Monthly Archives: April 2012

April 30, 2012

Of sandy lanes

A piece of Mars: Of Sandy Lanes. The yellowish-tan rocks are tall high-standing hills that have been scoured by the wind. Dark sand slowly cuts down the whiter rocks in the valleys, slowly creating majestic lanes bordered by steep, sharp ...

April 30, 2012

Panorama of ATA site

Sometime back, professional photographer Ron Barrett spent the day at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (site of the Allen Telescope Array) and worked up a beautiful panorama of the site: http://www.seti.org/node/1108 I love how much detail is available in this image (you ...

April 29, 2012

Echoes of the past

These dunes are quite unusual for Mars, and difficult to interpret. The thick blue and white stripes are dunes in their current location, but subtle stripes above them seem to indicate former positions of dunes, small pieces that got left ...

April 28, 2012

I ♥ astronomy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djulik/6264962767/ As one can see (I put notes on the flickr image, click on it) this 25-second exposure taken on October 20, 2011 contains a lot of things (the Earth's zodiacal light, the "Kiwi", the galactic center, the VLT observatory, a ...

April 27, 2012

First post: who am I and what am I doing here?

Well now, here is my very first post of my very first blog. Ever. Although really it's not my first time writing what I think, so maybe it's not a big deal after all. I am a research scientist here ...

April 26, 2012

Searching for Fragments of the Sutter’s Mill Meteorite

An update about the Sutter's Mill Meteorite that I mentioned yesterday. A few hours ago, I saw the pieces that Peter Jenniskens brought at the SETI Institute. I am not a meteorite expert but they indeed look like a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. The fragments ...

April 25, 2012

Fragments of the daylight meteor found in California

It all started on Sunday Morning April 22 at 7:51am PDT, when several people located in the Northern California and Reno areas reported seeing a bright fireball visible in daylight. The American Meteor Society compiled a list of 121 visual observations ...

April 20, 2012

2012 – the year of Astronomy meetings

Its mid April 2012, and finally I have some time to write an entry. Again its been almost an year since my last post - so much for trying to make regular entries - the fact is there is so ...

April 16, 2012

Hi Friends!

It has been almost a week, but I'm still high on my trip to AbSciCon (Astrobiology Science Conference), in Atlanta, GA. Funded by NASA, AbSciCon is held only bi-yearly, and brings together all sorts of people in astrobiology, like biologists, ...

April 13, 2012

The New Cosmic Diary is now open

Some of you may have noticed that the Cosmic Diary Blog was unavailable over the past 2 weeks due to the migration of the Blog to the SETI Institute server. I am happy to announce that thanks to the great ...