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CMO/ISMO #36 (CMO #410)
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¤·····Subject:
Saturn
Received;
Saturn images (S130430)
Tomio@AKUTSU
(Cebu, the PHILIPPINES)
¤·····Subject:
Re: Saturn
Received;
Nice
work Dave.
I
observed visually an hour later than you and had fair seeing in which I could
see the EB, double
Regards
Richard McKIM (Peterborough ,@the UK)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn
Received;
30 April 2013 at 18:06 JST
Hi
Guys here is Saturn in IR one day after opposition and still showing opposition
ring brightening. Seeing was poor at an altitude of 27 degrees from UK.
The IR 742nm filter helped. Anti dispersion prisms were also used .
The
processed results of 9 avis over 16 minutes were stacked and derotated in
Winjupos.
Best
wishes
Dave TYLER (Bucks, the UK)
www.david-tyler.com
Ham call G4PIE
¤·····Subject:
cassini closeup of the north polar hexagon and central vortex
Received;
30 April 2013 at 14:24 JST
Some
stunning imagery from Cassini once again...
http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/191/The_Red_Rose_Of_Saturn
Ralph, I reckon Rebecca might be
interested in this... can you forward this on?
cheers, Bird
Anthony WESLEY@(NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject:
The Red Rose of Saturn....from Cassini
Received;
30 April 2013 at 02:14 JST
April
29, 2013
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
One of the most gorgeous sights we have been privileged to see at Saturn, as the
arrival of spring to the northern hemisphere has peeled away the darkness of
winter, has been the enormous swirling vortex capping its north pole and ringed
by Saturn's famed hexagonal jet stream.
Today,
the Cassini Imaging Team is proud to present to you a set of special views of
this phenomenal structure, including a carefully prepared movie showing its
circumpolar winds that clock at
See for yourself by going to ...
http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/191/The_Red_Rose_Of_Saturn
... and enjoy our ongoing journey
around Saturn.
(A news release that went out a moment ago is attached below).
Best,
Carolyn PORCO iBoulder, COj
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
http://ciclops.org
http://twitter.com/carolynporco
http://www.facebook.com/carolynporco
PS. To unsubscribe from this
list, go to the right hand column of the
CICLOPS home page ( http://ciclops.org
) and find and click
the[Unsubscribe] link
===================================
Nasa's Cassini Sees Large Saturn Hurricane Close Up
MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
CASSINI IMAGING CENTRAL LABORATORY FOR OPERATIONS (CICLOPS)
SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, BOULDER, COLORADO
http://ciclops.org
media@ciclops.org <mailto:media@ciclops.org>
Steve Mullins (720)974-5859
CICLOPS/Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
Jia-Rui C. Cook (818)354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Image Advisory: April 29, 2013
NASA PROBE GETS CLOSE-UP VIEWS OF LARGE HURRICANE ON SATURN
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up,
visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn's north
pole.
In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane's eye is
about
"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like
a hurricane on Earth," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team
member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But there
it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the
small amounts of water vapor in Saturn's hydrogen atmosphere."
Scientists will be studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on
Earth, which feed off warm ocean water. Although there is no body of water
close to these clouds high in Saturn's atmosphere, learning how these Saturnian
storms use water vapor could tell scientists more about how terrestrial
hurricanes are generated and sustained.
Both a terrestrial hurricane and Saturn's north polar vortex have a central eye
with no clouds or very low clouds. Other similar features include high clouds
forming an eye wall, other high clouds spiraling around the eye, and a
counter-clockwise spin in the northern hemisphere.
A major difference between the hurricanes is that the one on Saturn is much
bigger than its counterparts on Earth and spins surprisingly fast. At Saturn,
the wind in the eye wall blows more than four times faster than hurricane force
winds on Earth. Unlike terrestrial hurricanes, which tend to move, the
Saturnian hurricane is locked onto the planet's north pole. On Earth,
hurricanes tend to drift northward because of the forces acting on the fast
swirls of wind as the planet rotates. The one on Saturn does not drift and is
already as far north as it can be.
"The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that's likely why it's
stuck at the pole," said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate
at Hampton University in Hampton, Va.
Scientists believe the massive storm has been churning for years. When Cassini
arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, Saturn's north pole was
dark because the planet was in the middle of its north polar winter. During
that time, the Cassini spacecraft's composite infrared spectrometer and visual
and infrared mapping spectrometer detected a great vortex, but a visible-light
view had to wait for the passing of the equinox in August 2009. Only then did
sunlight begin flooding Saturn's northern hemisphere. The view required a
change in the angle of Cassini's orbits around Saturn so the spacecraft could
see the poles.
"Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the
north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with
orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn's equatorial
plane," said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "You cannot see the
polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from
different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the
entirety of the planet."
Cassini changes its orbital inclination for such an observing campaign only
once every few years. Because the spacecraft uses flybys of Saturn's moon Titan
to change the angle of its orbit, the inclined trajectories require attentive
oversight from navigators. The path requires careful planning years in advance
and sticking very precisely to the planned itinerary to ensure enough
propellant is available for the spacecraft to reach future planned orbits and
encounters.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the
Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the U.S.,
England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team leader (Dr.
C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Images and two versions of a movie of the hurricane can
be viewed online at: ciclops.org
<http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/191/The_Red_Rose_Of_Saturn>
and
http://go.nasa.gov/17tmHzo
For more information visit http://ciclops.org,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.
-end-
===================================
¤·····Subject:
Saturn
Received;
29 April 2013 at 22:30 JST
Saturn images
(S130428)
Tomio@AKUTSU
(Cebu, the PHILIPPINES)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn
Received;
28 April 2013 at 02:33 JST
Saturn images (S130426)
Tomio@AKUTSU
(Cebu, the PHILIPPINES)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn
Received;
25 April 2013 at 20:16 JST
Saturn images (S130423)
Tomio@AKUTSU
(Cebu, the PHILIPPINES)
¤·····Subject:
Solar images 20th,21st and 23rd-Apr-2013
Received;
25 April 2013 at 08:40 JST
Hi
Guys We have had a little taste of spring here in UK , Some dodgy solar seeing
though but great to get out.
Ar
1726 is very active and we have had a few pleasing proms. All images 90mm
Coronado S'Stk' REGI 4, 5 and 6 +Autostakkert .
Best wishes
Dave TYLER (Bucks, the UK)
www.david-tyler.com
Ham call G4PIE
¤·····Subject:
oliver stone from guardian
Received;
16 April 2013 at 02:53 JST
Oliver Stone has just
agreed to take part in the US version of Jamie's Dream School, the TV show that explored the interesting
notion that famous people might educate kids better than teachers. "It was
much criticised in Britain but I still think it's a good idea," says
Stone over coffee and bagels in a Soho hotel. He'll be the American equivalent
of Jamie's history teacher David Starkey.
Only, you'd suspect, more radical.
Stone's TV history class
might well be named US Heresies 101. "We're going to take these texts from
regular history and compare them to what we think happened." He will teach
that the bombing of Hiroshima was premised on a lie, that the CIA's secret war
against leftist Central American governments was based on chimerical communist
threat, that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were follies and, perhaps
most intolerable of all to patriots, that the United States of America
is just as self-serving, duplicitous, corrupt, oppressive, expansionist and
racist as – there's no easy way to say this – the British empire.
In the 1960s, Stone was
awarded a bronze star and a purple heart with oak leaf cluster for heroism in
Vietnam. If he survives lynching by adolescent reality-show neo-cons, he should
get another medal.
It will be the latest
improbable chapter in the life story of a man raised as an Eisenhower
Republican, who fought as a patriot in Vietnam and made his name in Hollywood
writing such splashy, amoral screenplays as Scarface for Al Pacino, before
becoming an Oscar-winning, Chávez-admiring Buddhist whom the Observer described
as "one of the few committed men of the left working in
mainstream American cinema". Today he tells me he is looking forward
to attending the Subversive film festival in Croatia. Of course he is.
One reason Stone has
mutated into concerned TV historian is because in 2011 the US federal government survey reported that only 12% of US high
school students knew their country's history. Why is that? "My theory is
history is boring because the horror stories are left out. What's left in is
the sanitised Disney version – a triumphalist narrative. We kind of always win.
And we're always right."
For the past five years,
the 66-year-old director has been working with historian Peter Kuznick
on the desanitised version, complete with horror stories. The result is a
10-hour TV series called The Untold History of the United States, and an allied 750-page
book. Stone and Kuznick want to confound the idea that the US fulfilled the
destiny expressed in 1630 by John Winthrop, English Puritan lawyer and one of
New England's founders, namely that America's destiny was to become a divinely
ordained "city on the hill" – a beacon for the rest of the world to
follow.
"I was brought up with
all that manifest destiny stuff when I was a kid," says Stone. "I was
sleepwalking until I was 40." What catalysed him to make this documentary history was
finding that the sanitised version of US history he had jettisoned was
still being taught to his children. "The reasons given for the atomic bomb
are, in my opinion, nefarious and disingenuous. But we bought it. Now my
17-year-old daughter goes to a school – a very good school – where they're
still told that in the textbooks: 'Japan would not have surrendered. The bomb
ended the war to save American lives.'"
Didn't President Harry S
Truman argue that the bombing of Hiroshima spared the lives of thousands of GIs
who would have otherwise died in an invasion of Japan in 1945? "That's
bullshit," snaps Stone. "And there's a very practical reason it's
bullshit – we couldn't have even mounted an invasion until November."
His and Kuznick's theory,
then, is that the atomic bombing of civilians was aimed, not at securing
Japanese surrender, but at shocking and awing Stalin. They believe that, had
Hiroshima and Nagasaki not been bombed in August 1945 by the US, something more
intolerable to both Japanese and American sensibilities would have happened –
namely that the Red Army, which by August had already swept through
Japanese-occupied Manchuria, would have invaded Japan. Stone imagines the
scenario from a Japanese perspective: "The Japanese are terrified. These
guys [ie Soviet troops] are beasts. They rape, they kill. They'd kill an
emperor without thinking about it. Look what they did in Germany."
As for Truman's US, the
threat of a rampant Soviet Union in the postwar Pacific rim was even more
chilling. So nuking Japan was aimed at impressing the Soviets. The bombs, for
Stone and Kuznick, didn't just kill thousands of innocents, but unleashed a
nuclear arms race and the cold war.
The
real reason for America dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
(above) was to impress Stalin, claims Stone. Photograph: EPA
For Stone, the US has, ever
since those two fateful days in August 1945, been in the malefic grip of the
military and hegemonic delusions. It has postured as extending democratic
ideals but rather has extended control across the globe by any means necessary,
including covert CIA support for death squads, drone attacks and
calamitous invasions.
"We were showing we're
as barbaric as we can be. As ruthless as the Russians could be in Germany, we
could be more ruthless. We had no problems dropping the atomic bomb on
civilians – a devastating war crime. If the Germans had dropped that bomb and
lost the war, that bomb would have been stigmatised for all time. There would
have been some international agreement to control it." But, Stone and
Kuznick argue, because the US used atomic bombs first and was dishonest about
why it did so, that international agreement didn't happen: instead, Stone grew
up under that threat of nuclear Armageddon.
This account,
unsurprisingly, has enraged some US historians. Writing in the New York
Review of Books, Sean Wilentz argued that Stone and Kuznick ignore scholarship that contradicts their assumptions. "It is
hardly clear, for example, that the Japanese government was close to
surrendering on the Allies' terms in the summer of 1945," writes Wilentz.
"American analysts believed that, short of a bloody invasion of its
shores, Japanese leaders would fight hard, holding out for a much milder
negotiated settlement, which negates Stone and Kuznick's contention that Truman
was misleading about his motive for using atomic bombs."
Arguably, though, Stone and
Kuznick's contention is less readily confuted. In his recent biography of
so-called father of the bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, Ray Monk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/nov/09/ray-monk-life-in-writing reports
that the only nuclear scientist to have resigned on principle from the
Manhattan Project, Joseph Rotblat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/sep/02/obituaries.obituaries, did so
when he realised that the atomic bomb was not to be used to defeat the Nazis
but to cow their ostensible allies. Rotblat overheard the military director of
the Manhattan Project, Lieutenant General Richard Groves, say at a wartime
dinner party: "You realise of course that the main purpose of this project
is to subdue the Russkies."
In any event, Stone and
Kuznick's more intriguing task is to do counterfactual history. Their American
history isn't untold, but rather a meditation on what could have – and, in
their view, should – have, happened. What if, they wonder, Truman had not
succeeded Franklin D Roosevelt as president in April 1945? What if, instead of
choosing Truman – whom the pair psychopathologise as having unresolved
"gender issues" and portray as weak, biddable and blustering
("To err is Truman," 1940s Republicans sneered) – as Roosevelt's
vice-presidential candidate in the 1944 presidential election, the Democratic
convention had once more chosen the now little-known Henry Wallace to be FDR's
running mate?
Their contention is that
if, after FDR died in April 1945, vice-president Wallace had succeeded,
postwar world history would have been very different. "The bomb would not
have been dropped with Wallace or Roosevelt as president, in my opinion,"
says Stone. "Not at all. Not a chance. They [the military] would have
opposed Wallace, given him a hard time, but you can't force a president to drop
a bomb. You just can't."
Given that Stone and Kuznick's
revisionist American history starts from the idea that Truman lowered the US's
moral threshold and many of his successors continued that descent, this is
no small issue. The drama of that 1944 Democratic convention is one that
Stone and Kuznick wrote as a Hitchcockian thriller in the late 1990s before
deciding to make it, a decade later, the linchpin of their documentary.
"Bush wasn't an aberration," says Stone of the two-term Republican
president whom he savaged in his 2008
biopic W, "Bush is the climax to an American mindset that had started
with Truman and accelerated after world war two."
Stone
won military awards for his time as a soldier in Vietnam. He thinks Kennedy
would not have committed US troops in south-east Asia. Photograph: Alfred
Batungbacal/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
He portrays Wallace as the
man who could have spared the US its postwar debacles – the cold war, Vietnam,
the "war on terror" – had he managed to get that vice-presidential
nomination in 1944. Wallace was, in short, the good father snatched away when
America needed him most.
It's hard not to think that
Stone has told this story before. In his 1991 film JFK, he depicted President Kennedy as a
peace-loving liberal taken from America by a murderous conservative conspiracy
covered up by the Warren Commission. He and Kuznick write: "We do know that
Kennedy had many enemies who deplored progressive change just as fervently as
those who had blocked Henry Wallace in 1944 when he was trying to lead the
United States and the world down a similar path to peace and prosperity."
For them, Kennedy died resisting the forces that wanted to push him into war
with the Soviet Union.
If you wanted to
psychoanalyse Stone as he and Kuznick do Truman, you might well focus on
his close relationship with his father and the traumatising impact of his
parents' abrupt divorce when their only child was away at school in 1962. His
father Louis, a stockbroker and non-practising Jew, had been married to
Jacqueline, a Frenchwoman and non-practising Catholic. They divorced in
the year that Kennedy faced down the Soviet threat over the Cuban missile
crisis. The following year, JFK was killed in Dealey Plaza, becoming the lost
father to a grieving nation.
For Stone, Kennedy was the
guy who could have spared the US the debacle of Vietnam and ended the cold war.
"It was just inconceivable that Kennedy would have said yes to ground
troops in Vietnam. He'd said no to the military on Laos. He'd said no at the
Bay of Pigs on air support. And no at the Cuban missile crisis – that's the
greatest single act of human courage this world has ever witnessed with
that much at stake."
John F Kennedy campaigning in 1960: 'Saying no
at the Cuban missile crisis was the single greatest act of human courage this
world has witnessed.' Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
You could fit most of
Stone's cinema into this Oedipal frame. His 1986 Vietnam movie Platoon explored his
Vietnam war experiences, with Charlie Sheen's rookie grunt confronting two
war-seasoned father figures, the good sergeant (Willem Dafoe) and the bad
sergeant (Tom Berenger). In Wall
Street, Charlie Sheen's ingenue trader is mentored by Michael Douglas's
venal Gordon Gekko. Stone's 1995 Nixon biopic, starring Anthony Hopkins, could be taken as
manichean flipside to JFK – the bad father undone at Watergate as the good father
was slain in Dallas. The Untold History of the US is, perhaps, also worth an
Oedipal reading – it's the latest rebellion against the conservative politics
his dad installed in him.
"I was born a
conservative," he says. "My father raised me Eisenhower Republican. I
was very much fearful of the communist conspiracy to take over the world."
That fear led him to fight in Vietnam. "I was a patriot. I really
believed it." Didn't Vietnam radicalise you? "No. I came out of
Vietnam bloodied but not really understanding the geopolitical realities.
"I wrote the
screenplay for Born
on the Fourth of July [his adaptation of the autobiography of
disillusioned Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, which Stone eventually filmed in 1989
starring Tom Cruise] in 1976. Ron was shot, castrated, in a wheelchair. He was
radicalised by Vietnam, but I wasn't."
It was witnessing what the
US did covertly in Central America during the 80s that did the job. "The
scales dropped from my eyes when I saw the American presence throughout
Guatemala. We trained and funded the death squads of Guatemala, the elite
troops who did a lot of the massacring. I saw what we did in El Salvador,
Honduras and Nicaragua too. The ultimate goal was to stop the communists
taking control of the region – breaching the Rio Grande, as Reagan said.
"I thought at the
time, looking around: 'This is Vietnam redux.' I may be stupid, but it took me about
15 years to get it. I saw that America was this bully and I hated it. From then
on, I made progressive films."
The first of those was Salvador
(1986) about a cynical hack (James Woods) politically awakened by witnessing
the military coup in El Salvador propelled by US-backed death squads. His
subsequent career, right up to The Untold History of the United States, amounts
to a retrospective critique of what he believed about the US until he was
40.
Hugo
Chávez and Oliver Stone at the 2009 Venice film festival. Photograph: Pascal Le
Segretain/Getty Images
Stone's version of American
history ends on a hopeful note. How can you? "Well, Chávez was smiling as
he was dying of horrible cancer because he kept on believing in something
greater than himself. And I think we all do – those who care about the human
race."
He takes succour from the
Occupy movement and from Hillary Clinton being replaced as secretary of state. "I can't
stand her!" he says. "She's been a hawk for years. She was
against the Contras. She voted for the Iraq war. She urged Obama to send in
more troops to Afghanistan. She's always taken the 'America is
indispensable' routine and, most recently, she wrote an article for Foreign Affairs. She spoke of the 21st century as America's
Pacific century, arguing that China can and should be contained. She's like
those idiots on Fox News who make an enemy of China by presenting them as a
threat. Who's the threat? We have 800 to 1,000 foreign bases; they have
one."
Not that Stone lets the
current US president off the hook. "Meanwhile, we have Obama spending
$12bn over two years selling arms to Taiwan. We're putting arms into
Vietnam and Australia. Ach," he says exasperatedly, "here we go
again."
Stone is certainly more
compelling as Cassandra than Pollyanna. He suggests the Pentagon is obsessed
with "full-spectrum dominance". "It means we control air, land,
sea, space and cyberspace. That's the plan. We've already attacked Iran with
Israel with cybertools. Now we're truly seeking control of space. They're talking
about drones
For Stone, these are
delusions akin to Reagan's thwarted Star Wars dreams of the 1980s. He and Kuznick
approvingly quote ex-Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev: "Everyone is used
to America as the shepherd that tells everyone what to do. But this period has
already ended." Not so much city on the hill, as city over the hill.
Nobody seems to have told
the US, yet. Stone is upbeat: "In 15, 20 years, some young person is going
to see The Untold History of the United States and it will maybe inspire the
person who's going to lead the next generation. There's always hope."
Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States starts on Sky Atlantic HD
on Friday 19 April at 9pm.
Bill SHEEHAN (Willmar,
MN)
¤·····Subject:
RE:
Received;
16 April 2013 at 00:03 JST
Dear
Masatsugu,
Thanks for your interesting e-mail. I haven't seen the
Oliver Stone, but the ideas presented certainly sound reasonable. My
understanding is that Truman dropped the atomic bombs really not to speed the
end of the war, as was claimed at the time, but to demonstrate US power to the
Soviets, who were the new threat in the US "bipolar" view of the
world (and of course the British were swept underfoot at Yalta; the body
language of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill is very revealing--Churchill has
his bowler hat covering his privates).
I gave a talk on aspects of visual observing to a group including
many physicians--and two ophthalmologists from the Mayo Clinic were on the same
program, as well as a retired hematologist. It was very interesting and I
learned a great deal. I would consider it a successful venture. I
also spent some time (en route) at Carleton College--the alma mater of
Thorstein Veblen, most famously, but also E. A. Fath. I was looking
through Fath's papers, etc.
Glad to see that Reiichi is writing essays for the next two issues,
followed by Christophe. By the time those are through I may have caught
my breath and will be able to do something on Pickering. I will have
little spare time until June 1.
Bill
---------------------------------------------------------------------
>-----Original
Message-----
>From: Masatsugu MINAMI
>Sent:
Monday, April 15, 2013 12:52 AM@i+09:00j
>To: Sheehan, William P (DHS); Bill and Debb Sheehan
>Subject: Re: pickering
>
>Dear Bill,
>
>How are you getting well? I don't well remember, but I think I have
not heard yet about your recent travel to Rochester.
>
>This is just to inform that we had an occasion to watch a TV programme
broadcasted by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (so-called NHK). Its original
title is the Untold History of the US, told by William Oliver Stone (we of
course were watching the translated scenarios). It is composed of ten
subtitles, and as an April part just four out of ten were casted last week. The
remainder will be shown in May and June. Every issue in April sounded quite
interesting.
>
>Oliver Stone's treatment of Henry A Wallace looks quite outstanding. Oliver
Stone says if, instead of Harry S Truman, Henry Wallace happened to have been
elected as the succeeded President of Franklin Roosevelt, the atomic weapons
could have never been used under the excuse of ending WWII. It seems to be
believed still by almost all Americans that the atomic bombs against Japan led
to a speedy end of the war. But this is false as Oliver Stone insists because
Japan had been just about to surrender (just a trivial matter remained was
concerning the future position of the Emperor).
>
>At that time already even such a small city like Fukui had been air raided.
I was just around six or seven years old, but at the bombing night fleeted with
mother and grandmother to the direction of Mikuni avoiding the indiscriminate
bombing.@Wikipedia says it occurred on 19
July 1945 at 23:24 until 00:45 JST, with 127 numbers of B29 which flew from
Tinian. A total of 84.9% of the City were destroyed and 1576 were dead, and
6527 wounded (later, 108 died further). More than 20 thousand houses at Fukui
burnt down including our house. Of course these minor cases were not narrated
in Oliver Stone's scenario, but he mentioned the case of the more tragic
bombing of Tokyo: Tokyo was attacked several times already, but the one on 10
March 1945 was the heaviest. Total of 279 B29s out of the prepared 325 flew up
inside the area of Tokyo city and made a long term indiscriminate bombing with
381,300 bombs, and more than 100,000 Tokyo civilians were dead or missing on
the night. These attacks were ordered by Curtis LeMay. These indiscriminate
bombings opened the way of the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Stone looks to have talked nicely about the A-bomb problem.
>
>Oliver Stone says it is generally believed in the US that WWII was ended by
the effort of the US, but he mentioned that the defence sacrifice paid by the
USSR cost very high on the occasion of the German invasion to the area of
Moscow, while USSR's counterattack made the German troops too weak to rise up
again, and Stone believes this is the main cause Hitler finally gave up and
killed himself (and Eva Brown).
>
>As to the cold war also, Oliver Stone blames the behaviour of Truman, and
suggests if Wallace was elected again as the vice-President of Roosevelt, the
situation afterward must have been quite different. Americans brought about the
tragedy to Americans by themselves.
>
>During the era of the cold war, Robert Oppenheimer already was against the
H-bombs. But I think there were a lot of fanatic scientists who were no more
than mere technical experts without any philosophical thoughts.
>
>I thought when watching it was quite appropriate for the little Bush to
appear several times on the screen as an apparition of Truman.
>
>At the severe cold war times, I spent my life mainly at Kyoto. When the new
Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the US and Japan was signed
in 1960, I took part in the demonstration parade in Kyoto against the treaty.
>
>As you know, I was born at Fukui in 1939. After the bombing affair, we
evacuated to Mikuni for a while, but after the war we came back to Fukui to
live there again. In 1952, as a memorial or symbolic building of the
reconstruction of the ruined city, the Fukui City Museum of Natural History was
established with an astronomical dome, the place you once visited and watched
the planet Jupiter in 2004. This dome is also the place I first observed Mars
in 1954 (maybe first watched it in 1952) when I was 15 years old. At the age of
18, I went to Kyoto to enter the University, and officially stayed there as an
undergraduate and graduate student for 9 years, and readily worked there from
the age of 27 at a Mathematical Institute, and retired at 63 of age in 2002.
Before retirement I of course frequently went back to Fukui to watch the planet
Mars. I also used an
>
>Around 1980~1990, we had a group working in the University for the
anti-nuclear movement (we said gnon-nuclearh). We for example learned about the
nuclear winter. When the Chernobyl disaster occurred, I was in Taipei to
observe Mars in 1986, and hence I donft know the movements in Kyoto and the
University, though about the disaster news I heard from a Hong-Kong radio's
English broadcast. In Taiwan the students of the National Taiwan University
surrounded the main building of the Taiwan Electric because it had some nuclear
power plants. I donft well remember but I think I heard about the Reykjav?k
meetings. I remember the signing of the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces)
Treaty was talked about in Kyoto. Mikhail Gorbachev after Perestroika was liked
by us.
>
>I look forward further to the Oliver Stone's TV Programme in May.
>
>I should now set out to edit CMO/ISMO #409. Reiichi wishes to write the
opening essays in #409 and #410. I also expect to hear from Christophe.
>I sincerely hope you will prepare some essay about Pickering.
>
>With best wishes,
>
>Masatsugu
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill SHEEHAN (Willmar,
MN)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn,
Received;
13 April 2013 at 13:24 JST
Here's
an image of Saturn from this morning in reasonable seeing.
I've experimented with merging multiple images in WinJupos using the
derotation, this result is quite good but you can still see a few artifacts
around, especially in the rings, where the merging and derotation doesn't work
quite correctly.
Overall it works quite well, and has brought up some nice detail.
regards, Anthony
Link:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130412-152335/large.jpg
Anthony
WESLEY (NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn,
Received;
12 April 2013 at 01:12 JST
Hi
all, here is a red-channel image of Saturn from this morning, showing the dark
vortex in the north as well as some of the lighter storms at the same latitude
and the polar hex. Seeing was not great, lots of smoke and haze around.
cheers, Anthony
Link:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130411-145819/large.jpg
Anthony
WESLEY (NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn,
Received;
11 April 2013 at 16:12 JST
Hi
all, there were periods of good seeing this morning, coinciding with a view of
the ongoing dark vortex in Saturns northern hemisphere.
Here are some images, and a 2-frame animation.
Links:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130410-161325/large.jpg
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130410-174938/large.jpg
Animation:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130410-174938/saturn-20130410-1732-1750.gif
regards, Anthony
Anthony
WESLEY (NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject:
Re: Solar Images March 30th-31st& 2nd April 2013
Received; 10 April 2013 at 17:15 JST
March
30th North limb proms sketch
http://www.deirdrekelleghan.net/blog.html
Deirdre KELLEGHAN (IRELAND)
http://deirdrekelleghan.net
http://twitter.com/skysketcher
¤·····Subject:
Saturn
Received;
9 April 2013 at 16:28 JST
Hi all,
Had some reasonable seeing this morning on Saturn, here is an RGB image and a
2-frame animation in luminance to highlight the various bright storms that are
visible.
RGB
Link:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130408-161936/large.jpg
Luminance animation:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130408-161936/1559-1618-rgb.gif
There is a 0.5 pixel offset
between the two frames in the animation that I can't get rid of, hopefully not
too distracting :-) These images were captured with a new camera I'm testing,
an ASI-120MM-C. It has a type 1/3 cmos sensor, 3.75 micron pixel size. It seems
to have more sensitivity and less noise than my old ccd-based camera. It looks
like cmos sensors have finally caught up to ccd.
regards,
Anthony
Anthony
WESLEY (NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn 7th April 2013
Received; 8 April 2013 at 14:08 JST
Hi
all, thanks to the slightly longer day on Saturn I was able to image the black
spot again last night, although it was well past the CM it still shows up to
the right in this image. It's being trailed by a white spot at approximately
the same latitude, the white spot is close to the CM in this image.
Link:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130407-154328/large.jpg
regards, Anthony
Anthony
WESLEY (NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject:
Re: Solar Images March 30th-31st& 2nd April 2013
Received;
8 April 2013 at 00:01 JST
Hi Dave and Dave, stunning images.
I filmed the large prominence for over 4 hours [11:08
to 15:30UT] on 1 April but also took a tour of the full disc to make a mosaic
from 73 of 100 separate images between 13:40 and 14:12UT for this my second
attempt at a solar mosaic. I was returning to the prominence every sixth minute
to keep that sequence going. The image is about 1m in diameter and quite a
large file. Seeing was mainly an average grade 3 to a poor grade 4.
I hope that you like it in total about 25 hours work in
just this one picture.
Regards
Andy DEVEY (SPAIN)
http://www.thesolarexplorer.net/
¤·····Subject: Saturn, 6th April 2013
Received;
7 April 2013 at 13:15 JST
Hi all, here is an image of Saturn in red light from
this morning, in fairly poor seeing. We'd had some large storms come through earlier
in the night complete with hail and lightning, thankfully it cleared up just
after midnight for a few hours.
The dark spot is faintly visible to the left and north
in this image, the attached 2-frame animation makes it much easier to see.
There is also a bright spot preceding it that appears to be embedded in the
light band immediately to the north of the dark spot. There are several light
spots visible across the disk at approximately this latitude.
Link:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130406-164037/large.jpg
Animation:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130406-164037/1639-1651-red.gif
regards, Anthony
Anthony
WESLEY (NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject:
Re: Solar Images March 30th-31st& 2nd April 2013
Received;
7 April 2013 at 09:34 JST
V nice Dave, after a loooong break I'm back imaging
again heres some from the last couple a days
http://www.davegradwell.com/imageslatest.html
Dave GRADWELL (IRELAND)
¤·····Subject:
Solar Images March 30th-31st&
Received;
6 April 2013 at 21:42 JST
Hi Guys here are a few blue sky grabs of what was
going on in H alpha as we hit spring. Poor seeing of course, but some
reasonable prominences.
Best wishes
Dave TYLER (Bucks, the UK)
www.david-tyler.com
Ham call G4PIE
¤·····Subject:
Saturn, 3rd April
Received;
5 April 2013 at 09:15 JST
Hi all,
Here's an IR image of Saturn from yesterday morning in poor seeing, not much
can be seen on the disk - which is interesting as the dark spot should be
easily visible. It appears to have faded somewhat if this image is correct, but
validation is needed in better seeing to really understand what's happening.
The spot can still be seen faintly to the right of centre, at latitude approx
+45 (just below the narrow light band). It was much more
prominent in earlier images.
Link:
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/saturn/20130403-162307/large.jpg
regards, Anthony
Anthony
WESLEY (NSW, Australia)
¤·····Subject: Jupiter 1.04.13
Received;
3 April 2013 at 05:47 JST
Hi All,
An image from yesterday. A start was made just before dusk,
the seeing for a while was fair.
Cold and and blustery otherwise!
All the best
Simon KIDD (Welwyn the UK)
¤·····Subject:
Saturn March 31
Received;
1 April 2013 at 05:04 JST
The seeing looked steady visually last night, but
on-screen it was rippling very fast at a small scale (not surprising for 27º
altitude). Three sequences of RGB were captured, and all combined for a 14
minute run, interspersed with I captures. This is the first image I have
produced using the PierroAstro dispersion corrector in the imaging train.
There's no evidence of any spots, though Encke is
faintly apparent.
Also published here.
David ARDITTI (Middlesex, the UK)
http://www.staglaneobservatory.co.uk
HA8 5LW