Courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day, we have actual images of the Philae lander in its resting place on Comet C67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and you definitely will want to not only click on that link, but on the image therein to
Category: Astronomy
The cosmic ballet goes on
I had intended to post this earlier, but life got in the way, mostly in the form of an illness that caused me to cancel out on two students this weekend. ‘Tis the season…
Anyway, there is a cool event going on tomorrow (Monday, December 7th) during daylight hours, one that may be worth going out at a specific set of times to try and see. Venus is going to pass behind
Too cool, part 29: Flatulent Enceladus
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a masterpiece of subtlety, belying the fascination to be found in one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus is a small frozen satellite, actually a thick crust of ice over what is believed to be a global ocean atop a rocky core. In other words, a hard center suspended in a ‘water’
Let’s hope they’re cute
For one or two posts a year, I have to touch on the idea of extra-terrestrial life, and this particular facet of the topic I’ve mentioned before, but I’m going into it a bit deeper this time. Given the extremely low likelihood of such an event coming to pass, this post counts as far more attention than is warranted, but if I only tackled relevant and important topics, I’d lose
They’re coming… maybe
I suddenly realized that the term, “meteorology,” with its inherent inaccuracies, must have come from the predictions for meteor showers, since only once has the claim of a “good storm” come true in my experience. An awful lot of times, when I’ve gone out specifically to view one during peak times, I’ve seen nothing.
With that pessimistic opening, I can say that
Monday color 37+
So, the important stuff first: with this post I surpass all previous records for posting within a year, and we’re only in mid-October! Everything past this point is gravy, and even if I stop posting now, I’ve still got that accomplishment under my belt. It’s a warm fuzzy feeling, let me tell you.
A lot of this is due, naturally, to starting this whole “Monday color”
Some time later
I mentioned how well I fared with the lunar eclipse a few posts ago, but as it turned out Jim Kramer (of the Alaskan posts) did a hell of a lot better that evening. Not so well later on, however,
Go NASA!
Just in case you haven’t heard the news…
Yes, I know the Mars Rovers had nothing to do with the finding, that being accomplished by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But I don’t have a model of that one…
Never trust a trend
That’s what meteorologists rely on, you know…
We’ve had rain and overcast for three days straight, with the same thing predicted for the next week. Seriously. I looked at the skies a few times over, just in case we’d get a break in the clouds sometime during the total lunar eclipse, but nothing even slightly promising. So I went to bed early.
Woke up, rolled over, and caught
Hey! I just saw a UFO!
Well, very briefly, anyway. Almost as soon as I got the binoculars on it, it became Identified.
Here’s the whole, sordid story. The Girlfriend was outside at roughly 10:25 pm EDT chatting with a neighbor when they saw the light in the sky, and came in to summon me, telling me to get the binoculars. By the time I came out it had disappeared, but I got specific location and directions from them