Tonight at approximately midnight, stargazers will be treated to a rare sight. Jupiter will be in near perfect opposition to the Earth, and at it’s closest in decades. Take a look to the sky tonight and the brightest thing you’ll see – besides our moon – is the red colored gas giant.

Jupiter's giant red spot, as seen from the unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft. (NASA photo.)

While the planets cross once every thirteen months, their orbits are not perfect circles, so it’s of varying distances. Tonight marks the closest the planet will pass opposed to the sun since 1963, and it won’t align as so again until 2022 as Jupiter completes its nearly 12 year orbit. Tonight, it will be as much as 46.6 million miles closer than than usual for this sort of alignment, making it easily visible to the naked eye and outshining all of the stars in our view. (It will be at a near perfect minimum of about 365 million miles away; as opposed to it’s maximum distance of approximately 601 million miles – a 40% difference!) Jupiter will rise over the horizon beginning at sunset and will be at its closest, and brightest, at around midnight. While tonight is the best viewing in decades, Jupiter will remain close for the next few weeks if you miss your chance at midnight.

Taken from his amateur back-yard observatory right here in downtown Buffalo, local photographer Alan Friedman has an absolutely awesome shot of Jupiter from just three weeks ago on his website, here. (So awesome, it was was featured on NASA’s Science News website.) While you’re waiting for midnight, check out some more of his work at his home page, avertedimagination.com.

On a related note, another once in a lifetime alignment occurs tonight with Uranus also at opposition to our sun, about one degree apart from Jupiter in the sky. It is a rare coincidence that both planets nearly align in opposition from the sun at the same time. This one however will be barely visible, if at all, to the naked eye, but even the most basic hobby telescope should be enough to catch a glimpse. So while you’re taking a look at Jupiter, you’ll might be able to find an emerald green point of light that is Uranus near by.

Not Artvoice's network closet. Not far off though.

Although this made-up holiday will have its 11th anniversary tomorrow, it’s still relatively unknown. The last Friday in July has been dubbed International System Administrator Appreciation day. (As you may guess, it’s creator was an under-appreciated system administrator.)

While technically a system administrator is somebody who, well – administers computer systems – for the purpose of the holiday it’s a little more generic. We’ll throw tech support, desktop support, network admins, and general IT guys all under the umbrella, because chances are your organization has some, and chances are most days of the year nobody notices them until something breaks. As a whole we expect pressing “send” on that e-mail results in it being delivered. We flip out when an error pops up, but wouldn’t imagine saying thanks for when it goes through. Chances are the more skilled and harder working your sysadmin is, the LESS you notice them. When something does go wrong however, they’re expected to know it all – immediately – and fix it with or without the proper resources to do so. (Don’t forget the “drop everything because my problem is the most important problem” attitude, we totally love that and really have nothing else to do!)

In over a decade of sysadmin, support, and IT roles in three different organizations, I’ve seen a lot. From orange juice in the keyboard to peanut butter in the CD-ROM drive, spending hours on a job that should have taken minutes thanks to “secret” porn stashes clogging the works (naming the folder “business documents” doesn’t fool anyone) – and perhaps my all time favorite which occurred right here in the AV office – having an iMac spontaneously explode in my face, billowing a puff of pungent blue electronic smoke into the air. (As the old geek adage goes: electronics run on magic smoke; if you let the smoke out, they no longer work!)

Mountains of dust and filth just under the hood are a common system administrator hazard.

I’ve fixed machines that would fit in better at the Computer History Museum than on an office desk. I’ve fashioned replacement printer parts out of paper clips. Used soldiering irons and a jeweler’s drill to do things you aren’t supposed to be able to do with circuit boards to bring them back to life. (Thanks, counterfeit Chinese capacitors.) Taught a certain upstate NY ex-mayor how to use his computer once he no longer had aides to send his e-mail for him. Stuck dead hard drives in freezers to recover manuscripts bytes at a time – that deadline with the publisher was looming, no time to waste on nonsense like backups! Battled spammers, put in 20 hour emergency marathon sessions responding to virus outbreaks – fueled only by pizza and energy drinks – and spent more Saturday nights in server rooms than I’d like to admit.

I’m not complaining; if anything the surprise challenges in the field are endless and the solutions are often creative, which in itself can be rewarding. But still, it is always nice to hear “thanks.”

So, take a moment tomorrow, and let your local computer geek know he or she is appreciated.

If you’d like to find out more, visit the International System Administrator’s Appreciation Day website.

For the sake of full disclosure: I am myself the system administrator here at Artvoice. (Actually, I’m more like the sysadmin, IT department, network admin, webmaster, desktop support, and computer programmer.) To my co-workers, I’m not here fishing for compliments – I do feel more appreciated in this environment than some I’ve been in! I’m doing my part to spread the word about this “holiday” for the sake of my peers, because many are much less fortunate, to which I can still relate!

This holiday season, remember a passed on loved one by sending a message to heaven. You’ll need to be long on faith, but you’ll have to keep your message short – 140 characters to be precise – which shouldn’t be an issue in this age of Twitter and text messaging, right?

The UK based Bereavement Register will provide the service via the Deep Space Communications Network (DSCN) at the Kennedy Space Station. (Ironically, the Bereavement Register is normally in the business of preventing communications with the deceased. Their “day job” is assisting British families with putting a stop to direct mail to those no longer with us.)

The bereaved can visit www.rememberingyouthischristmas.com and enter a Twitter-style message that will be beamed to the cosmos. They’ll compile the messages and fire them into space in one shot on Christmas day, using state of the art transmitters and a five-meter parabolic dish. (The dish pictured is actually a much bigger 70 meter model, part of the similarly named but not to be confused NASA Deep Space Network, or DSN.) The transmission will be aimed at an “empty” area of space, ensuring the transmission traveling at the speed of light expands outwardly, unimpeded.

For the interested geek, they have chosen a comma separated/tab delimited file to transmit – clearly a choice compatible with the great database in the sky.

Let’s hope the Lifeboat Foundation doesn’t find out, as this being a flagrant affront to their mission of keeping Earth off alien civilizations’ radar. Sending messages to nowhere may be a gesture appreciated by your dearly departed, but you never know how a hostile alien nation in the transmission path may interpret the message billions of light years along its way. That is, if they aren’t too busy responding to Craigslist ads that have gone out on the DSCN previously.

Oh, you’ve got until December 20th to add your message.

While it may sound like a headline straight off the presses at The Onion, I assure you it is not. NASA will be “bombing” the Moon tomorrow morning – not once, but twice. To be accurate, there is no bomb per se. The NASA LCROSS mission will slam a spacecraft into the Moon’s Cabeus crater at 7:31AM EST time on Friday.

The mission will happen in two stages: a rocket delivering the impact payload will send the payload craft at close to 6,000 miles per hour into the crater. The delivery rocket, specially equipped to detect the presence of water will chase behind, fly through the debris cloud, and then smack into the crater approximately four minutes later.  The hope is, that by kicking up enough Moon stuff into the “air,” scientists will be able to detect the presence of water that may be hidden just under the surface.  The crater was chosen as a likely candidate because it lives in the shadows and hasn’t seen sunlight in perhaps millions of years.  It’s cold temperatures may have allowed for frozen water to remain locked away, whereas moisture exposed to the heat and light would have boiled off into space countless ages ago. It’s likely the moisture itself was delivered from violent impacts in the past, when ice laden meteorites crashed into the lunar surface.

So what’s the point?  The discovery of water on the Moon may mean it can support life. Not life native to the Moon of course, but it could help support human life. A “Space Base” on the Moon may some day make use of the moisture for drinking water, and even splitting it into its constituent parts to make breathable air. If moisture is detected, NASA has plans for follow up missions to drill several feet into the Moon to get a better look.

Aside from being able to detect moisture, the chase craft is also equipped with high definition video cameras. NASA has an entire event planned, including a stream of the live footage. The event can be seen on the NASA channel on cable, or live at the NASA LCROSS website. It begins at 6:15AM. The debris cloud from the impact is expected to be large enough that it should be visible to the amateur astronomer with a typical hobby telescope.

Just some final notes: For those of you who spend more time hugging trees than reading science books, please take a moment to put this impact in context. The force of the impact in relation to the size of the Moon is on the order of a mosquito hitting the windshield of a dump truck at highway speed. It pales in comparison to the impacts that have rained down on the surface of the moon for millions of years.  This will not harm the Moon – how do you think the giant crater NASA is targeting got there in the first place? And… for the conspiracy theorists who think it’s cover to test weapon capabilities – I’m not even going to try to convince you otherwise. We already know sending things to the Moon is ripe for spinning convoluted tales…

I’ll leave you with this prophetic clip from Mr. Show.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj7vMKy4EI