John Carlos Baez

Ouch! The most accurate standard of time in the USA may have gone down! Yup, a bunch of atomic clocks in Boulder, Colorado may have lost power. Luckily they have others... and I guess if those fail, there are plenty of atomic clocks elsewhere. "At initial power loss, there was no immediate impact to the NIST atomic time scale or distribution services because the projects are afforded standby power generators. However, we now have strong evidence one of the crucial generators has failed. In the downstream path is the primary signal distribution chain, including to the Boulder Internet Time Service. Another campus building houses additional clocks backed up by a different power generator; if these survive it will allow us to re-align the primary time scale when site stability returns without making use of external clocks or reference signals."

NTP at NIST Boulder has lost power - NANOG - lists.nanog.org

Anyone know the latest news? This is from 7:28 am December 20th, presumably Mountain Standard Time.

Brent Mckean captured this amazing moonlit scene with three combined exposures on an icy winter morning in Manitoba, Canada. The colorful rings are a corona caused by diffraction by ice crystals near the direction of the Moon. Outside those rings, a 22-degree halo was created by moonlight refracting through ice crystals shaped like hexagonal prisms. On the left and right are 'moon dogs', caused by light refracting through thin, flat, 6-sided ice crystals. At the top and bottom of the 22-degree halo are 'upper and lower tangent arcs', created by moonlight refracting through nearly horizontal hexagonal ice prisms. A few minutes later the halo and arcs disappeared and the sky returned to normal -- with the exception of a single faint moon dog. Image source:

APOD: 2020 February 24 - Moon Corona, Halo, and Arcs over Manitoba

A different astronomy and space science related image is featured each day, along with a brief explanation.