APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

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APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by APOD Robot » Thu Aug 02, 2012 4:06 am

Image South Pole Star Trails

Explanation: No star dips below the horizon and the Sun never climbs above it in this remarkable image of 24 hour long star trails. Showing all the trails as complete circles, such an image could be achieved only from two places on planet Earth. This example was recorded during the course of May 1, 2012, the camera in a heated box on the roof of MAPO, the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory at the South Pole. Directly overhead in the faint constellation Octans is the projection of Earth's rotational axis, the South Celestial Pole, at the center of all the star trail circles. Not so well placed as Polaris and the North Celestial Pole, the star leaving the small but still relatively bright circle around the South Celestial Pole is Beta Hydri. A shimmering apparition of the aurora australis also visited on this 24 hour night.

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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by moonstruck » Thu Aug 02, 2012 4:13 am

Wow!! I can't wrap my head around none of that......Amazing what APOD can come up with. 8-)

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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by ta152h0 » Thu Aug 02, 2012 4:42 am

I see a geostationary satellite or two
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by Chris Peterson » Thu Aug 02, 2012 5:13 am

ta152h0 wrote:I see a geostationary satellite or two
From the South Pole, the geostationary orbit band lies about 8° below the horizon.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by slyman » Thu Aug 02, 2012 5:32 am

who was complaining about star trail pics last time? haha. i don't they can complain about this one

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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by neufer » Thu Aug 02, 2012 5:56 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Octantis wrote: <<Sigma Octantis (σ Oct, σ Octantis) is a magnitude 5.6 star in the constellation Octans most notable for being the current South Star. Sigma Octantis is approximately 270 light years from Earth, and is classified as a giant, with a spectral type of F0 III. It is a Delta Scuti variable, with magnitude varying by about 0.03 magnitudes over 2.3 hours.

Its position near the southern celestial pole makes it the southern hemisphere's pole star, whence its occasional name, Polaris Australis. To an observer in the southern hemisphere, Sigma Octantis appears almost motionless and all the other stars in the Southern sky appear to rotate around it. It is part of a small "half hexagon" shape. It is over a degree away from the true south pole, and the south celestial pole is moving away from it due to precession of the equinoxes.

At magnitude 5.5, Sigma Octantis is barely visible to the naked eye, making it a rather poor pole star, especially by comparison with the much brighter and more easily visible Polaris. Because of this, the Crux constellation is often preferred for determining the position of the South Celestial Pole.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octans wrote: <<Octans is a faint constellation the southern sky. Its name is Latin for the eighth part of a circle, but it is named after the octant, a navigational instrument. Octans was created by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1732 out of faint circumpolar stars. Originally, it was known as "Octans Hadleianus" in honor of the octant's inventor, John Hadley, who devised it in 1730. There is no real mythology related to Octans, partially due to its extreme southerly latitude.

The constellation is circumpolar to the south celestial pole, so it can be seen in Southern Hemisphere skies during the evening in any month of the year. The Right Ascension and month of best visibility given are for the three brightest stars, which are at their highest in the sky during the evening in November.

Octans is a very faint constellation; its brightest star is Nu Octantis, a magnitude 3.8 star. Sigma Octantis, the southern pole star, is a magnitude 5.46 star about 1 degree away from the South Celestial Pole. Delta Octantis, a magnitude 4.3 star, is the south pole star of Saturn.>>
Last edited by neufer on Thu Aug 02, 2012 5:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by NoelC » Thu Aug 02, 2012 9:26 am

Wow, I love how the star trails are equidistant from the horizon all the way around. They are right on the pole!

How does a station on the South Pole maintain information connectivity to the rest of the world? No geostationary satellites are visible. Do they bounce signals off other satellites that pass over? Surely they haven't run cables all the way down there. Or have they?

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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by neufer » Thu Aug 02, 2012 12:42 pm

NoelC wrote:
How does a station on the South Pole maintain information connectivity to the rest of the world? No geostationary satellites are visible. Do they bounce signals off other satellites that pass over? Surely they haven't run cables all the way down there. Or have they?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Antarctica wrote:
<<Data access to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is provided by access via NASA's TDRS-F1, GOES & Iridium satellite constellation.

Marisat F-2 provided data communications until it was retired in 2008. For the 2007-2008 season, the TDRS relay (named South Pole TDRSS Relay or SPTR) was upgraded to support a data return rate of 50 Mbit/s, which comprises over 90% of the South Pole's data capability, which is used primarily for scientific data return.>>
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by Tara_Li » Thu Aug 02, 2012 2:50 pm

Is this the first full-circle star trails image published widely? I seem to remember a few months ago, APOD (or maybe it was over at the Bad Astronomer blog) that nobody had done one. At the time, I expected someone to pop up fairly immediately with one, as it seemed a *relatively* simple task (yeah, I know, not *really* that simple, but...)

Ah - ok - I missed the reference to Lewin's Challenge. I guess it *is* the first!

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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by Chris Peterson » Thu Aug 02, 2012 3:24 pm

NoelC wrote:How does a station on the South Pole maintain information connectivity to the rest of the world? No geostationary satellites are visible. Do they bounce signals off other satellites that pass over? Surely they haven't run cables all the way down there. Or have they?
Besides the satellite systems Art mentioned, Antarctic communications utilize non-stationary geosynchronous satellites. These are geosynchronous satellites in non-equatorial orbits (typically with low inclinations). From Antarctica, they appear to slowly bob above and below the horizon, over a day, so it's possible to aim an antenna at them (typically a slowly steered antenna) and get several hours of connectivity. The same trick is used for Arctic communications.
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"once covered in palm trees"

Post by neufer » Thu Aug 02, 2012 5:03 pm

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/02/antarctica-once-covered-in-palm-trees-scientists-discover/ wrote:
Antarctica once covered in palm trees, scientists discover
FoxNews.com, August 02, 2012

<<Today the frozen Antarctic ice sheet borders the Southern Ocean. But tropical palm trees once flourished there. An intense warming phase occurred 52 million years ago, leading tropical vegetation, including palms and relatives of today's tropical Baobab trees, to grow on the continent’s now frozen coasts. The surprising discovery came from a study of drill cores obtained from the seafloor near Antarctica. The results, published in the journal Nature, show that warm ocean currents and high carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the air boosted temperatures, allowing tropical vegetation to grow where visitors today meet only icebergs and freezing cold.

"The CO2 content of the atmosphere as assumed for that time interval is not enough on its own to explain the almost tropical conditions in the Antarctic," said Jörg Pross, a paleoclimatologist at the Goethe University and member of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Germany. "Another important factor was the transfer of heat via warm ocean currents that reached Antarctica." When the warm ocean current collapsed and the Antarctic coast came under the influence of cooler ocean currents, the tropical rainforests, palm trees and Baobab relatives also disappeared.

The scientists used rock samples from drill cores on the seabed obtained off the coast of Wilkes Land, Antarctica, as part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). The samples are between 53 and 46 million years old and contain fossil pollen and spores that are known to originate from the Antarctic coastal region. The researchers were thus able to reconstruct the local vegetation on Antarctica and, accordingly, interpret the presence of tropical and subtropical rainforests covering the coastal region 52 million years ago. The scientists' evaluations show that the winter temperatures on the Wilkes Land coast were warmer than 50 degrees Fahrenheit at that time, despite three months of polar night. The continental interior, however, was noticeably cooler, with the climate supporting the growth of temperate rainforests characterized by southern beech and Araucaria trees of the type common in New Zealand today.

Additional evidence of extremely mild temperatures was provided by analysis of organic compounds that were produced by soil bacteria populating the soils along the Antarctic coast. "By studying naturally occurring climate warming periods in the geological past, our knowledge of the mechanisms and processes in the climate system increases," Pross said.>>
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by ta152h0 » Thu Aug 02, 2012 7:25 pm

the ancient aegyptians built the pyramids obviously influenced by the Orion stars geometry. I am wondering if the ancient brazylians did the same with the Crux but just not found yet ???
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by neufer » Thu Aug 02, 2012 9:13 pm

Image
ta152h0 wrote: the ancient aegyptians built the pyramids obviously influenced by the Orion stars geometry. I am wondering if the ancient brazylians did the same with the Crux but just not found yet ???
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Brasilia,_Brazil wrote: <<The pilot plan for Brasília was built to conform to Le Corbusier's Letter of Athens, which embodied the ideal qualities of a city. The pilot plan was based on the shape of an airplane. The heart of the city is the Monumental Axis (the fusilage of the "airplane") intersecting in the center of the city with a Residential Axis, or the wings of an airplane. The Monumental Axis, also known as the Ministries Esplanade, is an open area in downtown Brasília. Costa designed the city in four scales of design: a monumental scale, a residential scale, a gregarious (or social) scale, and a bucolic scale.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_correlation_theory wrote: <<The Orion correlation theory (or Giza–Orion correlation theory) is a hypothesis in pyramidology. Its central claim is that there is a correlation between the location of the 3 largest pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex and the three middle stars of the constellation Orion, and that this correlation was intended as such by the builders of the pyramids. The stars of Orion were associated with Osiris, the sun-god of rebirth and afterlife, by the ancient Egyptians. Depending on the version of the theory, additional pyramids can be included to complete the picture of the Orion constellation, and the Nile river can be included to match with the Milky Way galaxy.

The Orion correlation theory was first put forward by Robert Bauval in 1983. One night, while working in Saudi Arabia, he took his family and a friend's family up into the sand dunes of the Arabian desert for a camping expedition. His friend pointed out Orion, and mentioned that Mintaka, the smaller more westerly of the stars making up Orion's belt was offset slightly from the others. Bauval then made a connection between the layout of the three main stars in Orion's belt and the layout of the three main pyramids in the Giza necropolis. He published this idea in 1989 in the journal Discussions in Egyptology, volume 13. The idea has been further expounded by Bauval in collaboration with Adrian Gilbert (The Orion Mystery, 1994) and Graham Hancock (Keeper of Genesis, 1996), as well as in their separate publications. The basis of this theory concerns the proposition that the relative positions of three main Ancient Egyptian pyramids on the Giza plateau are (by design) correlated with the relative positions of the three stars in the constellation of Orion which make up Orion's Belt— as these stars appeared 10,000 BC.

Their initial claims regarding the alignment of the Giza pyramids with Orion ("…the three pyramids were a terrestrial map of the three stars of Orion's belt"— Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods, 1995, p. 375) are later joined with speculation about the age of the Great Sphinx (Hancock and Bauval, Keeper of Genesis, published 1996, and in 1997 in the U.S. as The Message of the Sphinx). According to these works, the Great Sphinx was constructed c. 10,500 BC (Upper Paleolithic), and its lion-shape is maintained to be a definitive reference to the constellation of Leo. Furthermore, the orientation and dispositions of the Sphinx, the Giza pyramids and the Nile River relative to one another on the ground is put forward as an accurate reflection or "map" of the constellations of Leo, Orion (specifically, Orion's Belt) and the Milky Way respectively. As Hancock puts it in 1998's The Mars Mystery (co-authored with Bauval):

...we have demonstrated with a substantial body of evidence that the pattern of stars that is "frozen" on the ground at Giza in the form of the three pyramids and the Sphinx represents the disposition of the constellations of Orion and Leo as they looked at the moment of sunrise on the spring equinox during the astronomical "Age of Leo" (i.e., the epoch in which the Sun was "housed" by Leo on the spring equinox.) Like all precessional ages this was a 2,160-year period. It is generally calculated to have fallen between the Gregorian calendar dates of 10,970 and 8810 BC. (op. cit., p.189)
Image
The allusions to dates c. 12,500 years ago are significant to Hancock since this is the era he seeks to assign to the advanced progenitor civilization, now vanished, but which he contends through most of his works had existed and whose advanced technology influenced and shaped the development of the world's (known) civilizations of antiquity. Egyptology and archaeological science maintain that available evidence indicates that the Giza pyramids were constructed during the Fourth dynasty period (3rd millennium BC), while the exact date of the Great Sphinx is still unclear. Hancock does not dispute the dating evidence for the pyramids, but instead argues that they must have been planned with the knowledge of how the stars had appeared some eight thousand years before they were actually built —since the Orion correlation theory claims they are oriented that way— which it is implied provides further evidence for the influence of a technology and knowledge which would not have been available to the pyramids' builders.

The claims made by Hancock, Bauval, and others (such as Adrian Gilbert and Anthony West) concerning the significance of these proposed correlations have been examined by several scientists, who have published detailed criticism and rebuttal of these ideas.

Among these critiques are several from two astronomers, Ed Krupp of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and Anthony Fairall, astronomy professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Using planetarium equipment, Krupp and Fairall independently investigated the angle between the alignment of Orion's Belt and north during the era cited by Hancock, Bauval et al. (which differs from the angle seen today or in the 3rd millennium BC, because of the precession of the equinoxes), and found that the angle was somewhat different from the "perfect match" claimed by Bauval and Hancock in the Orion Constellation Theory– 47-50 degrees per the planetarium measurements, compared to the 38 degree angle formed by the pyramids.

Krupp also pointed out that the slightly-bent line formed by the three pyramids was deviated towards the north, whereas the slight "kink" in the line of Orion's Belt was deformed to the south, and to match them up one or the other of them had to be turned upside-down. Indeed, this is what was done in the original book by Bauval and Gilbert (The Orion Mystery), which compared images of the pyramids and Orion without revealing the pyramids' map had been inverted. Krupp and Fairall find other problems with the claims, including noting that if the Sphinx is meant to represent the constellation of Leo, then it should be on the opposite side of the Nile (the "Milky Way") from the pyramids ("Orion"), that the vernal equinox c. 10,500 BC was in Virgo and not Leo, and that in any case the constellations of the Zodiac originate from Mesopotamia and are completely unknown in Egypt until the much later Graeco-Roman era. Ed Krupp repeated this "upside down" claim in the BBC documentary Atlantis Reborn (1999).

According to Bauval and Hancock, some astronomers (including Dr. Archie Roy, Dr. Percy Seymour, Dr. Mary Bruck, Dr. Giulio Magli), however, have rejected Krupp's argument. The correlation, they claim, is a visual one when standing north of the Giza pyramids and looking south. Archie Roy, professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Glasgow University, and Percy Seymour, astronomer and astrophysicist at Plymouth University U.K., have both publicly rejected several of Krupp's arguments.>>
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by neufer » Thu Aug 02, 2012 9:24 pm

Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Chris Peterson wrote:
Besides the satellite systems Art mentioned, Antarctic communications utilize non-stationary geosynchronous satellites. These are geosynchronous satellites in non-equatorial orbits (typically with low inclinations). From Antarctica, they appear to slowly bob above and below the horizon, over a day, so it's possible to aim an antenna at them (typically a slowly steered antenna) and get several hours of connectivity. The same trick is used for Arctic communications.
Is the southern tip of the SDO's daily analemma :arrow:
visible in today's APOD :?:
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by Anthony Barreiro » Thu Aug 02, 2012 9:47 pm

neufer wrote:
ta152h0 wrote: the ancient aegyptians built the pyramids obviously influenced by the Orion stars geometry. I am wondering if the ancient brazylians did the same with the Crux but just not found yet ???
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_correlation_theory wrote: <<The Orion correlation theory (or Giza–Orion correlation theory) is a hypothesis in pyramidology. Its central claim is that there is a correlation between the location of the 3 largest pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex and the three middle stars of the constellation Orion, and that this correlation was intended as such by the builders of the pyramids. The stars of Orion were associated with Osiris, the sun-god of rebirth and afterlife, by the ancient Egyptians. Depending on the version of the theory, additional pyramids can be included to complete the picture of the Orion constellation, and the Nile river can be included to match with the Milky Way galaxy.

The Orion correlation theory was first put forward by Robert Bauval in 1983. One night, while working in Saudi Arabia, he took his family and a friend's family up into the sand dunes of the Arabian desert for a camping expedition. His friend pointed out Orion, and mentioned that Mintaka, the smaller more westerly of the stars making up Orion's belt was offset slightly from the others. Bauval then made a connection between the layout of the three main stars in Orion's belt and the layout of the three main pyramids in the Giza necropolis. ...

...>>
Thanks ta152h0 (how do you pronounce that?) and Neufer, this is very interesting. The various assertions and dismissals of this theory make me think that (1) human beings are very good at finding correlations and patterns; (2) it's hard to know what people who lived long ago and didn't leave any written documents may or may not have been thinking; and (3) it's a common mistake of lazy or disputatious thinking to conclude that because a hypothesis has not been proven it has therefore been disproven. One possibility not mentioned in the wikipedia article: perhaps an older late paleolithic culture built smaller monuments at these locations, and the later fourth dynasty Egyptians built the surviving pyramids and Sphinx on the same sites. One can speculate endlessly. I'll meditate wearing my pyramid hat this evening and let you all know what I discover.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by ta152h0 » Thu Aug 02, 2012 9:58 pm

it ia so unfortunate the ancient library at Alexandria burned down
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by Chris Peterson » Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:04 pm

Anthony Barreiro wrote:Thanks ta152h0 (how do you pronounce that?) and Neufer, this is very interesting. The various assertions and dismissals of this theory make me think that (1) human beings are very good at finding correlations and patterns; (2) it's hard to know what people who lived long ago and didn't leave any written documents may or may not have been thinking; and (3) it's a common mistake of lazy or disputatious thinking to conclude that because a hypothesis has not been proven it has therefore been disproven. One possibility not mentioned in the wikipedia article: perhaps an older late paleolithic culture built smaller monuments at these locations, and the later fourth dynasty Egyptians built the surviving pyramids and Sphinx on the same sites. One can speculate endlessly. I'll meditate wearing my pyramid hat this evening and let you all know what I discover.
Keep in mind that anything you see that treats the writings of Bauval or Hancock seriously can be disregarded. These folks are pseudoscientists of the highest order, and have no respect at all in the archaeological community.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by neufer » Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:14 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
Keep in mind that anything you see that treats the writings of Bauval or Hancock seriously can be disregarded. These folks are pseudoscientists of the highest order, and have no respect at all in the archaeological community.
Keep in mind that anything you see that treats the Continental Drift writings of Alfred Wegener seriously can be disregarded. Wegener was a meteorologist and climatologist and had no respect at all in the geophysical community.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by Chris Peterson » Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:36 pm

neufer wrote:Keep in mind that anything you see that treats the Continental Drift writings of Alfred Wegener seriously can be disregarded. Wegener was a meteorologist and climatologist and had no respect at all in the geophysical community.
That's not true... a myth. His theories were not taken seriously at first, but gained support over time. That's generally how science works.

Bauval and Hancock's ideas are in the same category as the guy who make up the Mayan end-of-calendar doomsday, or of von Däniken, or of Velikovsky: guys with no scholarship skills who figured out how to make money writing crazy books. These all represent ideas that have been out there for a long time, and have not gained support at all... because they contradict existing facts (like the age of the Pyramids, which is not in question).
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by agorick » Fri Aug 03, 2012 12:33 am

A beautiful star trails photograph.

On close examination of the enlarged photo I noticed some other artifacts that are clearly not celestial.
Some appear to be meteor streaks, captured on only one frame of course, hence "stationary".
However many appear to be red or blue dots, like stars but clearly not.

Any idea what caused these to appear on only one frame of the 24 hour sequence?

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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by neufer » Fri Aug 03, 2012 12:42 am

Image
Chris Peterson wrote:
neufer wrote:
Keep in mind that anything you see that treats the Continental Drift writings of Alfred Wegener seriously can be disregarded. Wegener was a meteorologist and climatologist and had no respect at all in the geophysical community.
That's not true... a myth. His theories were not taken seriously at first, but gained support over time. That's generally how science works.
Polflucht :!: It took almost 50 years for Wegener's ideas to gain support. That's generally how science works.
Chris Peterson wrote:
Bauval and Hancock's ideas are in the same category as the guy who make up the Mayan end-of-calendar doomsday, or of von Däniken, or of Velikovsky: guys with no scholarship skills who figured out how to make money writing crazy books. These all represent ideas that have been out there for a long time, and have not gained support at all... because they contradict existing facts (like the age of the Pyramids, which is not in question).
No one is questioning the age of the Pyramids...just the mindset of builders who were known to have worshiped the star Sirius.

There are some interesting coincidences here and the ideas proposed are far from outlandish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius#Observational_history wrote:
<<Sirius, known in ancient Egypt as Sopdet (Greek: Σῶθις = Sothis), is recorded in the earliest astronomical records. During the era of the Middle Kingdom, Egyptians based their calendar on the heliacal rising of Sirius, namely the day it becomes visible just before sunrise after moving far enough away from the glare of the Sun. This occurred just before the annual flooding of the Nile and the summer solstice, after a 70-day absence from the skies. The hieroglyph for Sothis features a star and a triangle. Sothis was identified with the great goddess Isis, who formed a part of a triad with her husband Osiris and their son Horus, while the 70-day period symbolised the passing of Isis and Osiris through the duat (Egyptian underworld).>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener wrote: <<During his lifetime Alfred Wegener (November 1, 1880 – November 1930) was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered for advancing the theory of continental drift (Kontinentalverschiebung) in 1912, which hypothesized that the continents were slowly drifting around the Earth. His hypothesis was controversial and not widely accepted until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of Plate tectonics.

Alfred Wegener first thought of this idea by noticing that the different large landmasses of the Earth almost fit together like a jigsaw. The Continental shelf of the Americas fit closely to Africa and Europe, and Antarctica, Australia, India and Madagascar fit next to the tip of Southern Africa. But Wegener only took action after reading a paper in Autumn 1911 and seeing that a flooded land-bridge contradicts isostasy. Wegener's main interest was meteorology, and he wanted to join the Denmark-Greenland expedition scheduled for mid 1912. So he hurried up to present his Continental Drift hypothesis on January 6, 1912. He analyzed either side of the Atlantic Ocean for rock type, geological structures and fossils. He noticed that there was a significant similarity between matching sides of the continents, especially in fossil plants. His hypothesis was thus strongly supported by the physical evidence, and was a pioneering attempt at a rational explanation.

From 1912, Wegener publicly advocated the theory of "continental drift", arguing that all the continents were once joined together in a single landmass and have drifted apart. He supposed the cause might be the centrifugal force of the Earth's rotation ("Polflucht") or the astronomical precession. Wegener also speculated on sea-floor spreading and the role of the mid-ocean ridges, stating: the Mid-Atlantic Ridge ... zone in which the floor of the Atlantic, as it keeps spreading, is continuously tearing open and making space for fresh, relatively fluid and hot sima [rising] from depth. However, he did not pursue these ideas in his later works.

In 1915, in The Origin of Continents and Oceans (Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane), Wegener published the theory that there had once been a giant continent, he named "Urkontinent" (German word meaning "origin of the continents", in a way equivalent to the Greek "Pangaea", meaning "All-Lands" or "All-Earth") and drew together evidence from various fields. Expanded editions during the 1920s presented the accumulating evidence. The last edition, just before his untimely death, revealed the significant observation that shallower oceans were geologically younger.

In his work, Wegener presented a large amount of very strong evidence in support of continental drift, but the mechanism remained elusive. While his ideas attracted a few early supporters such as Alexander Du Toit from South Africa and Arthur Holmes in England, the hypothesis was generally met with skepticism from largely conservative scientists, who were resistant to any change in the status quo. The one American edition of Wegener's work, published in 1925, was received so poorly that the American Association of Petroleum Geologists organized a symposium specifically in opposition to the continental drift hypothesis. Its opponents could argue, as did the Leipziger geologist Franz Kossmat, that the oceanic crust was too "firm" for the continents to "simply plough through", a suggestion which ignored the plasticity of all rocks at depth and at high temperatures and pressures. The comment also ignored the vast time-scale over which continental drift has occurred, effectively the total age of the earth of about 4.5 billion years.

In 1943 George Gaylord Simpson wrote a vehement attack on the theory (as well as the rival theory of sunken land bridges) and put forward his own permanentist views. Alexander du Toit wrote a rejoinder in the following year, but G.G.Simpson's influence was so powerful that even in countries previously sympathetic towards continental drift, like Australia, Wegener's hypothesis fell out of favour.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by Chris Peterson » Fri Aug 03, 2012 1:05 am

neufer wrote:Polflucht :!: It took almost 50 years for Wegener's ideas to gain support. That's generally how science works.
It took 50 years for his ideas to become fully accepted. In fact, support started to grow from the very beginning. There simply wasn't a consensus. And that's reasonable, given the total lack of a plausible mechanism when the idea was first proposed. But as evidence accumulated- and it did accumulate- a consensus developed.
No one is questioning the age of the Pyramids...just the mindset of builders who were known to have worshiped the star Sirius.
Not so. Bauval and Hancock propose a dating for the Pyramids and Old Kingdom Egyptians that is contradicted by the evidence. It's certainly not impossible that the Egyptians based the layout of the Pyramids on Orion, although unlikely and not supported by anything other than guesses. But that idea is only a tiny part of the whole package of nonsense advanced by Bauval and Hancock.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by neufer » Fri Aug 03, 2012 4:06 am

Chris Peterson wrote:
neufer wrote:
Polflucht :!: It took almost 50 years for Wegener's ideas to gain support. That's generally how science works.
It took 50 years for his ideas to become fully accepted. In fact, support started to grow from the very beginning. There simply wasn't a consensus. And that's reasonable, given the total lack of a plausible mechanism when the idea was first proposed. But as evidence accumulated- and it did accumulate- a consensus developed.
It took 31 years for Wegener's ideas to become fully rejected.
Chris Peterson wrote:
neufer wrote:
No one is questioning the age of the Pyramids...just the mindset of builders who were known to have worshiped the star Sirius.
Not so. Bauval and Hancock propose a dating for the Pyramids and Old Kingdom Egyptians that is contradicted by the evidence. It's certainly not impossible that the Egyptians based the layout of the Pyramids on Orion, although unlikely and not supported by anything other than guesses. But that idea is only a tiny part of the whole package of nonsense advanced by Bauval and Hancock.
It is the primary and most important idea advanced by Bauval and Hancock so far as this discussion is concerned;
just as the general concept of continental drift was the primary and most important idea advanced by Wegener.

All those other extraneous (if not downright false) ideas put forth by Bauval & Wegener should not be used to denigrate their primary visions.

Nor should their professional credentials & publicity seeking be held against them.
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Re: APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

Post by alter-ego » Sat Aug 04, 2012 6:09 am

neufer wrote:Is the southern tip of the SDO's daily analemma :arrow:
visible in today's APOD :?:
SDO Analemma visibility<br />Horizon-to-horizon viewing time ≈9.5 hours
SDO Analemma visibility
Horizon-to-horizon viewing time ≈9.5 hours
Yes. Unfortunately there is not a good azimuth reference in this picture, so, at an arbitrary horizon position, I added a reasonably accurate perspective of the SDO analemma that would show above the horizon. It turns out that, within a couple degrees, SDO did nicely slide by Sirius about 1 hour after reaching the southern most point of its analemma.
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Annuit cœptis

Post by neufer » Mon Aug 06, 2012 2:50 pm

Anthony Barreiro wrote:
Thanks ta152h0 (how do you pronounce that?) and Neufer, this is very interesting. The various assertions and dismissals of this theory make me think that (1) human beings are very good at finding correlations and patterns; (2) it's hard to know what people who lived long ago and didn't leave any written documents may or may not have been thinking; and (3) it's a common mistake of lazy or disputatious thinking to conclude that because a hypothesis has not been proven it has therefore been disproven. One possibility not mentioned in the wikipedia article: perhaps an older late paleolithic culture built smaller monuments at these locations, and the later fourth dynasty Egyptians built the surviving pyramids and Sphinx on the same sites. One can speculate endlessly. I'll meditate wearing my pyramid hat this evening and let you all know what I discover.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/gallery-indexEvents.html wrote: <<This image displays the type of detail discernible with the telescopic camera of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Curiosity rover. The instrument uses a telescope for spectroscopic analysis of chemical elements in targets such as rocks or soil. The same telescope serves the instrument's camera, called the remote microimager. For this image, the remote microimager photographed a dollar bill from 10 feet (3 meters) away.

ChemCam was conceived, designed and built by a U.S.-French team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N. M.; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (the French government space agency); and the Centre d'Étude Spatiale des Rayonnements at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France. Researchers will use the tools on the rover to study whether the landing region has had environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and favorable for preserving clues about whether life existed.>>
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