Too cool, part 45: Lunation libration animation

I’ve mentioned, many times, the curious wobble of the moon known as libration, and of course the different features and details you can see when photographing anything other than a completely full moon. Now, courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day comes a wicked animation of it, with lots of additional details.


The video was created by NASA’s read more

Too cool, part 44: “Chopsy”

First off, I apologize for anyone who’s ever seen this before, but not that much, because chances are you can watch it again without being bored. As internet popularity goes it’s a little old, but I doubt it received as much attention as some woman j’accusing a white cat (yes that’s a word.) I’m still not going to have a lot to post in the foreseeable future, read more

Too cool, part 43: Something for the solstice


Not only are we going to cross the line on December 21st with the winter solstice, so the days start getting longer thereafter, but we’re going to have an interesting conjunction visible in the early evening sky. Courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day (among numerous other sources read more

Storytime 51

Confession time: I started this back in the spring, and attempted to follow through, but timing and conditions did not mesh well. I include it here as a long Storytime post, partially because I already have the last one of the year written, but also just to clear it out of the queue. The previous draft of this post was last saved April 4th of this year, to give you the timeframe. read more

Too cool, part 41: Can’t get much smaller

I know, I just did a ‘Too Cool’ post, but then I came across this and it certainly deserves to be in here. Neatorama linked me over to an article on Quartz about a rather intriguing accomplishment in macro work, which is that little purple dot in the center of the image below, because this is apparently a single atom, captured with a conventional camera as well.

read more

Too cool, part 40: Red sprites in incredible detail


Astronomy Picture of the Day today featured a confusing and abstract image, because it’s something probably never seen in this detail before: a collection of red sprites above an active thunderstorm.

Here’s the deal. Occasionally, waaayyyy above the tops of the clouds on some thunderstorms, there is an additional discharge – actually, two different kinds, the other being read more

Too cool, part 39

Just a quick one here, but check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day from Friday. It features an image of a meteoroid striking the moon during the total phase of the lunar eclipse the other night. This is pretty lucky timing, because had it occurred during any phase that had full sunlight on that portion, it would read more

Too cool, part 38: “All Hallows Read”

First off, I’m a little behind where I want to be in posting, but that’s because of the exhibit that I was trying to finish and it’s done now (if that ‘sticky’ post up there isn’t enough of a clue.) So this is a follow-up post to Halloween, and a practice that we were alerted to by read more

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