Month: August 2024

Space News Special Edition: Starliner’s Continuing Problems. Can Boeing’s Manned Capsule be saved or will Space X have to Rescue the two Starliner Astronauts from The International Space Station (ISS)? 

NASA has made their decision, the Boeing Starliner capsule will return unmanned from the International Space Station (ISS) sometime in early September, the scheduled date is currently 6 September. The two Boeing astronauts who traveled to the ISS aboard Starliner Back in June, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will remain on the ISS and return to Earth with the astronauts of the Space X Crew 9 mission in February of 2025. That mission had been originally scheduled to go to the ISS in late August but the mission’s launch date has been pushed back to late September because of the problems with Starliner.

On the 24th of August the Big Brass at NASA announced that the Boeing Starliner Astronauts would be brought back to Earth aboard a Space X Dragon Capsule. This makes Starliner’s Orbital Flight Test a definite failure! (Credit: NASA)

Additionally, the Crew 9 mission was originally supposed to carry four astronauts to the ISS, NASA’s preferred compliment for the Space X Dragon capsule, but will now only carry two astronauts when it launches in September. That change to the Crew 9’s mission is so that it can return in February with Wilmore and Williams. This means that the original eight-day stay of Williams and Wilmore at the ISS will now last about eight months.

In order to bring back the Starliner crew the Space X Crew 9 Mission will only carry two astronauts to the ISS instead of the planned four shown here. Mission commander Zena Cardman on the right and Pilot Nick Hague next to Cardman will probably still go while Russian Cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and Mission specialist Stephanie Wilson will remain on Earth pending another mission. (Credit: NASA)

As the NASA administrator in charge of the Commercial Crew Program Steve Stich explained it. There was simply too much uncertainty in the way that the thrusters aboard Starliner worked to allow them to risk the capsule’s returning with its crew aboard. This is a painful setback for Boeing and its efforts to get into the business of commercial manned space travel.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the decision but it was a unanimous choice by the NASA Team. (Credit: Internet Archive)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When NASA initiated its Commercial Crew Program in 2011 to replace the Space Shuttle the space agency expected Boeing, with all of its aerospace experience to be the prime contractor for manned missions to and from the International Space Station (ISS). It was thought that the newer space startups like Space X, Sierra Nevada and Blue Origin would act as back ups to Boeing.

This is the way everyone thought NASA’s Commercial Crew Program would go, Boeing’s Starliner riding into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket. Boeing was expected to take the lead in sending astronauts to the ISS. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

Boeing’s design for their Starliner capsule was also the most conservative of the four competitors; it even somewhat resembled the old Apollo Command Module from NASA’s glory days. The designs proposed by the other potential contractors were thought to be more innovative.

The Apollo Command Module from NASA’s glory days. NASA had a lot of experience with capsules so when the decision was made on which designs would fulfill the CCP requirement they went with the two capsules. (Credit: SketchFab)

Sierra Nevada proposed their Dreamchaser space plane while Blue Origin’s unusual design was christened the ‘Biconic Nose Cone’. In the end it was the two traditional designs that received NASA’s full funding. Boeing’s Starliner got $4.2 billion while Space X’s Dragon capsule; an upgrade of their unmanned cargo carrying Dragon got $2.6 billion.

Looking like a miniature Space Shuttle Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser will undergo its first, unmanned test flight hopefully this year! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Blue Origin’s Capsule may look like an ordinary space capsule but it returns to Earth sideways like a shuttle, its heat shield is on its side! (Credit: Spaceref)

The original schedule of the program called for the first test flights of the two capsules to begin in 2017 with regular transfer missions to begin the following year but a series of problems caused both Boeing and Space X to announce delays. These delays required NASA to purchase an additional five seats aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft in order to maintain an American presence aboard the ISS.

Russia’s Soyuz capsule has been flying now since 1967. (Credit: NASA)

Finally in May of 2020 Space X’s Dragon capsule carried out its manned Orbital Test Flight (OTF) taking two astronauts to the ISS in the first manned mission to launch from American soil since 2011. Just a few months later Space X conducted the program’s first regular crew transfer mission to the ISS, the Crew 1 mission. Since that time Space X has carried out another seven successful crew transfer missions along with five purely commercial space missions, the Inspiration 4 mission, see my post of 2 Oct 2021 and the Axios-1 through 4 missions to the ISS, see my post of 17 June 2023. Going forward Space X appears ready to take however many astronauts NASA needs in Low Earth Orbit while at the same time grow the emerging market of private manned space missions.

In the First manned launch of a commercial space mission Space X Dragon capsule delivered two NASA Astronauts to the ISS. (Credit: NASA)

The same cannot be said of Boeing, which has had to deal with a long, and still growing list of technical issues. Those problems include some of the capsule’s most vital systems including the vehicle’s thrusters and parachutes along with numerous software glitches. Boeing’s difficulties became public in December of 2019 as Starliner failed to pass both its Pad Abort Test and its unmanned OFT. The results of these tests required further redesign of the capsule, and further delays including NASA’s insistence on a second unmanned OFT.

As every Engineer knows it’s Redesign, Redesign, Redesign… (Credit: My Code Club Journal)

That second OFT was finally conducted in May 0f 2022 as the Starliner capsule did manage to dock with the ISS, despite further problems with three of its thrusters. The manned OFT was then scheduled for early 2023 but yet again more problems led to more delays. It wasn’t until June 5th of this year that NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams sailed into orbit and docked at the ISS aboard a Starliner capsule. But again there were problems with helium leaks and thruster issues so that Wilmore and Williams were forced to manually dock with the station rather than allowing Starliner’s computer to control the docking process.

While I’m certain that Butch and Suni are happy to remain on the ISS having an eight day mission turn into an eight month one really screws up any personal plans you might have! (Credit: CNN)

According to the mission plan Starliner was only supposed to remain docked at the ISS for eight days before returning to Earth but NASA wanted to conduct further tests on the thrusters while the capsule was in orbit so, little by little, the eight days grew to more than eight weeks and rumours began that Williams and Wilmore were stranded in space. What made the whole situation worse was that, with Starliner still docked at the ISS there was no docking port available for the next Space X routine crew transfer mission. This is what caused the Crew-9 mission to be delayed from its original August 25th launch date to sometime in late September.

So long as Starliner is docked at the ISS there isn’t room for the Space X Crew 9 Mission to dock. So Crew 9 had to be delayed until late September while NASA figured out what to do with Starliner. (Credit: CBS News)

So NASA had a dilemma, did the space agency have enough confidence in Starliner to try to bring Wilmore and Williams back home aboard it, or have Starliner come home unmanned and have the astronauts remain on the ISS and come home with the Crew-9 mission in February of next year!

So the Starliner crew will have to wait until February to return to Earth aboard the Crew 9 Dragon capsule, splashing down off the coast of Florida like the Crew 4 mission shown here. (Credit: NASA)

In the end the space agency decided to take the safer course and bring the astronauts home in February aboard a Space X Dragon capsule. The question now becomes, will Starliner ever fly again let alone begin regular transfers of astronauts to Low Earth Orbit (LOE). Assuming the unmanned capsule returns intact from the ISS Boeing will have an enormous amount of investigative work to do determining the causes of the thruster issues. That effort will then have to be followed by a considerable resign of the capsule.

If Starliner makes a successful landing, like the unmanned OFT capsule did here, then Boeing will have to do a complete examination to determine what went wrong with the thrusters. (Credit: Geekwire)

Those efforts could take years and only after further ground testing is completed will NASA even consider launching Starliner again. At that point NASA will have to decide if Boeing will have to perform another unmanned OFT before another manned OFT before finally certifying Starliner. With all of the delays and problems Starliner has had so far the question becomes, will the ISS still be in orbit by the time Starliner is finally ready to begin service to it?

Three News Items from the Natural World around Us. 

Communing with Nature is a passion for many people. Just getting out of doors and observing the plants and animals that inhabit the wild areas of our world can be an endlessly fascinating pastime. Those people who are lucky enough to study nature as their profession are obviously called naturalists and they have many interesting stories to tell, here are three of them. I’ll start with the biggest, creature that is, and work my way down in size.

Ah, enjoying nature. What could be better than having a career that allows us to observe and understand the world around us! (Credit: Westend61)

Everyone has heard the old saying that “an elephant never forgets”. For thousands of years or longer we humans have recognized that elephants are among the smartest of animals and over the last few decades evidence that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror or the ability of elephants to remember the directions to waterholes they haven’t been to for years has proven their mental abilities.

Good advice from one intelligent species to another. (Credit: Flickr)

Now a new study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution that suggests that elephants might have individual names for each other in the deep rumblings that they use to communicate. There are already a few other species that are recognized as having and using personal names for each other, Bottlenosed Dolphins and Orange Fronted Parakeets are two examples. Unlike humans however, who are given our names at birth, individual Dolphins and Parakeets create their own signature call that their friends and family then use to identify them. These animals pick their own name in other words.

Yes, it appears that Elephants have individual calls that they associate with certain individuals and use those calls when they want to get the attention of those individuals. They each have their own name! (Credit: Bored Panda)

In order to determine whether or not elephants also have personal names researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York recorded 469 calls from wild female African savanna elephants and their offspring. The team then used an AI to analyze the contents of the calls. After processing the calls the AI was able to identify which elephant was being spoken to in each call more than 25% of the time.

Some of the audio data accumulated by the researchers as they studied the calls of African Elephants. (Credit: Nature)

In order to demonstrate that their analysis was correct the researchers then replayed some of the recorded calls to a group of 17 elephants. When the ‘name’ of a particular animal was played that elephant was observed to become more vocal itself and moved toward the speaker that had sounded its name.

African Elephants now join a growing list of different species of animals that are known to have personal names from individuals. (Credit: The Atlantic)

The fact that elephants actually call each other by individual, personal names shouldn’t really surprise anyone. We’ve always known that elephants have complex social lives and of course good memories. The Cornell study is really just another example of how intelligent other species of animals can be.

The evolutionary linage of elephants. Right now some scientists are trying to bring the extinct Mammoths back to life. If they succeed it will be interesting to see if they are as intelligent as their African kin? (Credit: Britannica)

Another way that animals can demonstrate their intelligence is through tool use. Certainly one of the biggest moments in science during the 20th Century was when Jane Goodall saw a chimpanzee take a twig, licked it and then stuck it into a termite mound. When the chimp pulled the twig back out it was covered with termites that the animal then consumed. The chimpanzee was using a tool to obtain protein rich food to eat.

When Jane Goodall first observed Chimpanzees using twigs to ‘fish’ for termites it was proof that our closest relative used tools. (Credit: Britannica)

Since that time many other species have been observed to use tools. For example sea otters along the Pacific coast will bring up a clam or oyster from the sea floor to eat. Swimming on their backs with the shellfish on their stomach the otter will then bang a sharp rock on the clam in order to break the shell open so they can eat the mollusk inside.

A sea otter banging a mussel shell against a rock in order to open it! Another species of animal that uses tools. (Credit: Phys.org)

The advantages of using the rock as a tool are pretty obvious but a new study by Naturalists at the University of Texas at Austin and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California examined tool use among sea otters more closely to determine if there were any other benefits as well. What the researchers did was to observe the feeding techniques of 196 radio tagged sea otters off of the California coast. In an effort to gather as much data as possible the scientists also enlisted the aid of volunteer ‘otter spotters’ who were able to keep track of individual otters thanks to the radio tags.

Here’s someone who’s really into observing sea otters. Naturalists often make good use of volunteers like this to gather data about how animals in the wild live. (Credit: USGS.gov)

What the researchers found was that female otters tended to make use of rocks as tools more often than males did, perhaps to compensate for their smaller size and reduced biting strength. The tendency of females to make greater use of tools is also known from other tool using species such as dolphins and chimpanzees, and perhaps for the same reason. The naturalists also suggest that, since it is the females that raise the young in all those species, it may be that tool use is passed down though the generations by females.

Like humans, much of what a baby sea otters learns comes from its mother! (Credit: YouTube)

One other unexpected but not surprising outcome discovered by the study was a considerable reduction in tooth damage to those otters that used the rocks as tools. As you can imagine major tooth damage can be a death sentence to any animal so the fact that tool use reduces the chances of tooth damage is another great advantage to any species.

Trying to open clam shells with your teeth not only requires a lot more effort but also can result in damage to the otter’s teeth. That’s the advantage of tool use! (Credit: Futurity)

My last story from nature does not concern a single species of animal but rather a huge group of animals spread across several phyla. I’m talking about animals that fly, along with many that swim and how fast they all beat their wings / fins in order to fly / swim. A large scale analysis of hundreds of such species by researchers at the Department of Science and Environment at the University of Roskilde in Roskilde in Denmark has led to a simple equation that predicts the frequency that a flying animal has to beat its wings based only upon the animals mass and the area of its wings. This single equation was found to be accurate for hundreds of species of insect, birds and bats and also for the fins of penguins along with several species of whale.

We all know that bird’s flap their wings in order to fly but how often they flap depends on several factors. (Credit: Wired)

According to the study the frequency of wing beat is proportional to the square root of the animal’s mass divided by the area of the animal’s wings.

The basic equation for the frequency that birds, insects, bats and even whales have to flap their wings or flippers in order to fly or swim. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

After checking the accuracy of their equation against the wing beat frequency of several species that had not been used in deriving it the researchers then used it to predict the frequency of wing beats for the extinct pterosaur species Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the largest known flying animal ever. According to the equation Q northropi would have had to beat its ten square-meter wings seven times every ten seconds in order to be able to fly.

Some of the data collected to verify their equation for wing beat frequency. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

Whether they are studying a single species or discovering a general rule that helps to understand hundreds of different species naturalists are lucky in that they get to study the endlessly fascinating world of life on Planet Earth.

The Happiest Countries and the most Livable Cities are all in Europe. What lessons can We here in the US learn from that or don’t We really want to be Happy Anyway?

The annual surveys listing of which are the happiest countries and the most livable cities in the world are out and together they show a definite trend, Europe is definitely the best Continent to live on. The happiest country survey comes from the Gallup polling organization along with the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network while the most Livable Cities survey is an assessment made by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

We all know this is true but here in America the drive for money is overpowering even as our country declines in happiness. (Credit: Quora)

As a part of the happiest country survey a poll of about a thousand people is taken in each country asking them to rate how happy they are on a scale of one to ten, ten being the happiest. The average value for the people surveyed in each country allows a happiness value to be calculated for that country. As you might guess some countries, like Russia and North Korea do not permit the survey to be taken so they are not included in the list, but can you imagine anyone being happy in either of those countries.

The North Korean government doesn’t allow the Happiness Survey to be conducted in their country but I don’t think it’s a very happy place anyway! (Credit: Al Jazeera)

In addition the people surveyed evaluate their own country with regards to six distinct qualities, GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption. Social support generally deals with governmental programs like education and healthcare.

The two best ways for any government to improve the lives, and hence the happiness of their people is to make certain that they have the best education and healthcare systems possible. (Credit: Colorado Consumer Health Initiative)

For the seventh year in a row Finland has topped the list at number 1 with several other Nordic countries also appearing in the top ten, Denmark at number 2, Iceland at 3, Sweden at 4 and Norway at 7. Israel came in at 5, a bit of a surprise since they are currently at war, while the Netherlands finished at 6. Rounding out the top ten were Luxemburg at 8, Switzerland at 9 and Australia at 10. The countries with the lowest rankings are also pretty easy to understand, Afghanistan comes in at the very bottom while Lebanon, Lesotho, Sierra Leone and Congo are also places you wouldn’t want to live in.

Maybe one of the reasons that Finland is such a happy place is because the people there take care of the environment in which they live! (Credit: Fishing Booker)
On the other hand it’s also easy to see why Afghanistan is such an unhappy place. (Credit: NBC News)

This year saw the United States take a considerable drop from 15th place to number 24 after being in the top 20 ever since the survey was first taken. It’s thought that there were two main reasons for the US dropping out of the top 20. Firstly several other countries got a lot happier. Czechia for example moved up to 18 while Lithuania rose to number 19.

Czechia moved up in this year’s happiness survey and I can understand why, Prague is one of the places I’d really like to visit! (Credit: Wikipedia)

The biggest reason for the US drop however was because of the low value given to it by people under thirty years of age. Indeed, the US ranked at number 10 for people over 60 years old but for young people the US ranked at a dismal 62. Such a disparity between the feelings of the old and young in this country is more than just unsettling it could threaten the very stability of our society. Lack of educational opportunity, college debt, the high cost of homeownership along with a feeling that their government simply doesn’t notice them all contribute to the unhappiness growing amongst America’s young. Low taxes for the rich along with Social Security and Medicare for the elderly, I’m one of them, means there’s nothing left to solve the problems facing young people.

Just some of the problems young people feel they have to contend with. I took particular note of how getting into college is a bit easier but paying for college is much, much harder. (Credit: Pew Research Center)

A similar trend can be seen in the rankings of the most livable city. What constitutes a livable city is a bit more complicated with thirty different factors being evaluated for each of the 173 cities reviewed. Those factors are grouped into five categories including stability, education, infrastructure, healthcare, culture along with a healthy environment. Each city is rated for each factor on a scale of 1 to 100.

So much of our view of the world in which we live is due to our environment. It’s no wonder that people who live in harsh, violent conditions become harsh and violent themselves. If you want better people, however you define that, you have to provide them a better environment to live in. (Credit: Telegraph India)

As with the survey for happiest country Europe dominates the list taking the top three spots, Vienna was number one followed by Copenhagen and Zurich. Altogether Europe placed eight in the top twenty. Seven cities in Australia and New Zealand also made it into the top twenty, as did three Canadian cities and two cities in Japan. Not a single US city managed to make in into the top twenty, the closest being Honolulu at 23, followed by Atlanta at 29 and Pittsburgh at 30.

Honolulu, Hawaii maybe the best city to live in here in the US but it’s so expensive that it has dropped out of the top twenty cities worldwide. (Credit: TheTravel)

So what’s going on here? We Americans are used to being on top, not back in the middle of the pack, and loosing ground! And you can’t insist that America’s decline is all because the surveys have some kind of liberal, leftist bias. In the Happiness survey they just asked a thousand people how happy they were and we didn’t do very well.

Here in the US what our government considers important is to blame the other side for our problems rather than try to fix them! Ya think that could be why we’re losing ground. (Credit:

Back when I was born in the 1950s the US probably was the happiest country on Earth. Back then most other industrial countries were still in ruins because of World War 2 but the US had a booming and fair, emphasis on fair, economy. So what happened, how did we fall so far?

This may be how we imagine life in the US was back in the 50s but even then there were problems but at least back then some of us tried to solve those problems. (Credit: History Facts)

I think it all comes down to the difference between being happy and being rich. Now don’t get me wrong, I know the US has always had a large segment of its population whose chief concern was increasing their own personal wealth. In the last 40 years however the grasping for every penny has gone from a chief concern to an unhealthy obsession. At the same time our competitive nature has also grown and coarsened to the point where opponents have become enemies and cheating has become accepted, so long as you get away with it.

It’s been almost 40 years since the movie ‘Wall Street’ encapsulated ‘Supply Side Economics’ in a single sentence. And far too many people still think it’s true! (Credit: Etsy)

  So what we have succeeded in building is a society in which we have a small number of big winners and a large number of losers, and losers are rarely happy people. But are the winners happy either? It is really worth owing a fifty-room mansion if you have to drive through a slum to get to that mansion?

Marie Antoinette’s wealth and power didn’t save her when the mob finally rebelled! (Credit: YouTube)

A hundred and fifty years ago it was Europe that was obsessed with ostentatious wealth. It appears that they have finally learned the lesson that living in a happy country, a fair country where everyone is happy, not just you, is better than living in a big mansion and having everyone else being jealous of you. Maybe America will learn that lesson as well one day. 

Astronomy News for July 2024: A New Study of the Radial Velocities of Cepheid Variable Stars Allows Astronomers to more Precisely use these Stars in Their Measurements and What Makes Cepheids so Important Anyway? 

The ancient astronomers of Babylon, Greece and Mesoamerica all believed that the heavens above were perfect, changeless, eternal, and that’s despite the changing phases of the Moon and the motion of the planets against the background of ‘Fixed Stars’. That’s why they thought comets and meteoroids were weather phenomenon, not part of the heavens, because they weren’t permanent. As astronomers began to examine stars with telescopes and other instruments however, they quickly realized that are the stars not ‘Fixed’ in their positions but they do move slowly across our sky.

The Geocentric model of the Universe. Here the Earth is motionless in the center with the planets orbiting around it and the ‘fixed stars’ of heaven beyond them. Modern instruments like the telescope quickly showed this idea to be grossly incorrect! (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)

Another way that astronomers discovered stars change is in their brightness. In fact even before the telescope there were some observations of ‘nova’ or new stars that appeared where no star had been and then disappeared after several weeks to a month. There was also the strange star Algol whose brightness noticeable dropped every 2.87 days. The Arab astronomers who first noticed this named the star ‘El Ghoul’ which over the centuries got shortened to Algol.

Algol is known to be an eclipsing binary where a large but cool star occasionally passes in front of a brighter star causing the system as a whole to become dimmer for a short period of time. (Credit: Cosmic Pursuits)

It wasn’t until the 19th century however that an entire class of stars were discovered whose brightness varied up and down in a rhythmic fashion, that is the length of time it took a particular star to go from being bright to being dim and back to bright was the same over and over again. Different stars of this type each had their own period but each star’s period stayed the same. The brightest star of this type in our sky was δ Cepheid so the entire class acquired the name Cepheids. By the way, while δ Cepheid might be the brightest Cepheid in the sky the best known Cepheid is the Pole Star Polaris.

Something I learned in my days as a Boy Scout. To find the North Star Polaris just use the two front star of the cup of the Big Dipper and follow the line they make to Polaris! (Credit: YouTube)

It wasn’t long before astronomers began to wonder if there was some connection between a Cepheid’s period and its absolute brightness, the actual amount of energy it emits every second. You have to remember that the brightness of a star in our sky, its apparent brightness, depends not only on how bright it really is, its absolute brightness, but on how far away from Earth it is as well. The star Betelgeuse for example is actually a lot brighter than the star Sirius, but Betelgeuse is about 70 times farther away than Sirius, that’s why it’s Sirius that appears to be the brighter of the two stars in the sky.

The star Sirius appears to be the brightest star in the sky here on Earth but if all of the stars around Sirius were at the same distance as Sirius it wouldn’t look very bright at all! Sirius is so bright mainly because it’s close to our Solar System. (Credit: Physics Feed)

On the other hand, if astronomers know the absolute brightness of a star then they can measure its apparent brightness and from those values calculate the distance to that star, and it’s measuring distances to objects in space that is the hardest thing to do in astronomy. That’s why astronomers were so interested in seeing if there was a relationship between the period of a Cepheid and its absolute brightness. By 1890 more than 30 Cepheid variables were known to astronomers but they were all over the sky, at various distances and brightnesses, the problem of finding a simple relationship seemed impossible to solve.

Cepheid variables are easily recognized by astronomers because of the rhythmic pattern in the change in their brightness. (Credit: Hyper Physics Concepts)

It was the Lady Computer Miss Henrietta Swan Leavitt of Harvard Observatory who cracked the puzzle. Oh, you didn’t know that before computers were built out of transistors and other electronics people were called computers. Computers were usually graduate students or women with degrees who did the actual calculations, the arithmetic so that the male scientists could get on with doing the real science! And if that sounds sexist, well it was!

It was Harvard researcher Henrietta Leavitt who worked out the relationship between the period of a Cepheid Star and its absolute brightness. (Credit: Ogle.astrouw.edu.pl)

In fact at the Harvard Observatory it was the male astronomers who made the observations, took the measurements and then handed their data over to the female computers to categorize the results. So it turned out that it was the women, paid less and never allowed to do actual astronomy, who took all that data and made the big discoveries.

It was another Harvard ‘Computer’ who developed the stellar classification system that astronomers still use today. (Credit: Space.com)

What Henrietta Leavitt did was take observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud where she managed to find sixteen Cepheids. Since the sixteen stars were all in the same cloud, and therefore at approximately the same distance, Miss Leavitt reasoned that any Cepheid that looked brighter really was brighter. With the data from those sixteen variables Henrietta was able to work out the equation that connected a Cepheid’s period to its absolute brightness. For example it was found that a Cepheid with a period of one day was about 200 times brighter than our Sun but a Cepheid with a period of fifty days was more than 10,000 times brighter than our Sun.

The small Magellanic cloud is a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way. It was among these millions of stars that Heneretta Leavitt found several dozen Cepheids and by assuming they were all at approximately the same distance, discovered her law of period to absolute brightness. (Credit: Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.)

By using Cepheids astronomers could not only find the distances to objects inside our Milky Way galaxy but distances to other galaxies as well. It was by finding a Cepheid in Andromeda that Carl Hubble was able to show that the ‘nebula’ as it was then called, was a galaxy in its own right, far outside of our Milky Way.

The photograph that exploded our view of the Universe. On the sixth of October in 1923 Carl Hubble took this image of Andromeda, then thought to be a nebula within the Milky Way, and found a Cepheid variable, see ‘VAR!’ at the top right. Thanks to Miss Leavitt he could calculate the distance to that star and it was way outside the Milky Way. Andromeda, and many other nebula were in fact galaxies in their own right! (Credit: Nick Nielsen)

With Cepheid variables being such important tools for astronomers you can imagine that astronomers are working even now to refine Miss Leavitt’s period-Luminosity law and make it more accurate. For example variations in the stars brightness can also be caused by other factors, such as if the Cepheid has a companion star, many do, and the two stars are dancing around each other so that the Cepheid is sometimes closer, sometimes further away!

In trying to make Henrietta Leavitt’s law more precise and accurate astronomers ran into the problem that many Cepheid’s are part of binary star system complicating measurements of their brightness. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In order to study such complications a recent study has been carried out at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The astronomers used their instruments to not only measure the brightness of the Cepheids they studied but also the velocity of the star either towards or away from the Earth. Because of this the program has been christened the VELOcities of CEphieds or VELOCE program. The results of the VELOCE study have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Some of the data collected by the VELOCE Program in their efforts to better understand the behavior of Cepheid variables. (Credit: ArXiv)

In order to obtain the most precise measurements the VELOCE researchers employed two high resolution spectrographs that separated the wavelengths of the light from each star they studied. By using the Doppler effect, see my post of 5 August 2023, the astronomers were able to precisely measure the stars motion relative to Earth and thereby make adjustments to the star’s actual brightness.

The most difficult thing to do in astronomy is to measure the distance to celestial objects. Astronomers use several different techniques that they have christened ‘The Distance Ladder’. Cepheid variables are an important rung on that ladder. (Credit: UNC Physics)

By improving our measurements of the Cepheid variables the work of the VELOCE group will allow astronomers to make better measurements of the distances to objects throughout the Universe giving us a better, more accurate picture of the Universe in which we live.

Book Review: The Climate Action Handbook by Heidi A. Roop 

With all of the evidence for Climate Change that’s accumulating, with all of the extreme weather that’s adversely effecting people’s lives everyday a growing number of people are now hoping that something can still be done to avert the coming climate disaster. The problem is that we are all just individuals; it so often appears as if our opinions just don’t matter to the politicians and billionaires who seem to run the world. Many of us want to see change but have no idea what we as individuals can do to make a difference.

Good advice even today. When one person gets up and starts doing what they think is right eventually others will follow, it’s the only way to make a better world! (Credit: LinkedIn)

That’s the whole purpose of ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ by Doctor Heidi A. Roop of the University of Minnesota’s Climate Adaptation Partnership. In her book Dr. Roop details one hundred actions that each and every one of us can take that will a have a positive effect on our environment. The actions described in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ are broadly divided into ten categories:

Cover art for ‘The Climate Action Handbook: By Heidi A. Roop. (Credit: Amazon)

Starting and Sustaining your Climate Action Journey

Energy Production and Transportation

Travel and Work

Food and Farming

Shopping and Consumer Choices

Actions Around the Home

Nature Based and Natural Solutions

Health and Well-Being

Civic and Community Engagement

Education and Climate Information

Dr. Heidi A. Roop of the University of Minnesota. (Credit: University of Washington)

Each of these categories is then sub-divided into specific actions that anyone can at least attempt and in which any degree of success is a definite contribution toward the goal of mitigating Climate Change. While it maybe true that governments and corporations have a far greater influence on the Climate than any individual, if each of us begins to take a few of the actions suggested in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ we can make a difference and in the long run those individual actions will help to force governments and corporations to take action as well.

Everything doesn’t have to be a fight. Setting an example by doing the right thing, either individually or as part of an organization can often succeed better than fighting! (Credit: University of Central Florida)

So what are the actions outlined in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’. Well, they vary from large scale efforts such as installing solar panels on the roof of your house to such simple things as combining several car trips into one in order to cut down on CO2 emissions. Whether large or small a little bit of up front thinking and effort can reduce your own carbon footprint, and often save you some money as well. Planting trees is another example of something simple anyone can do that will take carbon out of the air, while providing shade to help cool down our cities while just giving us all a little greenery to enjoy.

Installing solar panels on your home is an investment, not an expense. You can lower your energy bills for years to come, saving money in the long run! (Dominion Energy Solutions)

Many of the actions suggested in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ are pretty obvious once you think about it. For example did you know that a 16 oz. plastic bottle of water requires more than one thousand times as much energy to produce, package and transport as 16 oz. of tap water does! That’s actually a lot of carbon going into the air just for a quick drink, and that plastic bottle your water came in will likely just become plastic pollution as well. Another easy one is fast shipping on the items we all buy online. It’s true, not only does same day shipping cost a lot more than 3-4 days shipping does, but it also has a much bigger carbon footprint, and do you really need to have that latest Taylor Swift CD right now, you can’t wait a couple of days?

Yes, same day shipping is available but do you really need it? Can’t you wait a couple of days for that video game? (Credit: Shippo)

And speaking of plastic pollution many of the actions recommended in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ also deal with the incredible amount of plastic that we simple throw away causing harm to the environment and our own health. Food waste is another issue that produces greenhouse gasses while filling up our landfills; all while many people go hungry even here in the US.

With all of the food that gets wasted here in the US we could easily end hunger in this country! (Credit: Student Work – School of Information)

I do have a few complaints about ‘The Climate Action Handbook’, for one thing, in her effort to get to exactly 100 actions Dr. Roop has several that really overlap to a great extent. For example, Action 4: Be privy to the Politics of Climate Change has a lot in common with Action 96: Look to Community Leaders. Also, the book is formatted in a style similar to a live seminar being projected onto a screen in front of an audience. That is, each action is discussed on one page while on the page opposite what was discussed is repeated in bullet-form. Because of this there are several actions that should really be discussed at greater length while the discussion of other actions hardly manage to fill up their single page!

Are there really just 100 climate actions? And shouldn’t some topics deserve greater attention than others? Still ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ is meant to be a handbook, not an exhaustive study and in that it succeeds. (Credit: Amazon)

Nevertheless ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ is a great resource for how ordinary people can help to save our planet, and what could be more important than that! One last point, throughout ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ other resources, websites, organizations, other books are highlighted to help the reader go further, to find out more about how they can help solve the climate crisis.