterous

“Many people have no idea how many satellites orbit around the Earth. Now you can see the real-time positions of over 13,000 satellites updated every 30 seconds with Google Earth. The satellite positions come from a US government-sponsored database which Analytic Graphics, Inc., has interfaced with to make the data visible in 3D. Zoom around in space and pause to see the names of the satellites. Click on the satellite placemark icons to see more information on each one. Here is a YouTube video showing what the satellite visualization looks like. You can view the actual collection with AGI’s KML file in Google Earth. You can also watch it in your browser using the Earth plugin on this page by Google Earth Blog.”

~From the October 2008 issue of “The Sightseer” monthly newsletter for Google Earth.

“This KML network link visualizes all earth orbiting objects tracked by the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) using the satellite database processed by Analytical Graphics, Inc. using the Dynamic Geometry Library. All satellites are tracked in real-time and updated every 30 seconds.

USSTRATCOM has been tracking space objects since 1957 when the Soviets opened the space age with the launch of Sputnik I. Since then, they have recorded more than 26,000 space objects orbiting Earth. There are currently more than 12,000 man-made orbiting objects, the rest have re-entered Earth’s turbulent atmosphere and disintegrated, or survived re-entry and impacted the Earth. The space objects now orbiting Earth range from satellites weighing several tons to pieces of spent rocket bodies weighing under 10 pounds. About 3,000 space objects are operational satellites, the rest are space debris, retired satellites and rocket bodies left over from launches.

Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI) develops commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) analysis software for land, sea, air and space that is relied upon by the national security and space communities. With more than 32,000 worldwide installations, the main applications of AGI technologies focus on battlespace management, geospatial intelligence, space systems and national defense programs. In addition to the STK product suite, AGI produces the desktop software applications Navigation Tool Kit and Orbit Determination Tool Kit; interactive visualization AGI Viewer software; and the embedded technology development tool 4DX. For more information about AGI or its commercially available software technologies, e-mail info@agi.com or explore www.agi.com.”

From the excellent xkcd comic.

The fun kicks off around 1:45am Monday (argh) South African time (4:46:33 p.m on Sunday – Pacific Daylight Time) when Phoenix enters the Martian atmosphere at over twenty thousand kilometres an hour (5.7 kilometres per second!) and hopefully touches down gently 7 minutes later. See below for links to landing guides and times – which take into account the 15 minutes 20 seconds it currently takes a radio signal from Mars to reach Earth.

The NASA press kit linked below gives the following mission overview:

NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander mission is flying to a site in the far northern plains of Mars where it will analyze components of the surface, subsurface and atmosphere. It will use a trench-digging arm and a set of analytical tools to study water believed to be frozen into the soil just below the surface. It will check for the presence of organic compounds as part of an evaluation of whether the site has been a favorable environment for microbial life. The mission will place the stationary lander on the ground using descent engines all the way to the surface. The lander will have a prime mission of three months on Mars during late spring to mid-summer at the landing site.

This lander / landing is fascinating for several reasons:

• Of 13 attempts to land on the surface of Mars so far only *5* have succeeded
• Complex landing – no balloons this time, via descent engines all the way to the ground…. 5.7 km/s down to a soft landing in 7 minutes.
• Phoenix has a higher science instrument payload to total launch weight than any previous lander (thanks in part to using descent engines to touchdown safely rather than balloons to cushion the landing)
• Phoenix is an interplanetary laboratory – complete with a multi-talented robotic arm, multiple cameras (and for the first time one includes a motor adjusted focus), gas analyser with 8 tiny ovens, a wet chemical laboratory (which uses water from Earth), two microscopes, and a weather station.

I’ll also be recording the NASA TV coverage (using VLC) and can post that later, copyright permitting.

Links:

• NASA Landing Press Kit (3.2mb PDF, well worth the read!)
• Phoenix landing blog (although twitter may be a more up to date way to follow things)
• Landing events schedule
• 7 minutes of terror video
• space.com’s Phoenix Mars Lander: Step-by-Step Martian Landing Guide