APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

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APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by APOD Robot » Sun Dec 12, 2010 5:06 am

Image Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita

Explanation: In 1999, Leonids Meteor Shower came to an impressive crescendo. Observers in Europe saw a sharp peak in the number of meteors visible around 0210 UTC during the early morning hours of November 18. Meteor counts then exceeded 1000 per hour - the minimum needed to define a true meteor storm. At other times and from other locations around the world, observers typically reported respectable rates of between 30 and 100 meteors per hour. This photograph is a 20-minute exposure ending just before the main Leonids peak began. Visible are at least five Leonid meteors streaking high above the Torre de la Guaita, an observation tower used during the 12th century in Girona, Spain. Over the next few nights, the Geminids are expected to put on the best meteor show of this year.

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by neufer » Sun Dec 12, 2010 5:38 am

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by bystander » Sun Dec 12, 2010 2:20 pm

neufer wrote: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap041114.html
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by jman » Sun Dec 12, 2010 3:46 pm

Sure has, & it explains:" "Visible are at least 5 Leonid meteors". I count 14.

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by owlice » Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:05 pm

I think not all the streaks are Leonids.
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by Chris Peterson » Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:26 pm

owlice wrote:I think not all the streaks are Leonids.
I believe most or all of the streaks are Leonids. The discrepancy in count comes from the fact that this is a repeat APOD (as pointed out by Art). In the original image, only five meteors were apparent. But this latest image has been reprocessed, and now shows much more detail. Unfortunately, the caption wasn't reprocessed along with the image.
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by Lang » Sun Dec 12, 2010 5:10 pm

'Crescendo' does not mean 'climax'. It is a musical term, taken from the Italian, meaning 'growing'. Never use a long word when a short one will do, especially if you are not certain what it means.

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Not all the "streakers" are LEONIDs.

Post by neufer » Sun Dec 12, 2010 5:34 pm

Image
Astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams bungeed to the Combined
O
perational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill
(COLBERT),
treadmill aboard the ISS.

Image
LEONID Ilyich Brezhnev
Леони́д Ильи́ч Бре́жнев​
b. 19 December 1906
d. 10 November 1982
owlice wrote:
I think not all the streaks are Leonids.
And some "streakers" might have worn leotards on "LEONIDs". http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... ontour.ogv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brezhnev wrote: <<LEONID Ilyich Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, presiding over the country from 1964 his death in 1982. His 18-year term was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in length. During Brezhnev's rule, the global influence of the Soviet Union grew dramatically, in part because of the expansion of the Soviet military during this time. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support the fragile Marxist government located there. His tenure as leader has often been criticized for marking the beginning of a period of economic stagnation, overlooking serious economic problems which eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.>>
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by Chris Peterson » Sun Dec 12, 2010 5:45 pm

Lang wrote:'Crescendo' does not mean 'climax'. It is a musical term, taken from the Italian, meaning 'growing'. Never use a long word when a short one will do, especially if you are not certain what it means.
Amongst its other meanings, "crescendo" does indeed mean "climax". APOD captions are intended to be fun to read, and often make use of slightly poetic word usage. Literature would be very boring indeed if authors always observed the advice to use the shortest of available words for a given meaning!

IMO, "crescendo" is precisely the word to use here, conveying as it does both the rise in activity as well as the peak (much better than "climax"). And as anybody who has ever observed a meteor storm is likely to agree, describing it in terms associated with music is very suitable.
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by Lang » Sun Dec 12, 2010 6:04 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
Lang wrote:'Crescendo' does not mean 'climax'. It is a musical term, taken from the Italian, meaning 'growing'. Never use a long word when a short one will do, especially if you are not certain what it means.
Amongst its other meanings, "crescendo" does indeed mean "climax". APOD captions are intended to be fun to read, and often make use of slightly poetic word usage. Literature would be very boring indeed if authors always observed the advice to use the shortest of available words for a given meaning!

IMO, "crescendo" is precisely the word to use here, conveying as it does both the rise in activity as well as the peak (much better than "climax"). And as anybody who has ever observed a meteor storm is likely to agree, describing it in terms associated with music is very suitable.
'Crescendo' means 'growing', like it or not. In other words, the 'climax' meaning is an insidious error that is becoming more and more prevalent. And 'crescendo', in its correct meaning, is not the right word at all. The phrase was 'came to an impressive crescendo'. The rise in activity is expressed by the 'came to'. The only word that could possibly be used there is 'climax'. And Merriam-Webster has always been guilty of trying to legitimise errors.

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by jman » Sun Dec 12, 2010 7:19 pm

Can someone generate a matching star star chart to help pinpoint the radiant? I cant visualize stars through the trails.

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by neufer » Sun Dec 12, 2010 7:21 pm

Lang wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote:
Amongst its other meanings, "crescendo" does indeed mean "climax". APOD captions are intended to be fun to read, and often make use of slightly poetic word usage. Literature would be very boring indeed if authors always observed the advice to use the shortest of available words for a given meaning!

IMO, "crescendo" is precisely the word to use here, conveying as it does both the rise in activity as well as the peak (much better than "climax"). And as anybody who has ever observed a meteor storm is likely to agree, describing it in terms associated with music is very suitable.
'Crescendo' means 'growing', like it or not. In other words, the 'climax' meaning is an insidious error that is becoming more and more prevalent. And 'crescendo', in its correct meaning, is not the right word at all. The phrase was 'came to an impressive crescendo'. The rise in activity is expressed by the 'came to'. The only word that could possibly be used there is 'climax'. And Merriam-Webster has always been guilty of trying to legitimise errors.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Kerst and Krehbiel — Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as revealed 1773
  • One can see the reeling and trembling, one can see the heaving breast which is illustrated by a CRESCENDO;
    one hears the lispings and sighs expressed by the muted violins with flute in unison.
Honoré de Balzac — Eugenie Grandet. 1824
  • From time to time the young the heiress glanced furtively at her cousin, and
    the banker's wife easily detected a CRESCENDO of surprise and curiosity in her mind.
David Lindsay — A Voyage to Arcturus. 1824
  • The music rose to CRESCENDO.
Robert Louis Stevenson — St Ives. 1872
  • From Dunstable I rolled away into a CRESCENDO of similar impressions.
Jack London — Jerry of the Islands. 1896
  • With a quick jerk, cataleptically, his nose pointed to the zenith, his mouth opened, and a flood of sound poured forth, running swiftly upward in CRESCENDO and slowly falling as it died away.
Stewart Edward White — The Land of Footprints. 1909
  • With a sudden CRESCENDO the music stopped.
-------------------------------------------------
G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936). The Man Who Was Thursday. 1908.
Chapter V. The Feast of Fear

Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a CRESCENDO of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme’s eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men.
-------------------------------------------------
F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise. 1920.
BOOK ONE The Romantic Egotist : CHAPTER 2 Spires and Gargoyles

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory's head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind....
  • So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across the air....

    A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow moon—then silence, where
    CRESCENDO laughter fades ... the car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into blue....
They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke: "You Princeton boys?"
-------------------------------------------------

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by neufer » Sun Dec 12, 2010 7:24 pm

jman wrote:
Can someone generate a matching star star chart to help pinpoint the radiant? I cant visualize stars through the trails.
http://www.bashewa.com/wxmeteor-showers ... er=Leonids
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by jman » Sun Dec 12, 2010 7:29 pm

Thanks, Neufer now can you help locate the primary Leo stars on the APOD image?

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by Chris Peterson » Sun Dec 12, 2010 7:35 pm

Lang wrote:'Crescendo' means 'growing', like it or not. In other words, the 'climax' meaning is an insidious error that is becoming more and more prevalent. And 'crescendo', in its correct meaning, is not the right word at all. The phrase was 'came to an impressive crescendo'. The rise in activity is expressed by the 'came to'. The only word that could possibly be used there is 'climax'. And Merriam-Webster has always been guilty of trying to legitimise errors.
The same meaning is given in the OED. (Also in the OED, the musical usage "reaching a crescendo" is given as an example, meaning a musical climax.) In the English language, correct usage is determined by one thing: usage. If you want to worry about etymology or original meaning, practically every word has "erroneous" meanings.

People use "crescendo" to mean "climax", and because they do, the usage is correct. It's as simple as that. If you don't like that, don't use it that way yourself. But by any objective standard of English usage, the term was used correctly in the APOD.
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by neufer » Sun Dec 12, 2010 8:20 pm

jman wrote:
Thanks, Neufer; now can you help locate the primary Leo stars on the APOD image?
That is a tricky challenge, jman, thanks to the fish-eye camera & time lapse.

Clearly, Polaris is hidden behind to top of the parapet.

The Leonids are all pointing (in their sinusoidal fashion) back to the right
at their source :?: head of Leo in (blue & red stars).

The brightest stars in between the tower & Leo must be the big Dipper.

The cluster of stars on the left mirroring the big Dipper must be Cassiopeia.

The bright stars at the top must be Mirfak & Capella.

Perhaps Chris could lend his expertise here.

{I just realized that the time exposure is over two periods
so that every star becomes a "dash space dash" __ __ }

Starting to get a headache :!:
Last edited by neufer on Sun Dec 12, 2010 11:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by jman » Sun Dec 12, 2010 10:36 pm

Maybe here, the radiant matches up?
Clipboard02.jpg

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by Storm_norm » Sun Dec 12, 2010 11:22 pm

agreed, climax is the correct word to use in this instance.
because crescendo meaning a gradual increase.

climax meaning the actual moment of greatest intensity which is what this particular apod directly means.

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by NoelC » Mon Dec 13, 2010 2:58 am

I really hate to ruin your fine nitpicking, guys (okay, no I don't), BUT...

The APOD image was taken BEFORE the highest rate of observed meteors. The caption clearly says that the meteor count was rising when this photo was taken, hence the usage was quite appropriate by anyone's definition. Though you could argue that the first sentence could be taken to apply to something other than the image itself, the prefix "Explanation:" says that it is describing THIS photo.
Explanation:...
This photograph is a 20-minute exposure ending just before the main Leonids peak began.
-Noel

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by NoelC » Mon Dec 13, 2010 3:13 am

Some image rotation and recombination clearly reveals the location of the Big Dipper:

Image

That should help orient things.

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by neufer » Mon Dec 13, 2010 4:37 am

NoelC wrote:
Some image rotation and recombination clearly reveals the location of the Big Dipper:

That should help orient things. -Noel
Neat trick with that ProDigitalSoftware, Noel.

So I guess I had about everything right, after all,
except for jman's Leo (which was further out than I thought).
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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by jman » Mon Dec 13, 2010 2:58 pm

NoelC wrote:That should help orient things.
Impressive. Nice work, thanks NoelC.

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Re: APOD: Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita (2010 Dec 12)

Post by zloq » Mon Dec 13, 2010 6:32 pm

Eye hart the picher cuz it show the komits good. I c the big dipper konstillashin 2 and that is kul. Hop 2 c a komit storm lik that 2. W my luk it wud b wen it is all ovr, i.e. the diminuendo. Will tell my studints 2 watch next komit storm so thay lern komits and astrology and konstillashins.

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