Travelers In The Night

Many people in our modern world rarely if ever experience night vision. To achieve this interesting state of sensory awareness you cannot look at your cell phone or any other source of bright light for 30 to 45 minutes. Your night vision comes about over time because the rod sensors in the retina of your eye undergo a chemical change when they are placed in total darkness. The process starts immediately but takes 20 to 30 minutes to get 80% of maximum sensitivity. The night vision process can be reversed in seconds by exposure to a bright light. In it's most sensitive state your eye can function with a billion times less light than is present in strong sunlight enabling you to see a candle flame from 1.6 miles away.

It is possible the object creating the Tunguska event in Russia 1908 which knocked down 80 million trees over an area about twice the size of New York City was a fragment of a comet or asteroid. The International Asteroid Warning Network 2025 campaign to track Comet 3L/Atlas prepares the worlds observatories for the eventual time when a comet fragment has our number on it.

Venus and Earth are similar in size, composition, density, and mass. Unfortunately, our sister planet Venus is an example of a place where green house gases have created an extreme situation. Venus's thick carbon dioxide atmosphere has a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth. It would crush a submarine. Additionally, the thick atmospheric blanket holds in the heat causing Venus's surface temperature to be 864 F, hot enough to melt lead.

Just before noon on September 1st of 1859 Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson were making sketches of clusters of sunspots when they were nearly blinded by an intense solar flare. 17.6 hours later a geomagnetic storm thought to be caused by a solar coronal mass ejection traveling at some 1,500 miles per second slammed into the magnetic field surrounding our home planet. We missed being hit with a such large coronal mass ejection by only 9 days in July of 2012. Next time we might not be that lucky.

Dr Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory headed up a team of scientists who used the 70 meter antenna at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex to bounce RADAR beams off of the asteroid Florence as it made a close approach to Earth in September of 2017. The RADAR images these researchers obtained reveal that Florence consists of a 2.8 mile diameter primary asteroid which is orbited by two small moons. Florence's two satellites appear to be between three hundred and a thousand feet in diameter and orbit the main asteroid in about 8 and 24 hours respectively. Florence is rare since there are only two other triple asteroid systems among the 16,000 Earth approaching asteroids which asteroid hunters have discovered. We would know more about Florence if Hurricane Irma had not prevented astronomers from using the giant Arecibo RADAR Dish in Puerto Rico to study it. Our curiosity will have to wait since Florence will not come very close again until September 2, 2057.