Star Light, Star Bright

Who doesn't like a meteor shower?

The Leonids are due to first peak at 11 pm Monday, November 18th, although for us North Americans, the best viewing is likely to be at the ungodly hour of 5:15 am on Tuesday. (I might be up for that, but only if I haven't gone to bed yet.)

Temple-Tuttle orbits the Sun every 33 years, and during its closest approach the heat of the Sun causes some of the comet's ice to bubble off, taking some dusty debris with it.

This year, the early peak will be caused by a dust stream from Temple-Tuttle's approach in 1767. The late peak involves a cloud from 1866. A later cloud generally has had less time to spread, so it has a higher concentration of dust particles, which should make for more meteors. Earth will also hit this stream more head-on than the 1767 one.

These factors mean that the later peak should have more activity than the earlier. Estimates of the rate of meteors during the late peak are as high as 5,000 per hour, although Mr. Kronk notes that, because the moon will be nearly full, a peak of about 3,000 is more likely.

Read more about it in this New York Times Article.

It's not Jesus' brother's bone box...

...but still it's pretty cool.

Dr. S. Thomas Carter, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, believes he's found the earliest Christian building constructed especially as a house of worship in the ancient city of Aila, now Aqaba, Jordan.

Evidence gathered in four trips to Aqaba prior to this summer ~ including coins dating to around A.D. 300, shards of pottery, glass oil lamps, and a cemetery, in addition to the building itself ~ confirmed that he and his archeological teams discovered the lost city of Aila within the modern city of Aqaba, and led them to believe they may also have found the world's oldest purpose-built Christian church.

You can read more about it here.

[via mirabilis.ca]

First Post Using My Own System

I'm now building this blog out of records in a couple of Filemaker databases, and testing the use of WebMerge to create the static pages.

I'm at the very beginning of this experiment, and I've yet to learn how to generate an RSS feed.

I haven't decided what to do about comments, either. Every commenting system out there (except for Movable Type) involves trusting someone else's server, and makes it a challenge to associate the comments with the right entry if you ever want to recapture them.

I may use something like Haloscan to capture comments and then import them manually into my databases for posterity.

I'm already glad I'm not doing this for a client, as I'm plenty demanding myself!

A few items to keep you entertained...

...while I try to catch up on my sleep. And all the OTHER stuff I should have been doing while I've been wrestling with this site.

Macromedia has a new webediting tool, called Contribute. It's so easy to use that you have to have to be running Windows (just to make it fair, I guess).

This article seems to indicate that, while the ossuary box was genuinely of the right period, the inscription on it suggesting that it might contain the bones of James, brother of Jesus, was hoaxed up. The more we think something would be cool if it were true, the more we have to exercise due diligence to ensure that it is.

boing boing points to this article in the New York Times that explores Edgar Allen Poe's prescient cosmology. For example:

He was the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark at night. If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the Milky Way).

Poe is far from alone in "prediscoveries."

Which object will turn out to be real? Cosmic Q-balls ("lumps of super matter that may have formed when tiny superparticles coagulated in the hot dense phase of the early universe"? Wimpzillas (particles "heavier than a million billion ordinary subatomic particles"? Or quark nuggets (a four-ton object less than one twenty-fifth of an inch long that could "shoot through Earth like a bullet through butter")?

Any of these concepts might help solve the mystery of "dark matter, the unidentified stuff that astronomers believe makes up 90 percent or more of an average galaxy's mass.