Meet India’s Earth Warriors – Sanctuary/RBS Wildlife awards 2009

India’s nature has many champions. Often they go unheard of or unrecognized.

Fortunately, we have the Sanctuary/Royal Bank of Scotland (earlier ABN AMRO) Wildlife Awards who recognise people from all walks of life. 2009 was the tenth year this sterling award recognised Indians for their contribution to India’s nature and wildlife.

From the high-level executive who plays an important role in policy and resource allocation to the academics who have devoted their lives to India’s biodiversity to the oft-forgotten wildlife warden or forester to the young scientist burning to contribute his bit.  All these, and more, are honoured by the Sanctuary/RBS awards.

This year (2009) the 2009 Sanctuary/RBS Awards prizes went to :-

The Lifetime Service Award went to Brijendra Singh who has kept Corbett safe for over four decades!

The Wildlife Service awards went to Prabir Kumar Palei of Simlipal Tiger Reserve, Narhari Pandurang Bagrao who restored the damaged forests of Shahapur in Thane, Paresh Chandrakant Parob for his fierce commitment to the Goa forest lands under his control and his courage in the face of powerful vested interests, Drs Divya Mudappa and TR Shankar Raman for their exceptional contribution to saving the Western Ghats and Mike Pandey for his wonderful wildlife films which brought environment into the homes of the common Indian through DD.

The Young Naturalists award went to Prosper S Marak, Aamod Zambre and Vishal Bhave.

Prosper Marak has changed the face of Meghalaya's forests with his activism.

Aamod Zambre is a champion of scorpions.

Some of you may remember Aamod from my post on him and his friend Chintan Sheth. They are definitely living up to their promise and potential!

Vishal Bhave is doing path breaking studies of the sea slugs on our shores.

More power to these young naturalists of India!

Vijay Pinjarkar and the Nagpur Times of India won the Wind in the Wings Award for his brilliant investigative stories and his dogged pursuit of those who would violate the environmental and conservation laws of the land.

The Green Teacher awarsdwas won by Dr MR & Dr (Mrs) Sarah Almeida for nurturing, guiding and shaping young minds to explore and understand the mysterious world of plants.

Read more about them on the original post on the Sanctuary Asia website.

My New Year resolution – New Horizons!

Strangely for a blog purporting itself to be about terrestrial nature, I found my interests this month exploring the Cosmos and our Universe, vast and mysterious beyond belief. Believing this to be a genuine topic for this blog – my travails in outer space, I decided to

WISH ALL MY READERS A HAPPY NEW YEAR

with a resolution that suits my change of lifestyle this year from military duties to study leave.

I promise this year that I will explore new horizons and like the space craft which has reached nearer Pluto than Earth, go where I (man) have (has) never gone before.

Hope you join me on this epic adventure of discovery in 2010 by reading The ButterflyDiaries!

New Horizons - challenging our imagination and inspiring the world!

Learn more about New Horizons here :

*  Wired Magazine – Space Probe gets halfway to Pluto in record time!

*  NASA – New Horizons Pluto Kuiper Belt Flyby.

* Wikipedia – New Horizons.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/space-probe-gets-halfway-to-pluto-in-record-time/

Supporting Sahana!

I had a great time interacting with the SahanaPy folks  and the young Turks from Bikaner at FOSS.IN 2009!  I identify most closely with that aspect of FOSS.

Sahana is a free disaster management software which helps us mitigate human grief in the aftermath of a disaster. Great guys doing great work!

Another rant of mine about FOSS was that T-shirts were not to be had! I mean I can’t  barge into a double-Greek, geek session on GNOME/MAEMO/KDE and pick up a Tshirt. Not quite the thing I do!

So the next best thing is to order a T-shirt for myself which @ajuonline was kind enough to help me with.

So here’s my snap in token support of Sahana…oops SahanaPy!

Supporting SahanaPy

Another reason I like Sahana – thats my niece’s name!

Looking into the distant past – the Ultra Deep Field.

This is truly the only way to travel into the past!

The time machine - Hubble Space Telescope.

The image

The Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax. This image was created, or rather composited, from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003 through to January 16, 2004.

Locating the Ultra Deep Field!

The unique feature of this image is that it is the deepest image of the Universe ever taken, looking back approximately 13 billion years. It is being to search for galaxies that existed between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The image was taken in a section of the sky which had a low density of nearby bright stars. This low density allowed the light from more distant parts  of space to penetrate to Earth. It provided much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects.

The image below contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies!

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

The galaxies are so distant that from the red shift of their light it is calculated that the light began its journey at a period of time between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang.

We are looking through a time machine at events of 13 billion years ago. What the condition there is now, we can come to know only after another 13 billion  years have passed.

Truly, the awesome time scale, the massive number of galaxies just in this one shot and the fact that we saw something which happened so very, very long ago is truly mind-blowing.

See more images here!

The video

As if this image was not amazing enough, Mike Gillis of Pennsylvania State University created an animation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Using the measured redshift of all 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, he extrapolated the location of each galaxy in the field and created a 3D flythrough.

Tony Darnell who runs an amazing astronomy video collection on Youtube wrote a short script of the history of the deep field images, wrapped it around the fly-through and put it up on Youtube here. You can also view it below though in a smaller window.

Every galaxy in the image is in its proper distance as viewed from the telescope line of sight.

Credits – Jeremy A. in this post on his blog ‘The life of a priest is HELL” brought the video to my notice.