Electric blue night-shining clouds
2014 has been a great year for noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds, seen at high latitudes only from about mid-May to August. Wondrous, if you can catch them!
Engineering
Message For the Day…” Do Your Work with utmost sincerity and Dedication… “
For success in any aspect of life, three things are essential – knowledge, skill and balance. If you combine knowledge with skill, you get balance which is very important. It means maintaining equipoise in the face of praise and criticism. To stay balanced, skill is necessary. If you lose balance, suffering will soon follow. When you are given some work, you should put your heart and soul into it, and do it with utmost sincerity and dedication, to the limit of your capacity. Take for example, a person who is entrusted with planting trees and developing a garden. If he does the work wholeheartedly without getting affected by praise or blame, the plants will come up well, and the garden will get transformed into a place of beauty. When the Guru comes to see that garden and feels happy with the growth of the plants, the joy of the Guru becomes the grace He bestows on that individual, and that grace will confer great happiness to that person.
Watching Whales in Queensland !!!
Gentle Giants Of The Deep Ocean …
We had a privilege to witness one of the longest migrations in animal history right here in Brisbane’s Moreton Bay. Humpback Whales travel over 10,000 kilometres on their yearly round migration from their feedings grounds of the cold Antarctic waters to the warm tropical breeding grounds in sunny Queensland.
Of all the great whales, the Humpback is the most inquisitive and playful often leaping clear out of the ocean or slapping the surface with great fins and tail flukes in awesome displays of grace and power. The Humpback Whale is the most surface active displaying behaviour
that will not only inspire you but leave you in awe.
Natarajan From Brisbane , Australia
6 jULY 2014
Humpback Whales have:
- Little or no sense of smell or taste
- A very sensitive skin that is easily sunburned
- Remarkable eyes with strong muscles that change the hape of the lens so they can see in the air or underwater
- Incredible hearing ranging over many kilometres for navigation, communication and finding food
- Calls or songs that travel hundreds of kilometres
- Pectoral fins that are ten times longer than your arm
- Flukes that often feature black and white markings on the underside which can be used to identify individual whales
- The longest and most varied sign in the animal kingdom
- An average weight of 45 tonnes which is about 1000 children together
- An average length of 15 to 17 metres which is about 10 adults lying head to foot
- An eye the size of a grapefruit
- A belly button
- Calves that are fed daily over 400 litres of rich milk which is the consistency of condensed cream
- An expelled breath or ‘blow’ that reaches a speed of between 300 – 500 kilometres per hour as it exist through the blowhole
Few Glimpses of Whales in the Deep Ocean spotted By us ….ME, My Wife and our Son during our ” Brisbane Whale Watching ” Trip on 6 Juy 2014.
Photo Credit… brisbanewhalewatching.com.au
Photo credit…brisbane whalewatching.com.au
Photo credit… brisbane whale watching .com au
Photo credit… brisbane whale watching .com.au
Photo credit…brisbane whale watching.com.au
PhotoCredit::::Senthil Natarajan
Photo Credit:::: Senthil Natarajan
Source:::: http://www.brisbanewhalewatching.com.au
Natarajan July 6 2014
Image of the Day….
Stairway to heaven
“I saw this stairway leading into the Milky Way and figured I would give it a try.”
Wesley Liikane caught this shot on the last weekend in June, when he hosted a photography workshop at a very dark site, Algonquin Park in central Ontario, Canada. He wrote:
… at the second location I saw this stairway leading into the Milky Way and figured I would give it a try. I used multiple exposures, as I did not want to have light ruining the others night vision. One exposure was 155 seconds to let the natural light bring out the foreground while the other image was a 35-second exposure.
You can see the result here. Beautiful. Thank you, Wesley.
More photos by Wesley Liikane, aka Cowbody with a Camera
Source::::Earth Sky News
Natarajan
A Close Call For Two Planes …Scary Too !!!
Pilots averted a catastrophic situation on Saturday when two planes nearly collided at Barcelona Airport in Spain.
The video shows an Utair Boeing 767-300 on final approach to a runway just as an Aerolineas Argentineas Airbus A340-300 prepares to take off.
The Utair pilots quickly aborts the landing, pulling up and clearing the plane on the ground.
YouTube/Barcelona-El Prat In’tl
The manoeuvre is risky because the plane has to unexpectedly re-enter the air, which is populated with other planes.
The Utair pilots close the landing gear doors and circle around for another landing attempt.
Meanwhile, the Airbus takes off unscathed.
Eventually, the Utair flight lands safely on its second attempt.
A very scary close call.
Here’s the full video:
Source:::: Business Insider AU and You Tube
Natarajan
These Photos Speak More Words …
A doctor monitors vitals after 23 hour long heart transplant surgery in 1987. His assistant is sleeping in the corner.
The patient survived and actually outlived his doctor !!!
Source:::: Viral nova Trending
Natarajan
Stunning Aerial Photos of Brazil”s Soccer Fields …
via The Creators Project
The community surrounding ‘The Beautiful Game’ is huge, and is a unifying force for countries all over the world. All that soccer requires is a ball, a couple goals, and some players—that’s part of what makes it so brilliant.
As many cities in the World Cup’s current home country are occupied by the most famous soccer players in the world, Brazilian photographer and journalist Renato Stockler’s photo essay Terrão de Cima captures the pure democratic essence and simplicity of the soccer fields ensconced in Sao Paulo neighborhoods.
Stockler says in the project’s description that the fields he photographs, “Are a breath for the hard daily life of those who live in the outskirts of Sao Paulo. These fields show the urgency for public and communal places to practice sports, a portrait of those who fight for leisure in a city as Sao Paulo.”
The reddish dirt and uneven patches of grass that make up most of the fields are a harsh contrast to the soft greens that soccer fans are accustomed to watching. All the same, Stockler says that when the hard day’s work is at an end, it’s easy to find tight knit communities of players, friends, and family gathered around the sparse field to blow off steam.
Terrão de Cima, which loosely translates to, “The Ground from Above,” is a love letter to the rugged fields of Stockler’s home, which are fast disappearing due to land speculation.
Aerial photography is the perfect medium for the task, since it shows the incredible variance in color, shape, and texture of local soccer fields, yet also captures the players as a single unit—a culture, rather than just a bunch of people. We’re still not sure we’d want to slide tackle anyone on these fields, but we’re more than ok with ogling them from above.
via The Creators Project
via The Creators Project
via The Creators Project
via The Creators Project
via The Creators Project
via The Creators Project
via The Creators
Source:::: Business Insider .com
Natarajan
Message For the Day…” Who Is God … ” ?
What or who is God? When the answer to this question is sought, one discovers that God is the glory immanent in Nature. The earth rotates on its axis at a speed of thousand miles an hour. As a consequence, we have alternations of day and night, which helps us to live on this globe. Besides, it moves around the sun at the rate of 66,000 miles an hour, causing the seasons which bring rains for crops and vegetation which sustain human life. The earth does not profit in the least by these rotations but human beings survive, enjoy life and prosper on account of them. Nature must indeed be laughing at the sterile frenzies, the endless pursuits, and the countless miseries to which human beings submit themselves to, in their search for achieving the unachievable! You must search in Nature the sacred lessons it holds for you; then, you will understand how deep and how everlasting is the Truth that it conveys to you!
” This Bird is A SuperStar …” !!!
This bird is a superstar
Fewer than 100 pairs of Spoon-billed Sandpipers remain in the wild. Their migration is long and arduous. This is the first hand-reared bird that’s returned to breed.
The Spoon-billed Sandpiper is one of the rarest birds in the world. The bird in the image above has now become the first of a group of hand-reared birds in a special program to return to breed. The bird returned to Chukotka, Russia, where it was hatched two years ago.
Saving-Spoon-billed-Sandpiper.com tells the history of this bird:
… it is likely that fewer than 100 pairs remain in the wild.
WWT aviculturist Roland Digby has reared 24 Spoon-billed Sandpipers over the last two summers on their breeding grounds in northeastern Russia, giving them a head start to ensure they survived their crucial first days of life.
Once released, the birds migrated 5,000 miles to south Asia, facing exhaustion, starvation and illegal hunting along the way. There has been a two-year wait to see if any will survive to return to breed.
Now one of the group has been seen back at its birthplace by researchers from Birds Russia, Pavel Tomkovich and Egor Loktionov. They reported that the bird is looking heavy, indicating that she is a female carrying eggs and ready to breed for the first time.
Pavel Tomkovich of Birds Russia said:
Two years ago I attached a tiny plastic leg flag to this bird, so that we’d recognize it if it was ever seen again. The odds were severely stacked against that happening, but amazingly she was spotted, first by birdwatchers in Taiwan in April and then we see her here at her birthplace ready to have young of her own.
It’s a wonderful accomplishment by the people trying to save this bird from extinction. Congratulations to all.
Read more about this bird and its momentous return to breed from Saving-Spoon-billed-Sandpiper.com
Source:::: Earth sky News site
Natarajan
Image Of the Day… Upside-Down Rainbow !!!
upside-down rainbow. What is it?
Circumzenithal arc by Dudley Williams
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People who look up a lot may occasionally see the rainbow-like arcs depicted in the photos on this page. They’re called circumzenithal arcs, and they’re not really rainbows. Instead, they’re caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. These arcs are related to the frequently seen halos around the sun or moon. Les Cowley of the great website Atmospheric Optics says of these graceful and colorful arcs:
The circumzenithal arc, CZA, is the most beautiful of all the halos. The first sighting is always a surprise, an ethereal rainbow fled from its watery origins and wrapped improbably about the zenith. It is often described as an “upside down rainbow” by first timers. Someone also charmingly likened it to “a grin in the sky”.
Look straight up near to the zenith when the sun if fairly low and especially if sundogs are visible. The centre of the bow always sunwards and red is on the outside.
Les says that the most ideal time to see a circumzenithal arc is when the sun is at a height of 22 degrees in the sky. Look here to see Les Cowley’s illustration of the various kinds of halo phenomena, related to circumzenithal arcs. And enjoy the photos below, contributed by EarthSky friends on Facebook. Thanks to all who contributed.
Bottom line: When you see an upside-down rainbow in the sky, you are likely seeing a circumzenithal arc. It’s related the halos often seen around the sun or moon, caused by ice crystal in the upper atmosphere. The photos here are by EarthSky friends on Facebook. Thanks to all who contributed!
Gallery: Rainbows around the world
Source::::: Deborah Byrd In Earth sky news site
Natarajan
Take off with Natarajan 