Early morning of November 17 will have a wonderful display in the sky, with a strong showing of the Leonid Meteor Shower. This year’s meteor shower will look all the more better because of no interference from the moon, as November 16 is the new moon, so the skies will be dark and even the faint meteor streaks will be visible.

The shower will put up the best display for those in central and eastern Asia, with the meteor rate rising to few hundreds per hour at 21:40 GMT. Eastern observers in North America will get a more moderate view with a few dozen meteors an hour, and the best time to watch the skies will be between 3:30 and 5:30 a.m. EST.

Other regions in North America may not get a very good viewing of the 2009 Leonid Meteor Shower, but they will be able to see shooting stars every few minutes. Europe and Africa on the other hand, won’t have much of a view. The Leonid Meteor Showers are so named because their radiant is positioned “sickle” of the constellation Leo.

Source: MSNBC

Map of Peru

You can see all the seismic details from the US Geological Survey here. And, click here for a map of the area.

Reuters is reporting that the quake was not felt by witnesses in the area, and there are no reports of damages or casualties.

According to NPR, the depth of this particular earthquake could help explain why it wasn’t felt more on the surface.

On Tuesday, there was an earthquake off the coast of American Samoa in the South Pacific. And earlier today there was one near the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Are all three of these quakes related?

Researchers are looking into that possibility.

Slow motion tsunami

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a  tsunami watch for the Hawaiian Islands. You can read the details of the regional warnings, watches, and advisories here.

As a result, the city of  Honolulu has activated its Emergency Operations Center.

The epicentre of the quake was located 120 miles (190 km) southwest of American Samoa, a remote Pacific island, and measured 8.0 magnitude, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The earthquake caused waves in Pago Pago that were 5.1 feet (1.57 metres) above normal sea level.

An official of the US National Park Service said that there have been deaths in American Samoa, but the number of casualties remains unclear. Reuters is also reporting that the National Park of American Samoa visitors center and its offices are completely destroyed.

Image courtesy of Orin Zebest

The Nature Conservancy wants to equip you with facts like this so you can start thinking about the solutions that nature holds for slowing carbon emissions and dealing with the effects of climate change.

In fact, last week, the Nature Conservancy launched a web-based campaign that aims to inspire a movement to respond—and offer solutions— to the threat of climate change.

The campaign, called “Planet Change,” educates site visitors about:

• the implications of climate change for both people and nature
• the massive emissions caused by deforestation
• the powerful solutions nature holds for slowing carbon emissions and dealing with the effects of climate change

Planet Change uses innovative technology to spur users to action, enabling them to:

• tell world leaders what they want to protect from climate change
• use their personal Twitter account to share messages about the threats of climate change
• spread the word about natural solutions to climate change
• offset their own emissions through The Nature Conservancy’s carbon offset program

“We can do nothing and let climate change happen, or we can stand up and make change happen. Nature offers us real solutions for slowing carbon emissions and dealing with the effects of climate change,” says Mark Tercek, The Nature Conservancy’s President and CEO. “Planet Change gives people the opportunity to be a part of the solution, show that they care and let others know that they care.”

For more information, watch this short –but powerful –video clip. It sums up the Planet Change message in less than two minutes.

Created by Microsoft, the WorldWide Telescope sports a high performance Visual Experience Engine and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your PC to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. A web-based version of WorldWide Telescope is also available now, for preview. This version enables seamless guided explorations of the universe from within a web browser. It’s compatible with PC (requires Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 though) and Intel Mac OS X.

Dr. Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said:

“The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the greatest telescopes on Earth … and in space … and assembles them into a seamless, holistic view of the universe. This new resource will change the way we do astronomy … the way we teach astronomy … and, most importantly, I think it’s going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe. The creators of the WorldWide Telescope have now given us a way to have a dialog with our universe.”

Late Tuesday night is an option as well.

The Perseids are bits of debris from the Comet Swift-Tuttle. Every year around August the Earth passes through these debris streams.

“They are typically fast, bright and occasionally leave persistent trains,” says a SPACE.com Columnist. “And every once in a while, a Perseid fireball will blaze forth, bright enough to be quite spectacular and more than capable to attract attention even in bright moonlight.”

God has a show in store for tonight for those who are up or wish to stay up. Remember, to give credit where credit is due.

The best times to watch:

1. between midnight and dawn Wednesday

2. 4am-5am EST.

3. 1-2am PST

4. After daybreak in Europe.

All these people sing for a cause. They sing for a change. They sing for a world with no problems, with no war. They sing to make people aware that we don’t need first class and second class citizens, that the color of our skin should be just as important as the color of our eyes …

We don’t need, no more trouble. And it looks like music is our best weapon for a change.

I don’t know about you, but Bono and the other featured musicians had a great impact on me.

What’s the one thing we all miss?

Population explosion is modern world’s bottleneck towards progress with each and every problem that majority of the planet faces today finding roots in the excess mouths that we need to feed.

Human population might be growing at a geometric rate, but the fact remains that the planet is not going to expand and grow new land to create space and produce resources for more individuals. In such a situation common sense demands that we bring population to a stable figure that stops putting pressure on the supply chain.

Image courtesy of adriansalamandre

Solutions …

But good news is apparently on the way with recent report released by Lester R. Brown, President of Earth Policy Institute claiming that the world population is starting to reach a figure of stability. With the chaos and multitude of overpopulation problems caused in the last half century, it is about time we had some sanity around. But this by no means indicates we are out of troubled waters.

According to the report countries like Japan, Russia, Germany, and Italy will see a decline in population while nations like USA and China will see a stable population that might decline slightly in the later half of the century.

But there is an important third group of nations like Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda, which would end up doubling their population by 2050. While UN projects world population anywhere in-between 9.2 to 10.8 billion by 2050, it would be interesting to see where nations like Brazil and India rank on such a list. Because … 201 million couples across the globe today are still deprived of birth control measures making it impossible to bring order at the present rate.

For the situation to develop, we need to understand that providing family planning options, creating awareness and giving incentives is essential. While things seem just in control as of now, they could quickly and easily spiral out of control if the global community does not act soon. Time for us to wake up to the population facts and its overwhelming impact!

Source: ENN

I thought it might be interesting to throw in some of the appearances of the aurora in mythology that I found at wikipedia.

In Bulfinch’s Mythology, Thomas Bulfinch claimed in 1855 that in Norse mythology:

The Valkyrior are warlike virgins, mounted upon horses and armed with helmets and spears. /…/ When they ride forth on their errand, their armour sheds a strange flickering light, which flashes up over the northern skies, making what men call the “aurora borealis”, or “Northern Lights”.

Pretty stunning stuff. Must be incredible to see it live.

Check out more pictures …

An old Scandinavian name translates as “herring flash”. The northerners believed the aurora was a reflection cast by large swarms of herring into the sky.

Yet a different Scandinavian source calls them”the fires that surround the North and South edges of the world.”

The Finns named the northern lights revontulet, or fox fires. According to their legend, foxes made of fire lived in Lapland. And, the fox fires were the sparks they took up into the atmosphere on their tails.

In Estonian the northern lights are called virmalised, which is a spirit being of higher realms. Some are bad guys and some are good.

The Sami people believed that a person should be careful and quiet when in the presence of the northern lights (called guovssahasat in Northern Sami). To mock the northern lights or singing about them was considered dangerous and could be reason for the lights to come down on a person and kill him/her.

The Algonquin think the lights are their ancestors dancing around a fire.

In Latvian folklore the aurora borealis, especially if red and observed in winter, are fighting souls of dead warriors especially if it is red and seen in the winter. It is an omen foretelling disaster.

Russian folklore associates the northern lights with the fire dragon (”Ognenniy Zmey”). The dragon came to women to seduce them when their husbands were gone.

The northern lights in Scotland were known as “the mirrie dancers” or na fir-chlis. The dance often ended in a fight – “the mirrie dancers bled each other last night”. The appearance of the lights also predicted bad weather.

Prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush believed that the aurora borealis was the reflection of the mother lode of all gold.

And, the Inuit people of Alaska say that the “shadows” within the display are relatives and friends who have gone to the sky. They march and dance to remind the living people of their presence. When dogs bark and howl at the sounds of the aurora borealis, it is because the dogs recognize their companions.

I was fortunate to see a bit of the northern lights when my wife and I took a cruise there last fall. Now I realize we missed a lot more than we saw.

Images copyright to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Image: Wikipedia

In the Northern Areas of Pakistan, Baintha Brakk or commonly known as The Ogre Mountain, definitely deserves to be mentioned here. Rises above the north side of the Biafo Glacier, one of the major glaciers of the central Karakoram, and with an elevation of 7,285m (23,901 ft) Baintha Brakk is a dangerous combination of altitude, height above local terrain, and steepness. That’s the reason why the first ascent from 1977 was only followed 24 years later, in 2001.

Image: Wikipedia

Annapurna is a 55-km long massif in Himalaya with six major peaks over 7,200 m and the 10 highest peak in the world. In Sanskrit it means “full of food”, but locals call it the Goddess of the Harvests, however there’s another reason why Anapurna is famous. Since the first ascend in 1950, it’s been climbed by 130 people out which 53 died trying. Fatality rate is close to 40% making it the most statistically dangerous mountain in the world.

Image: Wikipedia

Remember Patagonia and the stunning Los Glaciares National Park? Located close to the amazing El Chaiten close to the Argentinta – Chile border, Monte Fitz Roy – also known as Cerro Chaltén or Cerro Fitz Roy, it’s guarded on all sides by steep rock faces that make it extremely difficult from a technical point of view. Because of unpredictable weather and the relative isolation, Monte Fitz Roy has been considered the most dangerous mountain in the world for decades.

Image: Se7en Summits

Though fully covered in snow, Antarctica has mountains. And one of them, Mount Vinson, has made it to the list with the most endangered mountains in the world. Though not very high, less difficult and with a lower fatality rate than the other mountains, Vinson is an isolated place with extreme temperatures and unpredictable weather. Accidents, no matter how small, are not an option and could lead to disasters.

Image: Wikipedia

Located in Northern Pakistan and part of the Karakoram segment in the Himalayan range, K2 is the second highest mountain in the world also known as the Savage Mountain. That’s because of its ascent difficulty. One out of four people die trying to “conquer” K2 making it one of the most dangerous in the world, all these because of steep, exposed, and committing nature of all routes, because of the extreme high altitude that lacks in oxygen and the fact that it’s renowned for extreme storms that last for days.

Image : judepics

Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain peaks after Mt. Everest and K2, it translates as The Five Treasures of Snows. Because technology evolved and we now have access to better gear, fatality rates are expeCted to go down, but not on Kangchenjunga. In the recent years, 22 people out of 100 trying to win the top have died because of avalanches and and weather hazards. It’s a dangerous mountain, indeed.

Image: Wikipedia

You would have expected, the highest mountains to be he most dangerous. Well, the Eiger mountain in the Swiss Alps made it to the list as a legendary dangerous, too. The most dificult part of the Eiger is the north face which got the “nickname” of Mordwand (Murder Wall).

Image: Wikipedia

Located on the Swiss-Italian border, Matterhorn (Cervino or Cervin) is one of the most renowned mountains in the European Alps. Looking like a horn rising, it was one of the last peaks in the Alps to be conquered and not only because of its technical difficulty, the prevalence of avalanches and rockfall,but mostly because of the fear it inspired in early mountaineers. Even though these days there are fixed ropes on parts of the routes to help, several climbers die each year.

Image: Ben Tubby

Nanga Parbat is the ninth highest peak in the world and i the western anchor of the Himalayas, lying south of the Indus River in the Astore District of Pakistan. In Urdu the name means Naked Mountain but Nanga Parbat is also two nicknames that made it famouse; Killer Mountain and The Man Eater. That’s mainly because of its technical difficulty.

Image: Giant Ginko

Mount Denali is the highest mountain in North America. Also known as Mount McKinley, the 20,32 ft tall mountain is renowned for its extreme weather conditions and temperature that make it a tough ride. More than 100 climbers lost their lives trying to conquer Denali, keeping the success rate at low levels (50%).

Image: vitafluida

The highest mountain on Earth (8,848 metres – 29,029 ft), Mount Everest makes it hard for climbers to reach its top mainly because of the high altitude where temperatures dip to very low levels causing frostbites to any body parts exposed to air. Exhaustion, extreme cold, the dangers of the climb or the low level oxygen (pressure is one third of sea levels pressure), makes Mt. Everest an undeniably dangerous objective.

So are you up to the challenge? Which one would you like to conquer?