Happy New Year 2010 ......!!!!

********** Happy New Year 2010 **********

Photo Background: By NASA

My Thoughts

UNIVERSE/NATURE:

1. HOW this Universe is working in this manner, I can understand upto some extant with the help of very fundamental laws of Physics.... but WHY this this is happening..? when I think this I find myself searching for glimps of stars during noon....!!! --RKS

2. At the event horizon of a black hole your mind will stop working.. and u will forget the way back to home...!!! –RKS

3. Rotation is the most important law of nature ...!!! –RKS

4. It is difficult to reach to the event horizon of a black hole but impossible to go across....as of now...!! –RKS

5. Nature has it own laws.. we are just discovering them and redefining them with respect to our frame of reference....!! --RKS

BLACK HOLES:

1. It is difficult to reach to the event horizon of a black hole but impossible to go across....as of now...!! –RKS

2. At the event horizon of a black hole your mind will stop working.. and u will forget the way back to home...!!! –RKS

3. I am still not sure whether my fall in Black Hole will increase its Entropy or not…!! But I am sure that you will never witness this event if it really happens ever. --RKS

4. If you want to witness my fall in a Black Hole, then you must join the journey along with me. --RKS

Bhuvan - One more step towards perfection

Congratulations ISRO !!!

After a long wait Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO) launched their first Geo-portal Bhuvan which will definitely prove Indian Imaging capabilities in Multi-sensor, Multi-platform and Multi-temporal domain. Bhuvan is a satellite mapping tool very similar to Google Earth(GE).

Beta Version of Bhuvan was launched on 12th August 2009 and I tried real hard to become one of the initial users. But due to heavy load I got success very late and registered myself to download Bhuvan plug-in on 14th August (A day before India's Independence Day).

I have used GE for hundreds of hours and when I used Bhuvan my mind started comparing both of them. No doubt GE is the best till date but supremacy does not remain constant. Bhuvan is really gonna be a tough competitor for GE because Bhuvan is concentrating only on India's landscape which is its birth place.

Bhuvan will provide more features than GE for India-specific users. It will provide enhanced quality street by street coverage and resolution up to 5 meters which is quite impressive. Along with that it will provide useful data about climate, weather and allows easy measuring and scaling and one-click snapshot of maps. There are many enhancements needs to be done with respect to the expectation level which is already at a very high level due to GE.

We all should Register it, download it and use it and give feedback to make Bhuvan The Best.

Register and Download BHUVAN Plug-in

Satellite Trackers

There are many webpages over the Internet which provide Satellite tracking facility. But you have to waste a lot of time to find the one that suites your liking. During last few months I searched a lot of websites and found some good sites for tracking satellites. Below are the some of those which I found good. Let me know as well if there are more....

1. http://www.n2yo.com/ : Provide live tracking of almost all the satellites.

2. HUMANSPACEFLIGHT provided by NASA for tracking ISS: This gives sighting opportunity of ISS for next 7 days.Just select your Country and then Select your city if available.

http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings

3. Provided by SKY & TELESCOPE, you can keep track of HST and STS alog with ISS

http://www.nightskies.net/satellites/custom.html?latitude=42.383&longitude=71.133&tzone=-5

4. http://www.heavens-above.com/

In Search of -- International Space Station

It was really a bad day today because of clouds in sky and I lost a very good sighting opportunity of ISS. Last week I planned to track ISS in the sky but there was no sighting opportunity from Bangalore that week.

According to NASA’s HUMANSPACEFLIGHT (Tracker for sighting opportunities of ISS) today was the best day for getting glimpse of International Space Station. Can you realize that??

Satellite	Local(Date/Time)	Duration(Min)	MAX Elev(Deg)	Approach (Deg-Dir)	Departure (Deg-Dir)
ISS	Sun Jul 05/07:29 PM	1	12	10 above SSE	12 above SE
ISS	Mon Jul 06/07:52 PM	5	87	12 above SW	11 above NE
ISS	Tue Jul 07/05:36 AM	1	16	11 above N	16 above NNE
ISS	Tue Jul 07/08:20 PM	<1	11	11 above NNW	10 above NNW
ISS	Thu Jul 09/04:50 AM	4	21	11 above N	10 above ESE
ISS	Thu Jul 09/07:34 PM	<1	10	10 above NNW	10 above NNW
ISS	Fri Jul 10/05:14 AM	5	46	11 above NW	10 above SSE
ISS	Sat Jul 11/04:07 AM	2	23	23 above ENE	10 above ESE

So I again made a plan with my colleague Sai Tirumal, to watch the greatest engineering architecture made by Human being. According to above chart ISS was supposed to appear by 7:52 PM IST. So in the evening around 5:30pm we went outside and searched for a viewpoint. It was an open area in my office campus from where we were able to see almost 70% of the sky. At that time there were no clouds and we wish for the same at 7:52pm.

I corrected the time of my wristwatch and then started working with full efficiency to complete my pending office work for the day. At 7:40pm we went outside ( so early ..!!) Yeah I was not willing to loose any chance. When we stepped down to ground floor….

Oooppss…!!! I already had strong intution of bad weather conditions. The sky was full of clouds. Still we had some hope because there were some free areas from where we were able to see the sky. So we decided to try our luck. The moment came(7:52 pm) and suddenly the time started moving very fast. Yes most of the time we were trying to find some holes in clouds. CrrraaazzzYYYY….

It happens, there are many opportunities still pending and I will definitely try my Luck for the upcoming sightings..

--Cheers