Can't afford a boat trip to the Antarctic? Try this instead!

This is the view today from the bow webcam on the Aurora Australis, the resupply vessel that services Australia's Antarctic bases.

Not your average cruise ship view! Not your average webcam view either…

The ship left Australia on 15 October, and was slated to return on 16 November. The latest sitrep has them here (and it is so worth your time to zoom in and look around the shoreline on this map!):

Pakistan earthquake: 80+ dead and a whole new giant island

Yesterday I tweeted:

This'll be bad MT @NewEarthquake: 7.4 earthquake, 69km NNE of Awaran, Pakistan. Sep 24 16:29 at epicenter 19m ago http://j.mp/16WAcc9

And it was. The severity of the earthquake was quickly upgraded to 7.8 (remembering that the Richter Scale is logarithmic, so small increases in the number equate to very big increases in severity).

Reports from Pakistan today are that at least 80 people were killed and another 80 people injured. Dozens of mud-based houses collapsed. [UPDATE: later reports have 515 people killed.]

On the flip side is an awesome testament to the power of this earthquake. A quite large island erupted from the sea about 600 metres off the Gwadar coast:

Earthquake creates a new island. Photo: https://twitter.com/NewsweekPak

NBC reports that seismologists suspect it to be a mud volcano island, but no-one's been out to inspect it as yet.

If you are interested in following earthquakes that happen around the world, you can follow on Twitter @NewEarthquake. 

UPDATE 30/09/2013: Here's a good article looking specifically at the new island, with before and after photos:

Amazing landslide escape—just a whisker from a right squishing!

This guy is about as lucky as you could possibly imagine. Watch this massive boulder almost kiss the side of his car.

Go full screen in HD resolution, and at the very beginning watch the hanging rock right at the very peak of the hillside as it comes loose.


According to the ABC, this happened yesterday near Keelung City in Taiwan.

Whoa! Watch this frozen lake attack houses in slow motion. Like a B-grade scifi movie.

Whoa... What would you do if a frozen lake started rising up and across the shore,overwhelming your house?

That's what these people faced when the Mille Lacs Lake, Minnesota did just that on 11 May 2013.

Gorgeous wing-tip vortices from an airliner landing in fog

This short video is a sleeper...

It's only 50 seconds long and you start wondering whether it was worth the click through.

Then...wow.


I am so going to have to take the camera out to the Canberra Airport next foggy morning...

It's a Swiss Air A340 landing in Zurich, and was published in January this year by Andy Ruesch. And it's a pretty good example why formation flying is kind of dangerous.

(Via @CatherineQ, @scimomof2 and The Laughing Squid) 

What I've been reading lately

Just an archival catch-up of recent The Beach House Weekly—my Paper.li auto summaries—of an interesting few weeks in science, space and Australian politics.

From rockets to meteorites, Roxon to Rudd, novas to Nobels, planet hunters to metric hunters.

25 March 2013
18 March 2013
11 March 2013
4 March 2013
25 February 2013
18 February 2013
11 February 2013
4 February 2013
28 January 2013
21 January 2013
14 January 2013
7 January 2013
31 December 2012
24 December 2012
17 December 2012
10 December 2012

Intriguing to look back through actually. Something in there for everyone.

Before the Canberra storm was the build-up... My 1:20 timelapse

iPhone shot out the other side of the house while the timelapse was shooting

No fireworks for this Australia Day - not the artificial kind anyway. But plenty of the natural white kind!

And before the big storm hit Canberra, there were some dramatic clouds during the build-up.

It was all very reminiscent of South-East Queensland actually...

Enjoy my first YouTube upload—1849 frames, four seconds apart, covering from 3:56pm to 6:20pm in one minute 19 seconds:



Pity Picasa doesn't fade out the sound at the end...

A still from the series

Related articles

• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Old Parliament House, Canberra

Siding Springs Observatory damaged by bushfire (FINAL UPDATE)

Anglo-Australian Observatory, Siding Springs, in the firing line

Australia's premier astronomy site, the Sidings Spring Observatory in the Warrumbungle Mountains near Coonabarabran, has been damaged by an out of control bushfire this afternoon.

All staff were evacuated from the observatory in time. Temperature sensors shot to 120 degrees Celsius as the fire-front passed over the site. Flames have been caught on webcams.

Weather readings from the site, posted by English astronomer James Allen, currently working at SSO.
Note the peak temperature!

The Rural Fire Service has reported two nearby properties as destroyed and the observatory as "damaged". A journalist has cited a good RFS source as saying the damage "is significant".

After a 38 degree day comes a cracker storm! Check these lightning photos.

It was hot outside today, and it will be hot again tomorrow. But in between we've had a great series of storm cells passing over, with some excellent lightning.

I pointed the camera out the upstairs window, and set it on automatic shooting with a programmable remote control. Unfortunately there's nothing automatic about the processing stage...

But after sorting through some 600 frames of 30MB RAW files, it came down to 13 keepers.

A couple more:

Cyberbully pot-kettle, Greens launches, telescopes, more. The week that was.

Alan Jones learns what it's like on the receiving end; the ACT Greens campaign powers towards 20 October; the first stage of the Square Kilometre Array is turned on; a Nobel laureate yanks the rug out from under Newspoll; iPad Mini confirmed; and much more.

The week that was - my readings and posts.

Must be time we had some aurora pics and vids... a lot of them!

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120708.html 

Let's kick off with an aurora AND a volcano erupting - this was from 1991 in Iceland but was featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day today.

This is a good two-minute compilation of timelapse video from the International Space Station, by  Tomislav Safundžić (via@SpaceX):

This is Our Planet from Tomislav Safundžić on Vimeo.

Image courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/

Music: The XX - Intro

Tromso, Northern Norway is a mecca for aurora chasers, and this time lapse video by Tor Even Mathisen shows why in this four minute beauty (via @BadAstronomer):

Astronomy 141 - an entire introductory university course available online and free

The internet has entered an amazing phase. All manner of materials that once cost extraordinary amounts of your hard-earned are now being posted for free.

Having finally caught up with all episodes on my list of 34 (!) regular podcast subscriptions, I'm now listening my way through this little brainfood goldmine: Astronomy 141 - Life in the Universe is an entire course from Ohio State University. The lecturer's description sums it up:

...an introduction to Astrobiology. The topics covered in this course lie at the interfaces between astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, and the earth and planetary sciences. We will learn about scientists' ongoing quest for answers to some of the most fundamental human questions: How did life originate on Earth? Is there life on other worlds? Are we alone in the universe? What is the long-term future of life in the universe?

But it isn't just about the potential for life in space.

Need more galactical timelapses? Sorted.

This is an ad for a whole movie-length version of this sort of gorgeous timelapse stuff. Holy cow - a whole movie of this might just be overload...

The scenes of the Milky Way are quite simply beautiful. And there are two scenes with huge cloud formations that are incredible.

Make sure you switch the resolution to 1080 first. Look for the geostationary satellite in the scene from 25 to 35 seconds - it isn't moving while the rest of the star field is. And what is that in the top left corner at 1:53?



The film is by Tom Lowe, and is available through Timescapes.

Via DVice

A week of frosts - so here's the pick of my Canberra frost photos

A frosty foundation being laid for winter this week in Canberra.

Here are a few photos I took during a cycle to work one morning last winter.

Camera is just an iPhone 4.

This ocean current video from NASA is a great big ball of beautiful art!

This new video from NASA has gone around the world like wildfire - for good reason - it is truly beautiful.

And everywhere it's gone, it is compared to a Van Gogh painting. Looking at these screen grabs, you can see why.

Here's what NASA says about the video:

Ooh - a new toy from NASA: Earth Now app for iPhones

It's a 3D model of climatic conditions around the entire planet.

As NASA describe it:

NASA's Earth Now is an application that visualizes recent global climate data from Earth Science satellites, including surface air temperature, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and water vapor as well as gravity and sea level variations.

Data sets are visually described using "false color" maps. Color-coded legends are provided to indicate relative strength or weakness of an environmental condition. The resulting 3D model of the Earth may be rotated by a single finger stroke, and may also be zoomed in or out by pinching 2 fingers.

It was developed by the Earth Science Communications and Visualization Technology Applications and Development Teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with support from NASA Headquarters.

Available on iTunes. And it's free.

UPDATE 22/03/2012: One of the people I follow on Twitter is Doug Ellison of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Doug is a visualisation producer and has confirmed for me that he was part of the team that designed Earth Now.

What's that? It's about time for more auroras?

Well OK then. And there are some nice depictions getting around on the interwebby place.

Whoa! Read about the photo on Universe Today.

See more of Ole Salomonsen's work on www.arcticlightphoto.no

About one minute into this sweet collection of HD timelapses, the sky just erupts with red and orange auroras. Via @SpaceX

Half-built Cotter Dam is a total torrent - they sure picked the right catchment!

Have you checked the DamCam tonight? The Cotter Dam overflow is raging more now than ever.

There was debate about dam locations before this project started. Well there can be little doubt now that the Cotter is a brilliant catchment can there?

Just such a shame this didn't come after the damn dam was done...

Don't forget you can see the timelapse of when it first overflowed here.

27 dead in US tornadoes. Have they heard of housing codes over there?

It's tragic to read of so many people killed in yet another devastating tornado season in the US. But when you see pictures like this of homes torn into kindling it really makes you wonder about housing regulations in the US...

Darwin was similarly wiped out by a cyclone. But within a couple of years, serious cyclone rating regulations were introduced for all new housing right across the northern half of Australia.

And it has paid off.

So what's going on in the good ol' USA?

Overflow of half-built new Cotter Dam in timelapse

Canberra's water shortage solution, the massive expansion of the Cotter Dam suffered a major setback tonight when the current consistent rains led to the half-built dam overflowing. A diversion tunnel couldn't cope with the inflow and over it went, for all to see on the webcam set up to show construction progress!.

MNeuling has captured the every-40-second webcam shots and converted them into a timelapse video:



Well done.

It came up incredibly quickly, giving testament to what a strong catchment the expanded dam will have.

The work crews were very busy this afternoon removing what they could from the site and evacuating.
Hopefully not too much damage is done to all the equipment and scaffolding that couldn't be removed in time.