Sudden Futue Singularities: Not what we need with a HST proposal deadline coming up...

Currently I have little time for blogging, having (a) just finished off (and had accepted) my NGC 6810 paper and (b) just started on HST Cycle 16 observing proposal creation, so I've only just noticed that this blog seems to have disappeared from the web (blogspot server problems?).





The shown are NGC 6810, taken from the paper. The image on the left is NGC 6810 as seen in the near-ultraviolet (NUV) and optical (specifically blue is the XMM-Newton Optical monitor UVW1 band, green is a U band filter and red is R band), while the image on the right contrasts the stellar light (optical R band shown in blue) with ionized gas at T~ 10000 K (continuum-subtracted H-alpha + [N II], shown in red) and soft X-ray emission (green, also mainly ionized gas, except now at T ~ 4000000 K).

As a test that its still working here are some interesting things I read about on coffee break this morning:

1. A conference proceedings on arXiv (in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, cross-posted to Astronomy) discusses the possibility of Sudden Future Singularities (see gr-qc/0701056), which would be bad news for those of us with up-coming proposal deadlines. Time runs faster than I like at the moment. The paper is way over my head, but I get the impression that a SFS is NOT actually a sudden discontinuous jump into the future, despite the cool name (get writing you SciFi authors).
2. Software coding errors, specifically over-writing the wrong memory addresses, may be responsible for the long-serving Mars Global Surveyor's sudden demise last year. Space.com has the story.
3. Rosa Williams makes the news with N19, a superbubble in the Small Magellanic Cloud. And if you name is Sally or You-Hua, I haven't given up on writing up that LMC superbubble data... I'll do it soon. Just after the proposal deadlines and grant reports due in January are done. Honest.