Blazing new comet may OUTSHINE THE MOON in 2013 Astroboffins have spotted a new comet that's scheduled to make its earthly appearance in November 2013, blazing through the night skies with a brightness that could well outshine the full Moon. According to the UK's Astronomy Now, the prosaically named comet C/2012 S1 was discovered last Friday by astronomers Vitali Nevski and …
Like any empire they called in the consultants to advise on best practices. Having precipitated the Great Collapse (downsizing went a little too far) the arduous business of date calculation was outsourced, and this off-by-one error arose from a poor translation of the original ISO9001-compliant astrology. The k’uhul ajaw apologises for any inconvience that the delayed end of the world may cause for you
Simple, when the archeologists were transcribing the calendrical numbers they didn't convert the negative values correctly. It was part of the "old forgotten knowledge"...
(I watched and laughed when Uggh University got done with porting the Cobol accounting code and converting the old data tapes and started seeing parallel run figures off by mere pennies on the new computer systems. Much finger-pointing back and forth until bright students (sidelined early as inexperienced and unuseful) asked if they were converting from the old system's ones-complement integers to the new system's twos-complement numbers. How no one higher-up had noticed in the RFC's and granting of new contracts that the number system had changed... was no mystery to those 'sidelined'. So... cut-over delayed some number of months, though not quite a year... Then the real disaster ensued...)
It's not really a happy read. After the meteor and and the tidal waves, you have to watch out for the cannibal fundamentalist gangbangers.
(Jerry Pournelle disliked both tele-evangelists and Black Panthers, so in the novel, he decided to ally them together as the adversaries of the good guys. And because there was a shortage of food in the novel, he added long pig as a sacrament for the new "religion".)
Article says Nov. 28 2013. That's Thanksgiving Day here, so if it turns out as bright as all that I'm sure it'll be known as the Thanksgiving Day Comet in the US.
I'm not getting my hopes up, as I'm just old enough to remember being a little kid when Kohoutek came by and being bitterly disappointed when the hype turned out to be just that.
Or has anyone else noticed that lunar craters tend to be perfectly hemispherical?
Wellll-llll... yes, and no. It depends on the angle of attack of the incoming impactors. Ones that come more or less straight in produce round, hemispherical craters, but then, if you look at enough detailed fotos of the Moon, you can see oblong gouge-shaped impacts from where objects sort of augured in at a more shallow angle.
Next time you're out after a heavy rainfall, find a thick mud puddle and flip some stones into it, to get an idea.
Why are we ranting about Pluto when it's NEPTUNE that is NOT A FUCKING PLANET ACCORDING TO THE NEW RULES. Yep that's right: Neptune hasn't cleared its orbit of other stuff because Pluto's orbit is still crossing Neptune's orbit, therefore Neptune cannot be a planet. It doesn't matter about the 3:2 resonance preventing collision: the orbits do cross which means the orbits have not been cleared. Those stupid cretins at IAU really bollocksed that one up, didn't they! Fuckwits.
Predicting the "spectacular-lessness" of comets, meteor showers, eclipses, transits (of the non-Ford variety) and planetary conjunctions is prone to hype. Not so much because of what the astronomers, in their enthusiasm, say but in the way the inexperienced media go completely doolally when they have something extra-terrestrial to report.
So yes, hopefully this comet will be bright. Hopefully if won't be obscured by clouds for months on end. Hopefully it won't be washed out by the full moon or by being too close to the sun in the sky. However, for the vast majority of people even the moon at its brightest has to compete with thousands of streetlights - all pouring wasted light into our skies and turning what should be a spectacular night-time view into a dull orange glow.
Luckily the Normans, in their conquest, didn't have to worry about such things or their tapestry wouldn't have featured a comet at all.
First, the Earth has broke in half and now a comet is coming! 8-()
orbit suggests an ancestral connection to Great Comet of 1860 ITIRC, so it may have been toasted in far past.
It is the ones in polar orbits around Sun that might be potentially disastrous. Biggest crater on Vesta, Moon and Mars is where ? South poles.
It is speculated that around 2040 there will be another group of sun diving comets to entertain the grandkids, so you young whippersnappers have something to look forward to.
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