Tonight, if you look up at the sky and you live in a place that is not cloudy all day, you can see Jupiter and Venus just after sunset in the West. Venus will be the brighter one a little higher in the sky. If you hold up your hand at arm’s length, you can make a crude measurement of the separation between the two. You can count the fingers like you do whiskey, or use a fist or an outstretched hand to get from thumb to little finger. Tonight, the separation will be about 7.5 degrees. If this interests you at all, you could watch these two planets each night just after sunset, they will be the first stars to appear in the sky. If you do follow them over the next week, you will notice that they separate a little more each night. They are called planets from the Greek word p?a??t?? , which means wandering star. If you’re like me, you might even gaze in wonder at the wanderers.
Next Monday night 3/26/2012 they will have separated to 11 degrees. Also on Monday, there will be a nearly new moon only 3 degrees, about two fingers to the upper left of the higher one Venus.
On Sunday night 3/25 a very new moon will be 3 degrees just to the upper right of Jupiter, the lower one.
Here, I found a drawing that illustrates this:
skyandtelescope.com
I think you would be a very good observer indeed if you are able to see the moon on 3/23, this is a game some astronomers play to try to get the “newest” moon. You might try binoculars to find it, but please wait til the sun sets to avoid the damage that might occur from looking at the Sun with binoculars. It will be about a day and a half old on Friday evening.
Now the next star to come out will be Sirius, the brightest star, only 8 light years away. Jupiter is about 30minutes light travel away. Sirius is due south in the early evening about 45 degrees or halfway between the southern horizon and the zenith. If you live in the far south, say San Diego or Florida, you might be able to see the second brightest star Canopus just on the horizon. This star is not visible to Northerners.
To the right and a little up is a constellation, Orion, which has the Great Orion Nebula (a stellar nursery) in his sword. This is easy to see with binoculars. Orion has three stars in a row which make his belt, more than likely you know about this, it’s easy to see, although I suppose it is of no interest to most people, c’est la vie.
Over in the East about halfway up you will see another bright object, Mars. It will appear with a reddish tint. It is in the constellation Leo. Now one degree south of Mars about a little finger’s width there is a galaxy called M95 discovered in 1781 by a Frenchman named Pierre, who was an assistant to Charles Messier another Frenchman, now famous for making a list of interesting objects in the sky. His intention in making this list was to note objects to avoid as he was searching for new comets. He was a comet hunter and discovered 13 comets. The galaxy M95 is around 38 million light years away.
On March 16, 2012, a new supernovae, 2012aw, was discovered in this galaxy M95. This is a Type II supernova and has been getting brighter ever since. It will reach greatest magnitude soon then will slowly fade away. I am going to attempt to see it tonight in a medium size amateur telescope. It will appear as a dim star near the galaxy. Here’s a report on it: blogs.discovermagazine.com
Around 9pm another planet Saturn will rise in the East and be quite visible by 10pm. This is a very beautiful object; most say the most beautiful of all. Just like Jupiter, you can see several of its moons with a small telescope. The largest moon of Saturn is Titan and it has an orange tint. We sent a spacecraft named Cassini along with a probe named Huygens to Saturn in 1997. Huygens separated from Cassini and landed on Titan in 2005 near the Xanadu region. Shortly thereafter, scientists announced "definitive evidence of lakes filled with methane on Saturn's moon Titan".
"Christiaan Huygens" en.wikipedia.org
Having read the above report of the illustrious career of C. Huygens, it is with some sadness that I report that your reporter has been reduced to peering through modern equipment in the dark attempting to recreate some of the excitement of bygone times; once in February as I was viewing Uranus which is composed of 1.99% methane and appears pale blue, I was at the same time experiencing direct evidence of the biological production of methane. C’est la vie, encore.
La vie : en.wikipedia.org
Now to the questions you raised:
Namely:
1. Are complex hydrocarbons organic or inorganic in origin?
2. Are the processes that form these energy supplies manufacturing these hydrocarbons at a rate greater than or equal to the rate we are burning them?
1 is easy to answer. I have sufficient evidence to conclude that hydrocarbons are produced by both methods. So you stated. I know no more than you. As to which process formed the vast majority of the energy sources we currently use, I have no clue, although I would say coal does contain plant fossi!s and there is peat. It’s always been thought it was organic, but that is not relevant to truth. We have often been wrong. Why should my beliefs have any weight whatsoever? I am not an expert and have little than a passing interest in this matter.
2 is IMO too difficult to even attempt to answer. I think there seem to be evil forces involved. Personally, I think they are misguided and many people are.
I briefly perused two articles: the first by Greg Lewis in American Thinker americanthinker.com which referenced DeRosa metaresearch.org
The first seemed entirely political in nature and was attempting to use an unproven scientific theory to counter obvious political schemes to enrich politicians and their crony’s pockets.
Abiotic oil theory is interesting and relatively new, but is not at all widely accepted and should not be used to make major political decisions. As a matter of fact, the problem is government intervention and disruption of the natural state of economic activity. We do have energy problems which are absolutely unrelated to the origin of oil. When I first read that article, I basically skimmed it and ignored it. But now that I have read it, he comes to the wrong conclusion.
He states that the problem is the do-gooders screwing up everything by using “fabricated global warming” and the public knows it and what should be done to counter their meddling is to defend the unproven abiotic oil theory and support “oil as the fuel of the future.”
Well, no, he says “Americans have digested the fact”, but I think not. False prophets, mainly Al Gore and Hollywood types, have convinced the public of a false theory. Politicians like Romney should continue to point out how they “hid the decline” , made simple math errors perhaps intentionally, they said the seas would rise and they didn’t , they said the glaciers would melt and they didn’t , they said it would get too hot then too cold then well you can’t predict using their theory, iow it’s useless.
Here’s the rub: They originally said we would have run out of oil by now and obviously we would now be up chip’s creek. Well, we are not. It seems that we have more oil now than we had before we started burning it. It seems it is newly discovered reserves and extraction processes we did not know we had before these predictions were made. They or we could not predict the future, the scientific predictions, perhaps linear, were wrong.
I heard Romney’s speech last night and he pegged it. He said the regime should be countered with one word: “Enough”.
Every time a Washington bureaucrat comes up with some bright idea to fix things they should be countered with Enough. We don’t have to pay them high salaries to keep them busy and out of trouble. We should just ignore them, make that fire them (think the Donald). Maybe we need to bring back psychiatric institutions for the worst of them.
We should just promote economic freedom; Rick and Mitt now agree that’s the ticket for prosperity.
As far as oil being the fuel of the future, well, that’s not going to happen. All you have to do is look at the past and see things change, in time we will figure out something new, just don’t let the fascists try to direct it, let economic freedom do its thing.
Here is what a scientific article is supposed to look like : arxiv.org
If you got any evidence for Abiotic that looks like that it would lend more support IMO vs popular articles.
I was also going to say that Supernova, galaxies, origin of heavy elements, star formation, etc were all unknown 100 years ago. You got to figure that it will be different in the future.
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