shanemcdonald.org

The Space Shuttle Endeavour has made its final night time launch from the Kennedy Space Center on the East coast of Florida. The Space Shuttle is now on a 13-day mission to rendezvous with the ISS (International Space Station).

This was the final night launch for NASA , as there are only 4 more space shuttle missions after this one, with all of the remaining shuttle launches taking place in daylight hours.

Now that the Space Shuttle is in orbit, we will once again have a chance to get sightings of the ISS and Space Shuttle over Ireland. If you are up on Tuesday Morning at 6:20am you will see the space station cross the Irish skies and the space shuttle will only be 5 mins behind it crossing Ireland at 6:25am. The next time we see the ISS and Space Shuttle in the Irish skies, they will have docked and it will be a merged ISS+Space Shuttle which will be visible in the skies.

I have uploaded the times of the Space Station and Space Shuttle sightings for early Feb based on Sightings for Waterford, Ireland.

At about 6pm today, a meteorite exploded over Ireland and was spotted from Cork to Donegal.

At 6pm on Wednesday 3rd Feb, emergency services all over the country received calls from people who said that there was an explosion in the skies over Ireland and that fiery debris was spotted falling from the skies. Smoke and heat trails were left in the skies for 10-20 minutes after the even as the ionised air was affected by the intense heat of the meteorite. Some people though planes had crashed and that the debris flying through the sky was aircraft engines.

People playing golf in Kerry reported it and at the same time people driving in Tullamore could see the same fire in the sky as the meteorite which would have been about 4 to 7 feet in size hit the atmosphere at hundreds of miles an hour. It would have broken into a few major bits as it fell to earth.

If anyone saw this they can place a “Fireball Report” on the Astronomy Ireland website, www.astronomy.ie and the search is now on for the pieces which fell to earth. Pieces of meteorite can sell for more than the price of gold. If you have pictures of the meteorite or video of the meteorite there are many media agencies, including RTE who are looking for spottings of the meteorite.

I have placed some YouTube Video of the actual Meteor which exploded in the skies below.

Unfortunately, I was driving south at the time and didn’t see a thing!!

Today, at 11:20 the popular and well moderated message boards at Boards.ie was attacked. At present the source of this attack is under investigation but it is known to be external to Ireland. The website was taken down by the staff at boards.ie and the boards data did not go missing as a result of the attack but the boards were taken down as a security measure.

In this attack on the boards.ie website, some data from the database, including some usernames, email addresses and security protected passwords were accessed. An email has been sent out to all boards.ie members and they have changed passwords on the system. The danger is that if you use the same email address on other websites – you should change that password now for your security. It is never a good idea to use the same password across all your online systems.

I think boards.ie did the right thing by advising people, alerting the Gardai and data protection commissioner and also were on Today FMs Matt Cooper show.

I hope they catch the hackers responsible – sending a strong message to them!