The Farm Section

24. December 2002 - Persons Of The Year 2002 ...

Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins ...
They took huge professional and personal risks to blow the whistle on what went wrong at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI—and in so doing helped remind us what American courage and American values are all about.
By Richard Lacayo and Amanda Ripley

22. December 2002 - The winter solstice ...

The winter solstice - our darkest day ...
At exactly 0114GMT the sun will have reached its most southerly point relative to the celestial equator. To put it more simply, it will be our shortest day of the year.

The sun will rise at 0813GMT and set at 1603GMT

NEW COMET ...

Northern sky watchers with telescopes can spot a newly discovered comet, C/2002 X5 (Kudo-Fujikawa), in the constellation Hercules just before dawn this week. It is a 7th to 8th magnitude object now, but it could brighten spectacularly (to visual magnitude -3) in late January when it approaches the sun even closer than the planet Mercury. At maximum brightness, however, the comet might be so close to the sun that only SOHO coronagraphs can see it. [ephemeris] [sky map] [interactive 3D orbit]

16. December 2002 - BRIGHT SATURN ...

Earth and Saturn are having their closest encounter in nearly 30 years, which means it's a great time to look at the ringed planet. Eric Ng of Hong Kong captured this image (left) using his 10" telescope on Dec. 16th. Click here to read the full story from Science@NASA.

05. December 2002 - OF MICE AND MEN ...

It's small and furry and doesn't look anything like a human, but the genetic blueprint of the mouse published yesterday shows there isn't much difference. Both have about 30,000 genes. "We share 99 percent of our genes with mice, and we even have the genes that could make a tail," said Dr. Jane Rogers, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England. And 90 percent of genes linked to diseases in humans are similar to those in mice.

04. December 2002 - It's payback time ...

Click here to read the full text of the Budget speech

The industry, already suffering from the economic downturn, and the after-effects of the many shocks suffered over the past 18 months, has been dealt a significant blow by this year's budget.
OPPOSITION parties attacked Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy, accusing him of forcing ordinary people to pay for the Government’s election spending splurge.

Leonid meteor storm alert - 19. Nov. 2002 ...

Leonid meteor storms happen when Earth plows through clouds of dusty debris shed by comet 55/P Tempel-Tuttle. Right now Earth is heading for two such clouds. "We'll collide with both of them on Tuesday morning, Nov. 19th," says Cooke. "The first cloud will cause a flurry of meteors over Europe at about 0400 UT. We expect sky watchers in the countryside (away from bright city lights) to see between 500 and 1000 Leonids per hour."

21. Oct. 2002 - Attack On Internet ...

The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever. Around 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, a "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attack struck the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications. Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected. This was the largest and most complex DDOS attack ever against the root server system.

20. Oct. 2002 - A first winter storm ...

Click here to see what I am talking about

I believe ... this is it ... the sure sign of early winter.

It's cold, very windy and there is lots of rain ... "hey folks, we are back to normal" ... the lovely days of late sumer are over and the solid ground will soon be softened, slippery and soaked with water ... again ...

Gales and rain are set to continue
The heavy rains and gaileforce winds that swept most of Ireland since Sunday, leading to flood in some parts, are set to continue trough Tuesday. Dublin, Cork and Kerry have been worst hit by the rains, with all three counties recording rainfall of up to 60 millimetres. Wednesday will be bright, wit a few scattered showers. However, the weather is set to deteriorate again from Thursday, with more heavy rains and low Temperatures. The rainfall has been far above normal for this time of year in all parts of the Country. Even if there was no more rain for the rest of the month, the rainfall is already twice the average of October. [Click here to see what's going on]

20. Oct. 2002 - Ireland votes Yes to Nice ...

16:22 The Nice Treaty has been ratified by the Irish electorate with 62.89 per cent voting in favour of the amendment to the Constitution. There was a turnout of 48.5 per cent, an increase of 12.5 per cent on last year. EU enlargement is ready to proceed ...

19. Oct. 2002 - Happy "First" birthday Zoe ...

27. Sep. 2002 - It was a corrupt payment ...

The interim report by Mr Justice Feargus Flood details money paid to Ray Burke, a leading politician in Ireland from the 1970s up to the late 1990s. "The Tribunal is satisfied, in all the circumstances, that these payments to the offshore accounts of Mr. Burke (etc.) were corrupt payments".
Refreshingly honest, clear and damning words are spelled out by yesterdays publication.
Click here to read the whole Second Interim Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments

24. Sep. 2002 - Indian Summer ...

What is it? ... It looks like summer, feels like summer, smells like summer and even sounds like summer ...

Answer ... it is the present irish Autumn ... here in Ballydehob (finally) the summer of 2002 has arrived ... late though... but better late then never.

19. Sep. 2002 - Electrodes trigger out-of-body experience ...

Stimulating brain region elicits illusion often attributed to the paranormal. Published today in: Nature 419, 269 - 270 (2002) - [doi:10.1038/419269a] Neuropsychology: Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions (out-of-body experience) By: Olaf Blanke, Stephanie Ortigue, Theodor Landis & Margitta Seeck
Laboratory of Presurgical Epilepsy Evaluation, Program of Functional Neurology and Neurosurgery, University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne, Geneva 1211 and Lausanne 1011, Switzerland Functional Brain Mapping Laboratory, Department of Neurology, Geneva University Hospital, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland
e-mail: olaf.blanke@hcuge.ch

18. Sep. 2002 - Attention Windows XP Users ...

A little-known but very dangerous vulnerability exists in Windows XP (remember, the safest and most secure operating system Microsoft has ever built). This vulnerability allows the files contained in any specified directory on your system to be deleted if you click on a specially formed URL. This URL could appear anywhere: sent in malicious eMail, in a chat room, in a newsgroup posting, on a malicious web page, or even executed when your computer merely visits a malicious web page. It is already being exploited on the Internet!

Click here for more information and how to address the problem"

08. Aug. 2002 - METEOR ALERT ...

The annual Perseid meteor shower is underway. Early-rising sky watchers this week have spotted 10 to 25 meteors per hour in the pre-dawn sky. Even more will appear on August 12th and 13th when the shower peaks.

If you can't wake up at 2 a.m. try looking for Perseids instead around 9 or 10 p.m. when Perseus is hanging low. (Note: it's always hanging low in the southern hemisphere.) You won't see many meteors then, but the ones you do see could be memorable. Shooting stars that emerge from the horizon and streak horizontally through the atmosphere are called Earthgrazers. They are remarkably slow, colorful and bright.

04. Aug. 2002 - Happy Birthday Linus !!!

We are truly speech less ...

02. Aug. 2002 - Good News "NO IMPACT IN 2019" !!!

Headline-making asteroid 2002 NT7 will not strike Earth in 2019. "With the processing of a few more observations, we can now rule out any Earth impact possibilities for February 1, 2019," says Don Yeomans, the manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at JPL.

30. Jul. 2002 - Brân died today ...

Sadly, but Brân didn't make it much longer as his brother and died today ...

"Goodby old friend"

May 10th: PLANETS LINE-UP !!!

The five brightest Planets visible from Earth (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) have lined-up, in plain sight, to form a spectacular celestial array that won't be seen again until the year 2040.
During the next four weeks these five Planets will appear tightly clustert in the Western evening sky, just after sunset, even for the naked eye.

April 16th: TEENAGE ALERT !!!

Anja finally made it ... she became a Teenager ...

April 16th: COMET ALERT

Image courtesy of: Dr. P. Clay Sherrod, Conway, Arkansas, USA March 6

If you haven't yet seen Comet Ikeya-Zhang, now is the last time to start looking. The comet is fading away. To find it, simply look north near the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia; the comet is a fuzzy blob about as bright as a 3rd or 4th magnitude star. Small telescopes and binoculars will reveal a lovely tail stretching 5 degrees. [ finder chart] [orbit] [ephemeris] [ gallery]

SOLAR WIND:

Image courtesy of: Yuichi Takasaka, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada Feb. 27 - Mar. 1

Earth remains inside a high-speed solar wind stream flowing from a coronal hole on the Sun. High-latitude sky watchers .-.. e.g., those in northern Europe, Canada, and the northern tier of US states ... should be alert for Northern Lights during the next 24 hours.

28. Februar the Punt is death long live the EURO ...

And the Irish Punt, Belgian Franc, Deutsche Mark, Spanish Peseta, French Franc, Greek Drachma, Italian Lira, Luxembourg Franc, Netherlands (Dutch) Guilder, Austrian Schilling, Portuguese Escudo, Finnish Markka ... are gone forever ...

18.Jan.2002: 11 years solar activity reaches a 2nd fever pitch:

Image courtesy David Hathaway, NASA/MSFC.

Solar flares erupt near sunspots on a daily basis ... Coronal mass ejections, billion-ton clouds of magnetized gas, fly away from the Sun and buffet the planets. Even the Sun's awesome magnetic field, as large as the solar system itself, grows unstable and flips. It's a turbulent time now, called Solar Max. Evidence is mounting that some solar cycles are doubled-peaked. The ongoing solar maximum itself appears to be "a double", and the second peak has arrived. The Picture shows: Sunspot counts for the current solar cycle peaked in mid-2000 and again in late 2001 and now early 2002.

14. Jan. SUNSPOTS: ...

An impressive array of sunspots is rotating across the face of our star. Active regions 9773 and 9782 have twisted "delta-class" magnetic fields that harbor energy for X-class explosions. Click here and have a look at the newest sun pictures.

10. Jan. 2002 Fionn died unexpectedly ...

This site will not be the place to show our grieve and sorrow for every animal member of our family ... but Fionn's death was so unexpected and sudden ... I just had to do it.
After only six years, we are missing him a lot ... and I feel sorry that we didn't actually spend more time and care for this two big dogs ... as we could have. I really hope. Brân will stay a bit longer.

Early January - NEAR-EARTH ASTEROID

On Jan. 3rd, German astronomer Thomas Payer captured this 8 minute movie of 2001 YB5 streaking among the stars.

A newly-discovered near-Earth asteroid named 2001 YB5 will race past our planet this week only two times farther away than the Moon. During the days leading up to its closest approach on Jan. 7th, the 300 meter-wide space rock will brighten to 12th magnitude -- an easy target for backyard telescopes equipped with CCD cameras.