Storm on Saturn (with radio waves)

There is a big and very unusual storm on Saturn right now. You can see it in the image above. It was taken by amateur astronomer Jim Phillips using an eight inch telescope. I've been out before dawn for the last two mornings trying to see the storm with my 6 inch Dobsonian reflector telescope. I get very nice views of Saturn and Titan, but I can't quite make out the storm. Conditions have not been great, and I'm not sure the storm was in view when I was looking.

The folks at spaceweather.com note that it is generating some static:
Instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft are picking up strong bursts of radio static. Apparently, lightning is being generated in multiple cells across the storm front.

Space weather indeed!

Our New SolderGlobe >>>>>>>>>>>>>

I really like this little globe. The red dots record past visits. But the fun part is the flags and city names that pop up showing who is currently looking at the site. Very nice.

You can make the globe spin faster (or backwards) and you can tilt the axis of rotation up and down with your mouse. Give it a spin!

Halogen Lamps and Heat Guns to The Rescue!

Hi Bill,

Your recent success with baking your Sony Vaio gave me the courage to attack my flat screen monitor. The most expensive thing in my entire computer setup is my "LG" brand monitor. It's the only thing that I've purchased new. Everything else came from the curb, or the surplus store. However, it started going on the fritz a few weeks ago.

While browsing around the chat groups on the internet I found out that many monitors from the past few years have had bad capacitors in them. So I opened it up, hoping to find a blob of leaking chemicals near a cap. "It should be a quick fix" I thought. However, everything looked great. No bulging caps, or leaking chemicals. I then turned the circuit board over, and instead of seeing a shining city of perfect solder joints, I saw a cloud of grey. Practically every solder joint was cold.

This is where your laptop baking got me thinking.

I didn't have a halogen lamp handy, but I did have a heat gun. So I put the gun on the high setting, and very slowly passed it over the board. It left a gleaming trail of solder joints.

When I started to connect things back together again, I heard a rattling. It seems that I heated the board up enough to allow some components to completely fall out. Luckily they were through-hole components (nothing surface mount), and were easy to solder back in.

Once everything went back together... success!

One thing to note, at one point I got a nasty zap from one of the caps on the board (I'm assuming for the back light). Even though we're not working with tubes and CRTs anymore, you still have to take heed and discharge high voltage caps before working on anything!

-Keith VE3TZF

Blue Light in Dark Ice

Down in Antarctica, the "Ice Cube" neutrino telescope was completed this month. It is an amazing piece of gear in an awesome location. Essentially, they use a 1 kilometer square piece of pure Antarctic ice as the detector -- when a neutrino hits a water molecule, it makes a bit of blue light and from this light the direction of the neutrino can be determined. But there is a problem: cosmic rays can create the same kind of blue light. So there's noise. They need a filter, right? Yes, and for this purpose they use... THE EARTH. They put the blue light detector at the TOP of the cube and look DOWN, down through the Earth! Only neutrinos get through.

For more details: http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/info/explained.php

SAVE 25% on SolderSmoke -- The Book (and other titles)

R/C Plane with Camera over New York City

This is really amazing. You should watch it in HD. 120 mile range? Maybe from the top of the Empire State building, right?

More info here:

http://singularityhub.com/2010/12/21/breath-taking-aerial-video-footage-from-new-york-city-taken-by-a-rc-plane/

DXers: What is my path to VK6XT?

I've been looking with pride at the WSPR map (below) showing that my little beacon has been received by far-off VK6XT. He picked me up again this morning, again only once. That makes three days in a row, each day only one report. Each time VK6XT is the only station in the Oceania area receiving me. And each day the my signal makes the trip around 1025 UTC. Now, I'm not a skilled DX'er, but it seems obvious to me that we are dealing with grey-line propagation here, right?

The image above shows the view from the sun at 1025 UTC today. Obviously the day/night terminator is along the perimeter of the earth in this image. So, I guess my little sigs could have been travelling either short path over Northern Europe and down over South East Asia OR they could have taken the long trip down over South America, over Antarctica, and on to Perth. My guess is that the short path is more likely. In any case, as cool as it is, the map drawn by the WSPR system is not how the sigs actually travelled.

I hope you DX hounds out there will chime in and tell me if I'm on the wrong path here...