[Let us all hope that those attending this lecture go away realising that geoengineering is a foolish concept, especially when considered in the context of a supposed “anthropogenic” global warming. Those of that persuasion cannot call themselves environmentalists when they fail miserably to consider our planet in its own natural environment. They would do well to study Spaceweather and Cosmoclimatology before making suggestions about interferring with our planet’s natural systems – especially our atmosphere. – John Michael, Editor]
February 15 2013 – Today’s Celestial Events & Space Exploration News
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“Russia’s Urals region has been rocked by a meteorite explosion in the stratosphere. The impact wave damaged several buildings, and blew out thousands of windows amid frigid winter weather. Hundreds are seeking medical attention for minor injuries, TV channel Russia Today (RT.com) has reported.
Around 950 people have sought medical attention in Chelyabinsk alone because of the disaster, the region’s governor Mikhail Yurevich told RIA Novosti. Over 110 of them have been hospitalized and two of them are in heavy condition. Among the injured there are 159 children, Emergency ministry reported.
Army units found three meteorite debris impact sites, two of which are in an area near Chebarkul Lake, west of Chelyabinsk. The third site was found some 80 kilometers further to the northwest, near the town of Zlatoust. One of the fragments that struck near Chebarkul left a crater six meters in diameter.”
Several video clips of the actual explosion taken by eyewitnesses
[Later this evening, February 15 2013,
Asteroid 2012 DA14, with an estimated diameter of 65 metres, is due to fly past Earth with a staggeringly small miss distance of less than one tenth of the distance between Earth and the Moon.
Numerous pieces of debris from the fragmented meteorite that exploded over the Urals in Russia this morning have been found in the area of Chebarkul Lake, west of Chelyabinsk, where a large hole made by meteorite debris was discovered by a fisherman after the explosion. Another impact site has now been discovered 80 kilometers northwest of Chelyabinsk near the town of Zlatoust.
There is much speculation already that both these events may be related, but NASA’ SpaceWeather website has issued the following statement:
“The trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object. Information is still being collected about the Russian meteorite and analysis is preliminary at this point. In videos of the meteor, it is seen to pass from left to right in front of the rising sun, which means it was traveling from north to south. Asteroid DA14’s trajectory is in the opposite direction, from south to north.”
Naturally, panic and scare stories have spread in the wake of the event, and the web is full of nonsense from the start of World War 3 to Alien Invasion. Hopefully this will end speculation that the two events are related – Ed.]
NASA ScienceCast
Record-setting Asteroid Flyby on February 15th 2013
February 16 2013 – Today’s Celestial Events & Space Exploration News
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RUSSIAN ASTEROID IMPACT UPDATE February 18 2013: It is now known that some 1200 people were injured as a result of what NASA says was an asteroid: ‘about 17 meters in diameter and weighed approximately 10,000 metric tons’.
Quoting Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, NASA also says: ‘It struck Earth’s atmosphere at 40,000 mph (18 km/s) and broke apart about 12 to 15 miles (20 to 25 km) above Earth’s surface. The energy of the resulting explosion was in the vicinity of 500 kilotons of TNT. A shock wave propagated down and struck the city below, causing large numbers of windows to break, some walls to collapse, and minor damage throughout the city. When you hear about injuries, those are undoubtedly due to the effects of the shock wave, not due to fragments striking the ground. There are undoubtedly fragments on the ground, but as of this time we know of no recovered fragments that we can verify.’ .
This impact has been described as ‘the most energetic recorded meteor strike since the Tunguska impact of 1908’, and there are a number of Russian websites which show a compilation of the many videos of the event taken by ordinary folk on mobile phones and other devices. These vary in quality as a result of this and may take a while to download depending on your connection speed, though it is worth the wait in my opinion – Ed.]
February 19 2013 – Today’s Celestial Events & Space Exploration News
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“The 2300 BC Event takes a new look at an old puzzle: what happened at this date to cause the various advanced societies on the Earth to simultaneously collapse?
Civilizations in Anatolia and Greece, through Egypt and the Middle East, and eastward to India and Central Asia were at their height. The collapse of these civilizations due to earthquakes and climatic changes has been mirrored by similar interruptions on all continents, in the Arctic, and extending to the Pacific.
The discontinuities have long puzzled archaeologists and historians. New religions and accompanying mythologies appeared at this time in all cultural regions describing bombardment and flooding from the skies.
Strangely, the dominant aspect of the mythologies, however, is the observation and worship of a ring appearing to surround the Earth, oriented to the two Ursa (Bear) constellations.”
“Some time around 2300 BC the Eath encountered a dense clustering of space debris, the early Southern & Northern Taurid meteoroid stream. The result was an intense fall of meteoroids, some of them sufficiently large to cause surface destruction.
Simultaneous with the meteoroid fall was a huge downpouring of water which caused flash flooding. Extensive destruction and loss of life resulted. An astonishing aspect of the event was the formation of a ring surrounding the Earth, reflecting sunlight during the day, hiding some stars at night, and moving around the sky through a 24-hour period.
Following the ‘main event’, there were crustal movements which shifted the location of water sources, and caused earthquakes which destroyed settlements. Abrupt severe climate changes occurred.”
“The Northern/Southern Taurid meteoroid stream is identified as the specific meteoroid stream that the Earth encountered at 2300 BC.
The Earth’s encounter with a dense cluster of large objects would produce atmospheric phenomena very different from the pleasant and interesting night displays of meteor trails that are within our own experience.
The rain of objects would have generated extraordinary visual and auditory effects combined with ground vibrations; and under extreme conditions would bring about severe surface destruction and loss of life.
The overall event was associated by the people with powerful deities and formed the basis for major religions. The mythologies and traditions are, in large part, the residues of those religions.”
Research in the field of neo-catastrophism and impact cratering has quickened its pace since the early 1980s. Scholars such as Victor Clube, Bill Napier, Mark Bailey, Sir Fred Hoyle and Duncan Steel claim that a more ‘active’ sky might have caused major cultural changes of Bronze Age civilizations, belief systems and religious rituals.”
“Stonehenge today is a battlefield, not only for police and festivalgoers at midsummer but also for rival camps of archaeologists, astronomers, and other researchers into the mysteries of prehistoric religion and science. Controversy flared up in 1963, when Gerald Hawkins made early use of the computer to identify Stonehenge as an observatory for the sun and moon and an instrument for predicting eclipses. Further studies of megalithic sites by Alexander Thom proved that many of them were also related to the seasonal positions of the heavenly bodies.
The study of astro-archaeology has now expanded worldwide, bringing new revelations about the mystical sciences of antiquity. This “little history” summarizes the issues involved in astro-archaeology, and illustrates its principal sites and personalities. Included are recent findings of British scientists, whose records of anomalous levels of natural energies at stone circles are in accordance with the magical reputations of such places in local folklore.”
“This complete, authoritative study of the growing discipline of Archaeoastronomy examines the role of astronomy in antiquity. Professor Giulio Magli provides a clear, up-to-date survey of current thinking on the motives of the ancients for building fabulous and mysterious monuments all over our planet. Was it an attempt to reproduce the sky on Earth, to bring down the power of the stars to where they could see it, worship it and use it?
The connecting thread is astronomy: Giulio Magli uses astronomy as a key to understanding our ancestors’ way of thinking. It is a challenge he likes to call ‘predicting the past’ – archaeology as a science is able to make predictions, like any other science, and to check them.
All of the astronomical achievements of the past are considered as a whole, in a comprehensive way that shows the depth and breadth of the thought behind them. In the past, the motives of the ancients – and particularly their scientific thought – have often been misconstrued, maligned or even dismissed.
In an ironic, provocative style, Professor Magli shows the limitations of orthodox archaeology in the face of astronomically-based artefacts and tries to understand what led the ancients to construct magnificent buildings such as the city of Teotihuacan in the Mexico Valley, the Ceremonial Centre of Chaco Canyon in the USA, the Avebury stone circle in Great Britain or the Great Pyramids in Egypt.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the reader is taken on an ideal ‘world tour’ of many wonderful and enigmatic places in almost every continent, in search of traces of astronomical knowledge and lore of the sky. In the second part, Giulio Magli uses the elements presented in the tour to show that the fundamental idea which led to the construction of the astronomically-related giant monuments was the foundation of power, a foundation which was exploited by ‘replicating’ the sky.
A possible interpretive model then emerges that is founded on the relationship the ancients had with “natureâ€, in the sense of everything that surrounded them, the cosmos. The numerous monumental astronomically aligned structures of the past then become interpretable as acts of will, expressions of power on the part of those who held it; the will to replicate the heavenly plane here on earth and to build sacred landscapes.”
“The discovery of a 5000-year-old Sun Temple and an ancient “time machine” – Stone Age calendar – in Canada led scientist Gordon Freeman to ground-breaking discoveries in Stonehenge. During fieldwork and research from 1986 to 2006, Freeman found striking similarities between the surface geometry of the two sites.
These similarities push back the boundaries of written history and have far-reaching implications for North American and European history.
Passion and science blend in this remarkable, readable book, as Freeman takes us along on his patient and exciting discovery of a 5000-year-old Temple in the plains of Alberta. What he finds at the Majorville Medicine Wheel in turn informs his convincing account of Stonehenge archaeoastronomy”
“In all of the world’s myths and religions we find traditions of a Great Flood. There are stories too of a Golden Age: the antediluvian paradise that it destroyed. Might these be real memories of the ancient world? And how can we analyse the subject scientifically? The key to unlock these ancient myths lies in astronomy. “Under Ancient Skies” will examine the astronomical evidence for an ancient cataclysm and in the process will explore a number of related anomalies in prehistory, including: Was there a single great flood in human prehistory, or have there been many?
Could the workings of ancient calendars and the records of ancient eclipses give us clues about the Flood and the antediluvian world? Did the Celtic Druids use a calendar based on the orbit of Saturn; and is this the same antediluvian calendar as is described in Plato’s myth of Atlantis? Do Hindu, Chinese and Mayan cosmology myths recall the years after the Flood when our world wobbled on its axis?
Geologists have recently found the crater in Yucatan, where an asteroid impact destroyed the world of the dinosaurs. Scientists and astronomers have stopped dismissing the theory that a comet could have struck the Earth during prehistory – but any suggestion that a comet impact just a few thousand years ago might have caused the Biblical Flood, remains the last taboo. It is time for this barrier too to be washed away. If you read this book and you understand it then be warned – it may scare you!”
“Stonehenge has fascinated mankind for centuries, enveloping generation after generation in its haunting mystery. But while much has been learned about this ancient monument, the fundamental questions remain: Who built it? What was its purpose? How was it used?
Drawing on more than 15 years of research, John North has at last succeeded where others have failed. He comprehensively examines Stonehenge from all available angles — archeological, astronomical, and spiritual — and considers relevant research from other prehistoric remains in Britain and Northern Europe. He shows, for the first time, that the stones were not so much sighting devices as maps of the heavens and that the design of the monument evolved over thousands of years rather than conforming to a single original blueprint.
Such observations form the basis of deductions about prehistoric life and religion that will profoundly affect our understanding of who we are and where we came from.”
Around 700 BC an Assyrian scribe in the Royal Place at Nineveh made a copy of one of the most important documents in the royal collection.
Two and a half thousand years later it was found by Henry Layard in the remains of the palace library.
It ended up in the British Museum’s cuneiform clay tablet collection as catalogue No. K8538 (also called “the Planisphereâ€), where it has puzzled scholars for over 150 years.
In this monograph Bond and Hempsell provide the first comprehensive translation of the tablet, showing it to be a contemporary Sumerian observation of an Aten asteroid over a kilometre in diameter that impacted Köfels in Austria in the early morning of 29th June 3123 BC.”
“Noted British astronomer’s fascinating study of early astronomical knowledge through the interpretation of Stonehenge, Carnac, other megalithic sites. Stone Age sculpture, astronomical computations, radiocarbon dating, many other topics. Over 140 maps, photos, illustrations. “…essential summary of astronomy in the Stone Age”. Bibliography. Index”
“Anthony Aveni is well known in scholastic circles for his many excellent and ground-breaking publications in the field of archaeoastronomy. This particular volume is geared toward interested laymen and uninitiated scholars who are not yet well grounded in the history of astronomy or ideas of cosmology from an anthropological perspective. The book is graced with numerous and apt illustrations, while the text reads easily with Aveni’s smooth and informative style. Chapters were clearly organized thoughtfully, as information builds upon previous explanations and new concepts or ideas are charted out for the neophytes as needed.”
“What was the meaning of Stonehenge? What was the Mayan Code? Why was the elaborate Incan city of Cuzco built? Groundbreaking archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni offers a host of startling new insights and conclusions in this acclaimed study of three of life’s most mesmerizing mysteries.”
“Heliophysics is a fast-developing scientific discipline that integrates studies of the Sun’s variability, the surrounding heliosphere, and the environment and climate of planets.
Over the past few centuries, our understanding of how the Sun drives space weather and climate on the Earth and other planets has advanced at an ever increasing rate.”
“This volume, the first in a series of three heliophysics texts, integrates such diverse topics for the first time as a coherent intellectual discipline.
It emphasizes the physical processes coupling the Sun and Earth, allowing insights into the interaction of the solar wind and radiation with the Earth’s magnetic field, atmosphere and climate system.
It provides a core resource for advanced undergraduates and graduates, and also constitutes a foundational reference for researchers in heliophysics, astrophysics, plasma physics, space physics, solar physics, aeronomy, space weather, planetary science and climate science.”
Additional online resources
including lecture presentations
and other teaching materials
will become available towards
the end of 2012 at:
www.cambridge.org/9780521110617
“The Sun is a magnetically variable star and for planets with intrinsic magnetic fields, planets with atmospheres, or planets like Earth with both, there are profound consequences.
This 2010 volume, the second in this series of three heliophysics texts, integrates the many aspects of space storms and the energetic radiation associated with them – from causes on the Sun to effects in planetary environments.
It reviews the physical processes in solar flares and coronal mass ejections, interplanetary shocks, and particle acceleration and transport, and considers many space weather responses in geospace. In addition to its utility as a textbook, it also constitutes a foundational reference for researchers in fields from heliophysics to climate science.”
“This final book in this series of three heliophysics texts, published in 2010, focuses on long-term variability from the Sun’s sunspot cycle and considers the planetary system’s evolution from a climatological perspective.
Topics covered range from the dynamo action of stars and planets to processes in the Earth’s troposphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere and their effects on planetary climate and habitability.
Supplemented by online teaching materials, it can be used as a textbook for courses or as a foundational reference for researchers in fields from astrophysics and plasma physics to planetary and climate science.”
“An excellent introduction into the newly emerging and exciting field of astrobiology. An essential, enjoyable and highly readable insight into life in its cosmic context.”
“Astrobiology involves the study of the origin and history of life on Earth, planets and moons where life may have arisen, and the search for extraterrestrial life.
It combines the sciences of biology, chemistry, palaeontology, geology, planetary physics and astronomy.
This textbook brings together world experts in each of these disciplines to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the field currently available.”
“This up-to-date resource is based on lectures developed by experts in the relevant fields and carefully edited by the leading astrobiologists within the European community.
Aimed at graduate students in physics, astronomy and biology and their lecturers, the text begins with a general introduction to astrobiology, followed by sections on basic prebiotic chemistry, extremophiles, and habitability in our solar system and beyond.”
“The dynamic field of astrochemistry brings together ideas of physics, astrophysics, biology and chemistry to the study of molecules between stars, around stars and on planets.
Astrochemistry: from Astronomy to Astrobiology provides a clear and concise introduction to this rapidly evolving multidisciplinary subject.
Starting with the Molecular Universe, the text covers the formation of the elements, simple models of stars and their classification.
It then moves on to draw on the theme of the Origins of Life to study interstellar chemistry, meteorite and comet chemistry as well as the chemistry of planets.”
“This highly interdisciplinary book highlights many of the ways in which chemistry plays a crucial role in making life an evolutionary possibility in the universe.
Cosmologists and particle physicists have often explored how the observed laws and constants of nature lie within a narrow range that allows complexity and life to evolve and adapt. Here, these anthropic considerations are diversified in a host of new ways to identify the most sensitive features of biochemistry and astrobiology.
Celebrating the classic 1913 work of Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment for Life, this book looks at the delicate balance between chemistry and the ambient conditions in the universe that permit complex chemical networks and structures to exist.”
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