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Lost for 11 days in the wilderness: she almost died because she didn’t know the winter sun was far to the north

By Jo Nova

The city kids don’t know the first thing about the sky

Despite the media frenzy here, no one seems to have noticed that the lost tourist, Carolina Wilga, was walking for 11 days in the wrong direction. She said she “followed” the sun, and thought she was going west, but she was actually going north-west, away from help. See the map below to appreciate what a terrible mistake she was making (among a list). At this time of year, the sun is setting almost as far north as it ever sets. Somehow she was missing the entire Wheat Belt of Western Australia.

Primitive hunter gatherers knew the cycles of the sun and the movement of stars we can’t even see. It’s the most ancient science and we seem to have lost it. Not just Ms Wilga, but all the commentators too. Neolithic Brits built Stonehenge 4,000 years ago to mark the solstice and modern phone bunnies with silicon chips have lost it. Heck, even Bogong moths can navigate by the stars.

Carolina Wilga, 26

The 26 year old German backpacker drove 35 km off the beaten track into no-mans land and had an incident where […]

July 16th, 2025 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Auroras possible tonight as Cannibal CME arrives

Paul Hoelen, Mortimer Bay, Hobart, Tasmania

UPDATE: I want to see an aurora, but living at 32S in Perth, Australia, this is like hoping to see the NorthernLights in Jerusalem or San Diego. No luck for me tonight, but there was one report from Geraldton 400km north of us (28.7S). Hopefully sometime in the next year during the solar max…

A quick note to say a CME just hit Earth, and some people may be able to see an aurora tonight that wouldn’t normally see one. A severe Kp 7 Geomagnetic storm is in progress (BOM estimate). Kp 7 is the bottom end of what is classed as a “severe” geomagnetic storm with Kp 8 and 9 being bigger (and even rarer).

Reports on X (Twitter): #AuroraAustralis #Auroraborealis

Southern Hemisphere data — BOM 3 day Geomagnetic Indices | Northern Hemisphere: SpaceWeatherLive

Spaceweather.com

9.4 out of 10 based on 31 ratings […]

December 1st, 2023 | Tags: | Category: Astronomy | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Betelgeuse may go supernova in our lifetime — brighter than the moon

By Jo Nova

Betelgeuse is the red giant at the top of Orion. Image by yoshitaka2 from Pixabay

Astronomers are very excited. A new paper suggests Betelgeuse — the red giant in Orion — might be only a decade or two (or maybe a century) away from going supernova. It’s the sort of thing that only happens once in a thousand years. Whenever it does go boom, it will shine brighter than the moon, and dominate the sky for a few months to a year.

It’s 600 light years away, so if it is going to go supernova in the next twenty years, then, of course, it must have already happened and the light is on the way.

Before anyone cracks the champers, the new paper by Saio is based on models trying to figure out what’s happening on a pulsating ball of fire 5,600 trillion kilometers away.

Charlie Martin, PJ Media:

Will We See a Supernova in Our Lifetimes?

There hasn’t been a supernova in our neighborhood since July 4, 1054, when Chinese astronomers observed a supernova, now labeled SN1054, that remained visible for almost two years. The remnants of that supernova are […]

June 20th, 2023 | Tags: | Category: Astronomy | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Space is full of rocks. We’ve found 27,000 near Earth Asteroids (so far)

Back in the eighties people laughed at scientists who talked about the threat from asteroids. Then we got better tools, and started tracking them. Now we are finding more every night.

Not only are there 27,000 near Earth asteroids that we know of, in the rest of the solar system we have found a few more, like 750,000. All this since the late 1990s.

Some computer somewhere is tracking all those orbits and arcs into the future. How often do these rocks run into each other and generate surprises?

Just how many threatening asteroids are there? It’s complicated.

By Meghan Bartels

“If you talk to the scientists who were studying this in the ’80s, there’s a phrase they often refer to called the giggle factor,” Carrie Nugent, a planetary scientist at Olin College in Massachusetts, told Space.com. “They’re basically saying that they couldn’t talk about this scientific topic without people kind of laughing at them.”

It looks like we’ve probably found all the big one-kilometer-wide asteroids that might pose a problem. And the little rocks will just burn up on entry. So it’s the middle sized ones (140m – 1000m) that we don’t know […]

November 24th, 2021 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Landmark: First photo of a black hole (and Einstein was right)

A brief break in transmission now for the first photograph of a black hole, looking pretty much exactly as anyone would expect it to. The photons caught in this image traveled for hundreds of years at the speed of light. Lots of “hundreds” — burning through space for some 55 million years.

The numbers melt neurons: The supermassive black hole called M87 is 6.5 billion times bigger than our Sun. It’s bigger than the orbit of Neptune (which is circling 30 times further out from the Sun than we are). This star is 10 billion kilometers across.

Geoffrey Crew, a research scientist at Haystack Observatory commented that “With the M87 black hole being so massive, an orbiting planet would go around it within a week and be traveling at close to the speed of light.”

The black heart of Messier 87, or M87, a galaxy within the Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light years from Earth.

It takes a telescope roughly as big as The Earth to catch an image 20 micro-arcseconds across. Eight radio telescopes were combined across four continents and lined up on a few special days when they all had clear weather together. Each telescope took […]

April 11th, 2019 | Tags: | Category: Astronomy, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |