Solstice Meteor Shower

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Space Weather News for Dec. 21, 2008
http://spaceweather.com

URSID METEORS: Earth is entering a stream of debris from comet
8P/Tuttle and this is causing the annual Ursid meteor shower.
Forecasters expect the Ursids to peak on Dec. 22nd with 8 to 10
meteors per hour flying out of the constellation Ursa Minor (the
Little Dipper). The display is usually mild, but outbursts of Ursids
occasionally surprise observers with rates many times normal.

Watching these northern meteors can be a chilling experience, so why
not stay inside and listen to them instead? Spaceweather.com is
broadcasting live audio from the Air Force Space Surveillance Radar in
Texas. When a meteor passes over the radar--"ping"--there is an echo.
Give it a try; feedback is welcomed.

Ping
http://wowzaweb.streamguys.com/~spaceweather/
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At various times throughout the year one can look up at night and see
flashes of light caused by space dust burning up in our atmosphere as
Earth crosses the tails of long gone meteors.

Sometimes you can even listen to the resulting electromagnetic
disturbances in the force. :-)

We have mentioned the topic of sounds from space before and with the
proper listening methods many electromagnetic disturbances can be
transformed into audio sounds. Fun to listen to and study.

Mother Earth creaks and groans too. Squeezing rocks and crystals can
make varying electrical fields which may be transmitted and converted
to audio sounds or traces on an oscilloscope if only you know where
and how to receive them.

You might even want to build your own receiver.
- LRK -

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ULF & ELF & VLF
http://home.flash.net/~evogel/ev-schu.html

Schumann Resonance Receiver
The current design incorporates a number of changes that (can) lower
the frequency response down to the ULF-ELF range. The design
intentions are as follows:

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http://home.flash.net/~evogel/index.html
Introduction

NOTE: This site is still under (re)construction. Some of the pages
still have live links to the old site pages. To get back to the new
site use the back button. Some of the links offered may also be dead.
I am working to clean these links up.

This site documents work I have done over the last 5 or more years.
Much of the work is dated, but may be of interest to others.

These days my focus is to develop techniques to allow an amateur like
myself to "see" q-bursts and eventually be able to detect sprites.
This search has led me to develop techniques that may be of interest
to others.

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http://home.flash.net/~evogel/ev-links.html
Links
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Thanks for looking up with me [listening too]

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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http://spaceweather.com/
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SOLSTICE WEBCAST: Today is the northern winter solstice. When the
solstice sun came up this morning over Ireland, a shaft of sunlight
traveled down an 18 meter tunnel to illuminate the inner chamber of
Newgrange, a massive prehistoric burial mound in County Meath. It
looked like this:

http://spaceweather.com/swpod2008/21dec08/NEWGRANGE_ITIMES_strip.jpg

Newgrange is 5000 years old, predating the better-known Stonehenge in
the neighboring island of Great Britain by more than a thousand years.
This makes it one of the oldest megalithic monuments in the world with
a known astronomical function. Curators of Newgrange webcast this
morning's event; you can watch it here.
http://www.servecast.com/opw/211208/index.html

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SPACESOUNDS - We Are Listening
http://www.spacesounds.com/

Nice intro sequence then select different sounds you would like to listen to.
- LRK-

http://www.spacesounds.com/home/index.html

What is your vision?
- LRK -

http://www.spacesounds.com/look/index.html

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Earth Mode Communications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_low_frequency
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ULF has been used by the military for secure communications through
the ground. NATO AGARD publications from the 1960s detailed many such
systems, although one suspects the contents of the published papers
left a lot unsaid about what actually was developed secretly for
defense purposes. Communications through the ground using conduction
fields is known as "Earth Mode" communications and was first used in
WWI. Radio amateurs and electronics hobbyists have used this mode for
limited range communications using audio power amplifiers connected to
widely spaced electrode pairs hammered into the soil. At the receiving
end the signal is detected as a weak electric current between two
further pairs of electrodes. Using weak signal reception methods with
PC based DSP filtering with extremely narrow bandwidths it is possible
to receive signals at a range of a few kilometers with a transmitting
power of 10-100W and electrode spacing of around 10-50m.

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Large earthquakes may broadcast warnings, but is anyone tuning in to listen?
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-12/su-lem121207.php

Like geological ninjas, earthquakes can strike without warning. But
there may be a way to detect the footfalls of large earthquakes before
they strike, alerting their potential victims a week or more in
advance. A Stanford professor thinks a method to provide just such
warnings may have been buried in the scientific literature for over 40
years.

In October, Japan instituted a nationwide earthquake warning system
that heralds the advance of a big earthquake; its sophisticated
machinery senses the shaking deep in the earth and transmits a warning
signal that can beat the tremors to the surface by seconds.

Antony Fraser-Smith, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and
of geophysics, has evidence that big temblors emit a burst of
ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic radio waves days or even weeks
before they hit. The problem is that nobody is paying enough
attention.

Fraser-Smith has been interested in electromagnetic signals for
decades. Most of these waves come from space, he said, generated in
the upper atmosphere by the sun and then beamed down to Earth.

In 1989, Fraser-Smith and his research team were monitoring
ultra-low-frequency radio waves in a remote location in the Santa Cruz
Mountains as part of a long-term study of the signals reaching Earth
from space. On Oct. 5, 1989, their equipment suddenly reported a large
signal, and the signal stayed up for the next 12 days. At 2:00 p.m. on
Oct. 17, 1989, the signal jumped even higher, about 20 to 30 times
higher than what the instruments would normally ever measure,
Fraser-Smith said. At 5:04 p.m. the 7.1 magnitude Loma Prieta
earthquake hit the Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay areas, killing
63 people and causing severe damage across the region.

Fraser-Smith originally thought there was something wrong with the
equipment. After ruling out the possibility of technical malfunctions,
he and his research team started to think the Loma Prieta quake had
quietly announced its impending arrival, and that their equipment just
happened to be in the right place at the right time to pick up the
message.

"Most scientists necessarily make measurements on small earthquakes
because that's what occurs all the time," Fraser-Smith said. "To make
a measurement on a large earthquake you have to be lucky, which we
were."

Along with Stephen Park, earth sciences professor at the University of
California-Riverside, and Frank Morrison, professor emeritus of earth
and planetary science at UC-Berkeley, Fraser-Smith continued to study
the phenomenon of earthquakes emitting electromagnetic waves through a
study funded by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

When the USGS terminated the funding in 1999, he decided to move on to
other things. But he was recently drawn back into this issue by a
local private company that wanted to use his methods to develop
earthquake warning systems.

"I took a new look at the measurements, concentrating entirely on
large earthquakes," Fraser-Smith said, "and all of a sudden I could
see the forest through the trees."

He found three other studies describing electromagnetic surges before
large earthquakes, just as he had found at the Loma Prieta site. The
earliest report was from the Great Alaska earthquake (M9.2) in 1964.
Up until now, most of the focus for earthquake warnings and
predictions has been on seismological studies, but no seismic
measurements have ever shown this kind of warning before a big quake,
Fraser-Smith said.

This technique will probably only yield results for earthquakes of
approximately magnitude 7 or higher, because background waves from the
atmosphere will tend to mask any smaller signals. But these are the
quakes people are most concerned about anyway, from a safety and
damage point of view.

Some seismologists are suspicious that these results are real,
Fraser-Smith said. But it would take little effort to verify or
disprove them. He is calling for federal funding for a
mission-oriented study that would place approximately 30 of the
ultra-low-frequency-detecting instruments around the world at hotspots
for big quakes. It would cost around $3 million to buy 30 of these
machines, he said, which is cheap compared to the cost of many other
large studies.

Every year, there are on average 10 earthquakes of magnitude 7 or
higher around the world. So within just a few years, he said, you
could potentially have 10 new measurements of electromagnetic waves
before big quakes-surely enough to determine whether the previous four
findings were real.

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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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