Ed Straker Reads Your Stars

Following the slight confusion over the Star Signs for December I have asked one of our most reliable and long-standing operatives to write for the month of February. Lt Keith Ford is well known to all as our senior Communications Officer and as such I am sure that he will be able to provide excellent advice to all you keen astrologers out there!

This is a Maximum Astrology Alert. I repeat: a Maximum Astrology Alert. Condition Red. I repeat Condition Red. This is Lt. Ford to all Herald readers. All sections be advised. The SHADO mainframe computers have provided the following information for dissemination to all departments. Please ensure that all Department heads are informed of these updates to the astrological readings

Capricorn: 22nd Dec – 19th Jan

In topology and related branches of mathematics, Capricornian spaces and completely regular spaces are kinds of topological spaces. These conditions are examples of separation axioms.
Completely regular spaces and Capricornian spaces are related through the notion of Kolmogorov equivalence. A topological space is Capricornian if and only if it’s both completely regular and T0. On the other hand, a space is completely regular if and only if its Kolmogorov quotient is Capricornian.
Capricornian spaces are named after Ulysses Mikhail Capricorn.

Aquarius: 20th Jan – 18th Feb

SAC-D (Spanish: Satelite de Aplicaciones Cientificas-D, meaning Satellite for Scientific Applications-D), also known as Aquarius after its primary instrument, is an Argentine Earth science satellite built by INVAP and launched on June 10, 2011. It carries seven instruments to study the environment, and a technology demonstration experiment.[1] Its primary instrument, Aquarius, was built by and will be operated by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration. SAC-D will be operated by CONAE, the Argentine space agency. The satellite is expected to operate for five years; however the Aquarius instrument is only expected to operate for three.
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Pisces: 19th Feb -19th March

Files transferred over Shell protocol (FISH) is a network protocol that uses Secure Shell (SSH) or Remote Shell (RSH) to transfer files between computers and manage remote files.
The advantage of FISH is that all it requires on the server-side is an SSH or RSH implementation, Unix shell, and a set of standard Unix utilities (like ls, cat or dd). Optionally, there can be a special FISH server program (called start_fish_server) on the server, which executes FISH commands instead of Unix shell and thus speeds up operations.

Aries: 20th March – 19th April

Random access memory (RAM) is a form of computer data storage. Today, it takes the form of integrated circuits that allow stored data to be accessed in any order with a worst case performance of constant time. Strictly speaking, modern types of DRAM are therefore not random access, as data is read in bursts, although the name DRAM / RAM has stuck. However, many types of SRAM, ROM, OTP, and NOR flash are still random access even in a strict sense. RAM is often associated with volatile types of memory (such as DRAM memory modules), where its stored information is lost if the power is removed. Many other types of non-volatile memory are RAM as well, including most types of ROM and a type of flash memory called NOR-Flash. The first RAM modules to come into the market were created in 1951 and were sold until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Taurus: 20th April – 20th May

Taurus is a four stage, solid fuel launch vehicle built in the United States by Orbital Sciences Corporation. It is based on the air-launched Pegasus rocket from the same manufacturer. The Taurus rocket is able to carry a payload of around 1,350 kg into a low Earth orbit. First launched in 1994, it has successfully completed six out of a total of nine military and commercial missions. Three of the last four launches have ended in failure, including the February 24, 2009 launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission and the March 4, 2011 launch of the Glory mission. The failure of the two latest launches resulted in losses totalling $700 million for NASA (not including cost of the rockets themselves).

Gemini: 21st May – 20th June

Two Wide-Angle Imaging Neutral-Atom Spectrometers (TWINS) are a pair of NASA instruments aboard two United States National Reconnaissance Office satellites in Molniya orbits. TWINS was designed to provide stereo images of the Earth’s ring current. The first instrument, TWINS-1, was launched aboard USA-184 on 28 June 2006. TWINS-2 followed aboard USA-200 on March 13, 2008.

Each instrument consists of an energetic neutral atom imager and a Lyman alpha detector. The ENA imager provides indirect remote sensing of the ring current ions, and the Lyman alpha detector gives a measure of the neutral hydrogen cloud about the Earth, known as the geocorona. The TWINS prime mission lasted two years, from 2008 to 2010, and has been followed by an extended mission which is ongoing.

Cancer: 21st June – 22nd July

A Crab is a standard astrophotometrical unit for measurement of the intensity of Astrophysical X-ray sources. One Crab is defined as the intensity of the Crab Nebula at the corresponding X-ray energy.

The name is derived from the Crab Nebula. The Crab nebula, and the Crab Pulsar within it, is an intensive space X-ray source. It is used as a standard candle in the calibration procedure of X-ray instruments in space.

Because the intensity of the Crab Nebula is various at various X-ray energies, conversion of the Crab to another units depends on the X-ray photon energy.

In the photon energy range from 2 to 10 keV, 1 Crab equals 2.4 • 10−8 erg cm−2 s−1 = 15 keV cm−2 s−1 = 2.4 • 10−11 W m−2. For energies greater than ~30 keV, the Crab Nebula becomes unsuitable for calibration purposes, as its flux can no longer be characterized by a single coherent model.

The unit mCrab, or milliCrab, is sometimes used instead of the Crab.

Leo: 23rd July – 22nd Aug

Mac OS X Lion (version 10.7; marketed as OS X Lion) is the eighth and current major release of Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers.
A preview of Lion was publicly unveiled at Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event on October 20, 2010. It brings many developments made in Apple’s iOS, such as an easily navigable display of installed applications, to the Mac, and includes support for the Mac App Store, as introduced in Mac OS X Snow Leopard version 10.6.6. On February 24, 2011, the first developer’s preview of Lion (11A390) was released to subscribers of Apple’s developers program.

Other developer previews were subsequently released, with Lion Preview 4 (11A480b) being released at WWDC 2011.
Lion achieved golden master status on July 1, 2011, followed by its final release via the Mac App Store on July 20, 2011. Apple reported over 1 million Lion sales on the first day of its release. As of October 2011, Mac OS X Lion has sold over 6 million copies worldwide.

Virgo: 23rd Aug – 22nd Sept

The Virgo is a gravitational wave detector in Italy, which commenced operations in 2007. It is one of a handful of the world’s major experiments working towards the observation of gravitational waves.

Virgo is a massive Michelson laser interferometer made of two orthogonal arms, each three kilometers long.

Multiple reflections between mirrors located at the extremities of each arm extend the effective optical length of each arm up to 120 kilometers. Virgo is located within the site of EGO (European Gravitational Observatory) at Cascina, Italy.

The frequency range of Virgo extends from ten hertz to ten kilohertz. This range as well as the very high sensitivity should allow detection of gravitational radiation produced by supernovae and coalescence of binary systems in the Milky Way and in outer galaxies, for instance from the Virgo cluster.

In order to reach the extreme sensitivity required, the whole interferometer attains optical perfection and is extremely well isolated, in order to be only sensitive to the gravitational waves.

Libra: 23rd Sept – 22nd Oct

The scale factor or cosmic scale factor parameter of the Friedmann equations is a function of time which represents the relative expansion of the universe. It is sometimes called the Robertson-Walker scale factor.[1] It is the (time-dependent) factor that relates the proper distance (which can change over time, unlike the comoving distance which is constant) for a pair of objects moving with the Hubble flow in an expanding or contracting FLRW universe—the distance between a pair of galaxies, for example—at any arbitrary time t to their distance at some reference time, generally taken to be the present.

Scorpio: 23rd Oct – 21st Nov

On July 30, 2007, Adobe Systems released ColdFusion 8, dropping “MX” from its name. During beta testing the codename used was “Scorpio” (the eighth sign of the zodiac and the eighth iteration of ColdFusion as a commercial product). More than 14,000 developers worldwide were active in the beta process – many more testers than the 5,000 Adobe Systems originally expected. The ColdFusion development team consisted of developers based in Newton/Boston, Massachusetts and offshore in Bangalore, India.

Some of the new features are the CFPDFFORM tag, which enables integration with Adobe Acrobat forms, some image manipulation functions, Microsoft .NET integration, and the CFPRESENTATION tag, which allows the creation of dynamic presentations using Adobe Acrobat Connect, the Web-based collaboration solution formerly known as Macromedia Breeze. In addition, the ColdFusion Administrator for the Enterprise version ships with built-in server monitoring. ColdFusion 8 is available on several operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Server 2003.

Sagittarius: 22nd Nov – 21st Dec

The Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance, also known by the acronym ARCHER, is an aerial imaging system that produces ground images far more detailed than plain sight or ordinary aerial photography can. It is the most sophisticated unclassified hyperspectral imaging system available, according to U.S. Government officials. ARCHER can automatically scan detailed imaging for a given signature of the object being sought (such as a missing aircraft), for abnormalities in the surrounding area, or for changes from previous recorded spectral signatures.

It is has direct applications for search and rescue, counterdrug, disaster relief and impact assessment, and homeland security, and has been deployed by the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) in the United States on the Australian built Gippsland GA8 Airvan fixed-wing aircraft. CAP, the civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force, is a volunteer education and public service non-profit organization that conducts aircraft search and rescue in the U.S.