Tomorrow is NEAF. It’s a great weekend to be a space geek in New York.

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Photo of a part of the sky during a meteor shower over an extended exposure time. The meteors have actually occurred several seconds to several minutes apart. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Lyrids are coming. They be visible Saturday night and peak on Sunday morning after midnight.

From the NASA Science website

Lyrid meteors come from Comet Thatcher.  Every year in late April Earth passes through a stream of debris from the old comet, which has been bringing Lyrid meteors to our planet for at least 2600 years.  Specks of Thatcher’s dust hit the top of atmosphere at 110,000 mph and disintegrate in a flurry of meteors.  Most years, the shower produces about 15 to 20 Lyrids per hour.

Source

I’ll be up in rural Pennsylvania. If the weather cooperates I’ll shoot some time-lapse footage and post here.

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• Meteors Without Borders – Lyrids Watch 2012(heavenswithlamps.wordpress.com)

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• Lyrid meteor shower: Skywatchers to get weekend treat (mnn.com)

Not perfect but pretty good. The biggest problem is the iPhone’s inability to deal with a wide dynamic range – or at least a dynamic range as wide as the Moon against the night sky.  I tweaked a bit in Photoshop (curves and unsharp mask).

Source:SPACE.com

Not bad for light-polluted suburban skies.

Technical details:

• Shot in my backyard on a Nikon D80 on an Astrotrac mount.
• 20mm Nikon lens at f4
• 5 minutes at ASA 400

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STS-135 Launch from David Parmet on Vimeo.

The launch of STS-135

You would think that with the Mac’s better graphics, that amateur astronomers would flock to the platform but sadly aside from a few advanced applications like Nebulosity and AstroPlanner, most software is designed to run only on Wintel machines. So I thought I would start a series of reviews of applications for the Mac OSX and iOS platforms, starting with some of the tools I use on my iPhone.

Sky Safari and Starmap - Both fantastic and fun to play with planetarium applications with loads of bells and whistles  What to know what time Saturn will rise or if M42 is visible tonight?  Both can help you out in that department. Both take advantage of the iPhone’s location aware services and motion detector so you can hold your iPhone up to the night sky and see a map of what you are looking of. Sky Safari will also show you what’s below the horizon.

NASA - The official source for anything you want to know about any current NASA mission. Also streams NASA TV. You can also see the next ISS flyover for your area.

flyby - Speaking of ISS flyovers, flyby uses data from Spaceweather.com and lists the next flyover for your location for a whole host of satellites and the ISS. It’s easy to use and will even countdown the time to the next flyover.

iCSC - Invaluable as you are getting ready to head out the door for an observing session, iCSC downloads the latest Clear Sky Chart for your observing site.

So what’s on your smartphone?

This morning Atlantis touched down on the runway at Kennedy Space Center, closing out the 30 year old Shuttle program.

After 135 launches the Space Shuttle leaves a mixed legacy. The promise of cheap access to Earth orbit and bi weekly launches was never realized. Two orbiters with 14 lives aboard were lost in preventable accidents. And the costs involved in maintaining the aging fleet in the 90s and 00s doubtlessly drew badly needed funds from the development of a replacement vehicle.

On the positive side of the ledger the Shuttle leaves behind 30 years of experience in living and working in space, scientific breakthroughs from research carried out on the orbiters and on the International Space Station, the launching and servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope and the construction International Space Station itself. It’s nothing sort of amazing that 16 nations were able to cooperate over two decades in the construction and operations of the station; the experience gained will serve NASA and other national space agencies will when we take the next steps out beyond Earth orbit.

As for the future, just Google ‘the new space race‘ and you’ll get a whole lot of information about the companies lining up to open the new frontier to the rest of us. I’m pretty sure it won’t be too long before we see humans launched from LC-39A or some other facility in Kennedy Space Center.

In fact, last week, tucked away in a corner of Cape Canaveral where the tourists don’t go, the Air Force Space and Missile Museum was hosting the newest space celebrity, the Dragon Capsule sent into orbit and back last year by SpaceX.

It was no accident that on launch day, the press area was filled with representatives of the major players in the New Space arena, all in nice air conditioned tents (thankfully giving out bottled water along with squishies and other schwag). Space, at least access to the ISS and Earth orbit, is now the domain of the private sector, freeing up NASA to focus on the next steps – at least that’s the idea.

The future may look grim for American involvement in human space flight but that’s only if you believe that space flight begins and ends with NASA. It doesn’t and I’m counting on returning to Kennedy Space Center in a few years to witness more launches bring more people into space.

Someone’s got to bring back that flag.

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