First Snowfall of 2012

The forecast was for a chance of rain. Instead we got this:

First Snowfall of 2012 in Bowie, MD

It was a scenic evening commute. However, it made a longer commute for some due to traffic. People really freak in DC when it snows.

Leap Second

A leap second will be introduced later this year on June 30. The irregularity in the earth’s rotation is significant enough to make it necessary to adjust the clock’s by that amount.

January 2012 Weather Weenie of the Month

Will Leverenz earned another Weather Weenie of the Month entry today. He made a comment about the iPhone auto-correct feature.

PropNET Project

Today I received an e-mail about a new web page. PropNET is an ad-hoc 2-way (and potentially, “more-way”) RF-based digital communication network whose activity is reported on the Internet.  As participating stations periodically ID and exchange data, they report their activity to an Internet data-collection hub for presentation through this web site. My amateur radio station was heard last night by this system, in California.

Signal Heard From My PSK31 Station

 

Happy Perihelion

At 7 PM EST today, Earth will be at perihelion, or the closest point in its orbit around the Sun (at 91.4 million miles). This may seem counterintuitive to some, and think, “Then why is it Winter and cold when we are closer to our Sun?” That is because the orbit is nearly circular and there is less than a 7% difference in the solar intensity between aphelion, the furthest point from the Sun, and perihelion. It is the tilt of The Earth’s axis, at 23.5 deg., that influences the change of the seasons by affecting the Sun’s elevation above the horizon.

Snowy Weather

Our area experienced several snow squalls this afternoon. They ended as quickly as they began with sunshine between events. These were an indication of the instability of the atmosphere. There were reports of some accumulation in the northern DC suburbs.

Temperatures are forecast to moderate by the weekend.

Tweetbot Update

Added a couple of conditional statements and made the tweets a little more interesting. Two different tweets dependent on the light level and limited the tweets to no more than every half hour. Follow the Tweetbot on Twitter.

Arctic Blast

Temperatures are expected to cool significantly tonight as a cold air mass moves southward. A major winter storm is also expected for western Maryland, The Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania and north-central West Virgina. 6 to 12 inches of snow are expected. Some good news for some ski resorts.

Parts of northern Florida are also expected to have freezing conditions tonight.

Arduino Fun

Arduino with Ethernet Shield

This morning I set up a simple photocell sensor and resistor circuit on my breadboard. I interfaced the circuit to an Arduino Duemilanove microprocessor and my new Ethernet shield, I programmed it to send a tweet to Twitter whenever the light level exceeded a preset value. I programmed a ten minute delay, following each trigger, so that there would not be an excess of Tweets. You can follow its Tweets here. No account is necessary.

Tatooine Discovered? Weeeelllllll, Maybe…

There has been much excitement about the discovery of an extrasolar planet in a binary star system. Many have christened the planet Tatooine, the home planet of Luke and Anakin Skywalker from The Star Wars films. The planet was depicted in the films as having two suns.

However, the official name of the newly discovered planet is Kepler-16b. Unlike the fictional Tatooine, it is about the size of Saturn; cold, gaseous and unlikely to support life as we know it. It orbits outside of the Kepler-16 system’s habitable zone. It also has about one third the mass of Jupiter with a mean density slight less than water. Like Saturn, if a large enough ocean could be found, it would float in water. It’s orbital period and distance from the primary star is similar to that of Venus.

The discovery does suggest that circumbinary planets may be more common than once thought.

Reference: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars