Jupiter and Venus

If you've been looking in a generally westerly direction in the early evening, you've, no doubt noticed the two exceptionally bright 'stars'.  Those are Jupiter and Venus, also exceptionally close to each other.  On one view, they're awfully close -- about 3 degrees, or 1/30th of the distance between directly overhead and the horizon.  To a different view, however, they're very far apart -- about 6 full moons would fit between them.

Technology keeps advancing.  In the 1970s, it was about all I could do to get a photograph of a nearly full moon through my telescope.  A fair amount of patience was needed to get the focus right, avoid contaminating light, and so forth.  Below is my phone photo of Jupiter (the fainter one) and Venus.  I was in a well-lit parking lot, and it wasn't much past sunset (hence the bright lower portion of the photo), and had just aimed the phone in the general direction of the planets.

I'll invite you all to contribute your own photos of the planets. 

25 years ago this summer

I realized today that 25 years ago was my first summer in Washington DC area.  At the time, that summer set many of the local records for hottest summer, longest streaks of hot days, and many variations on that.  I've asked a friend who is local and extremely in to weather observation* how recent summers would compare, and he said, with little hesitation, 'hotter'.  What used to be record-setting is now not very noticeable.

I made the challenge/request on my twitter feed (http://twitter.com/#!/rgrumbine), but for here: I'd be interested in seeing a widget+ of some kind that would track this year versus 1987 in DC and Chicago.  Plus, of course, any other cities you're interested in.  1987 was, at the time, an extremely hot year.  For another comparison, say summer 1981?  1982 was part of the major El Niño of 82-83, so perhaps would not be a good year to reference.

For keeping an eye on weather by way of twitter, I like the Capital Weather Gang for Washington DC, and Tom Skilling for Chicago.  I'm sure there are a bunch of other good sites even for those two cities.  I just have personal connections to those two.  I was secretary to the local AMS chapter some eons back when Skilling was the chapter president.

For a mailing list to discuss weather on, send an email with the phrase 'subscribe wx-talk' to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU Mailing lists, I'll add, are not web pages, or web sites, or chat rooms.  Different thing, with different strengths.

Read more »

Open Lab 2013

The Open Lab is now open again, taking nominations for posts from October 2011 through October 2012.  See Bora Zivkovic's note making the original announcement.

Also see the 'open lab 2013'  link on the right.  Feel free, of course, to nominate posts of mine.  But, more importantly, I encourage you to nominate science posts you like, regardless of where from.

The Return of Questions

It's been a long while, but at last here's a question place post for you all to ask about what's on your mind.  Particularly if what's on your mind has something to do with thinks I know about :-)

AMS feeds for scientific articles and a sampling

Very few scientific articles get any splash in the media, even those parts which pay some attention to science.  Readers then can build a mistaken impression that there are only a few scientists, a few dozen, tops, working in any given area. 

The American Meteorological Society is one of very many professional societies which publish scientific journals.  They also have RSS feeds for their journals, and a relatively open access policy to their older (than 2 years) articles.  Below is a biased sampling (the bias being that I'm interested in these articles and will be pulling them down at work) of recent articles.  There's quite a lot more going on than you're liable to hear of in media, by quite a few more people than you'll ever hear of. 

Some of the papers will probably inspire a need to make use of my guide to science jabberwocky.  That's not a knock on the papers, just a reminder that fields do develop vocabularies to ensure that the professionals all know what each other means.


If you are fairly good with your technique, you can set up your own double-diffusive staircases.  (The first paper discusses observations in nature of the effect.)

Read more »