Wildfire!

Debi's a member of Emergency Animal Rescue, and this evening she got a call from the supervisor. It seems there was a fire, a big one, and not that far from our house (although the supervisor only knew generally where it was. We were asked to make a run out to the area and check it out.

So off we went, in a big hurry because the supervisor's information was quite alarming. After we drove out of our valley, we expected to be able to see the smoke plume (and if it was really a big fire, we would have). But there was no plume anywhere in sight. We drove to within about 2 miles of the fire before we saw any sign of it at all, and even then all we could see was a layer (trapped by a thermocline, most likely) of hazy brown smoke. It didn't look like an active or large fire.

In Deerhorn Valley there's a fire station, and we stopped there to get a little information from a volunteer. He told us exactly where the fire was, and told us that he believed it was under control. The location he gave us was only about three miles down the road, so we went off to see for ourselves.

Our route took us from Honey Springs Road to Deerhorn Valley Road, then three miles or so to Manzanitas Road. At that intersection we could actually see where the fire had burned, right next to a large electrical substation. There was a tanker plane circling overhead, a firefighting helicopter hovering over the burned area, at least 25 or 30 fire crew working on the ground, and several pieces of equipment (pumpers, dozers, etc.) parked around the area. Nobody had been evacuated, and the prevailing wind would have taken the fire over uninhabited areas toward Barrett Lake. From what we could see the fire was out and under control.

Whew!

After we got home, I got out my maps and did some measuring. That fire was only 6.5 miles from our home as the crow flies, though it was over 25 miles by the very indirect roads. That's close enough to be a major concern to us, had the conditions been hot, dry, and windy (in the wrong direction). As it was, we really weren't in any danger at all.

One thing that was very nice to see: firefighters were all over this fire, and apparently very quickly. By eyeball, I'd guess there was 10 to 15 acres burned; that goes very quickly in the chapparal. Those firefighters got very quickly to an area far more remote than our home. That's a nice feeling...

APOD

APOD brings us...

What has this supernova left behind? As little as 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC) first reached planet Earth. The LMC is a close galactic neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy and the rampaging explosion front is now seen moving out - destroying or displacing ambient gas clouds while leaving behind relatively dense knots of gas and dust. What remains is one of the largest supernova remnants in the LMC: N63A. Many of the surviving dense knots have been themselves compressed and may further contract to form new stars. Some of the resulting stars may then explode in a supernova, continuing the cycle. Pictured above is a close-up of one of the largest remaining knots of dust and gas in N63A taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. N63A spans over 25 light years and lies about 150,000 light years away toward the southern constellation of Dorado.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Rhea

Cassini brings us another spectacular image from the Saturn system:

Saturn's brightly sunlit moon Rhea commands the foreground in this image from Cassini. The planet's splendid rings are discernible in the background. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

The spacecraft was just above the ringplane when it acquired this image, and thus captured the darkened appearance of the dense B ring when viewed with sunlight filtered through the rings. From this perspective, bright areas in the rings are regions of low density, containing very small particles that effectively scatter light toward Cassini.

North on Rhea is up and rotated about 25 degrees to the left. This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Rhea. The right side of Rhea is overexposed.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 540,000 kilometers (340,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 110 degrees. The image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Quote for the day

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

   Hannah More