On Friday, September 6th, at 11:27 PM EDT, NASA will be launching the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) satellite from the Wallops Island launch facility on the Virginia peninsula. Viewers on the east coast of the US may be able to see it as it heads towards lunar orbit, since night launches allow the exhaust plume to be seen from great distances.
Author: Al Denelsbeck
Doing the fartsy thing
No, the title does not mean last night was burrito night – it just means that, since I don’t do the artsy thing, this must be something else.
In the past several days, my right arm has been bothering me due largely to wielding the camera and flash bracket one-handed, often in awkward positions, but also from several demanding chores. I’ve been trying to let it heal, but that means
Dropout
There’s another gout of photos coming shortly, but this one needed to stand on its own.
This morning was rather humid, and in chasing pics among the dew I came across this suspended drop. My initial images indicated I should take a closer look, and thus, we can now see the unfortunate nucleus of the droplet. Some species of flying ant had been captured by a spider, probably not too long ago,
You go, Randall
xkcd is great today:
Ophrys apifera.
Yes, I read xkcd before Why Evolution Is True, but the latter has more detail on the whole subject.
Couldn’t hurt
At roughly 8 pm tonight (or I guess I should say August 31st, since this will undoubtedly post the next day,) The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog mentioned a campaign where a vaccine is donated to a child in an underdeveloped country for every comment made on participating blogs. Known as the Shot@Life campaign, they feature a different post every day for a month, from different bloggers.
Which
Makmende amerudi!
I said I’d be coming back to this you were a fool to doubt me. The song I’m eventually going to get to was responsible for introducing me to the previously featured video by the same band, but has a great backstory itself.
“Go ahead make my day,” was a meme before the term had even been adopted, and before the intersnarl existed, courtesy of Clint Eastwood/Dirty
Booger nights
I am not going to apologize for what is to come I am only going to warn you. This post contains graphic images that are probably just fine for children (because they’re usually fascinated with this kind of stuff,) but may gross out the adult who realizes what they’re looking at. If that isn’t enough, some of the text might assist.
The area where I live is apparently ideal for gastropods,
Les chats du biologique
Yeah, that’s probably nonsense, but I had to pass this one along. When preparing to shoot the illustrating image for the previous post, I was doing lighting and pose tests. Kaylee (the one in the back) will hold still and can even be convinced to look interested with the right approach – obviously not this one – while Little Girl (the pressure is on to switch her name to “Zoe”
Book review: The Selfish Gene
When this book was first published, I was 10 years old, in that directionless, awkward stage between playing Bionic Man and shooting Stormtroopers with my blaster, so if you want to consider this review ill-timed that’s fine with me. There is likely nothing I say here that hasn’t been said before, but that’s probably true of the entire blog anyway. I also need to note that the
A whooshing noise high overhead
Following links just now, I began reading a post on what Vanessa Williams discovered about her DNA. The money quote:
My DNA breaks down as follows: I’m 23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% Togo, 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese.
Now, I can’t wait to go to Ghana and Cameroon and Togo and Senegal — it’s a great opportunity