Birdoday

Wait. What? Yeah, I haven't done a Caturday post in the past two weeks. Not that it matters, my cats have been boring, lazy, cute fluffballs. Nothing to add there. I'd actually rather show you this funny video. See, I was watching the Science Channel the other night and saw a special on New Zealand and how its 'birdland.' or at least was, before explorers brought rodents. These parrots, Kakapo (meaning Night Parrot in Maori), were featured prominently. This isn't the video I saw, but its sufficiently cute/awesome. Anyways, these cute, flightless, fat parrots reminded my of my fat cat, Reyn. They are pretty cute, but they are endangered....

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Posted in Birds,Caturday,Life 33 comments

I Like This Video

So, in keeping with my Friday tradition of posting things that I personally like, related to astronomy or not, here is this weeks thing (that just so happens to be related to astronomy.) : In The Land Of The Northern Lights from Ole Christian Salomonsen on Vimeo. A friend of mine in the astronomy club sent me this video. I also noticed it slowly spreading across the internet on a few sites. But if you haven't seen it yet, it is wonderful. On the video page, the guy that made this video provides a great write up on how he made this video. It includes over 50,000 still images over 6 months. The movement is similar to what you would see if you were there watching it in person. This is thanks to the time lapse and speed of the video. It is amazing to see these auroral snakes move across the...

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Posted in Aurora,Northern Lights 24 comments

Farewell to Stardust

This is semi-related to last couple of posts, specifically A Dusty Blog Post and Mercurial Monday. And a bit of a eulogy to a fantastic and amazing spacecraft that provided groundbreaking science for 12 years. One of the mission's I learned a little bit more about the science behind was Stardust-NExT. A spacecraft that undertook a fascinating mission in comet exploration. The probe is now burning the last of its residual fuel and is being decommissioned about 312 million miles away from Earth. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent these last commands today at about 7 PM EST (March 24). [I found it a sobering moment amongst my birthday cele...

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Posted in Asteroids,Comets,Cosmic Dust,EPOXI,Stardust 22 comments

A Dusty Blog Post

Dust, it's everywhere! From the Earth-based perspective, dust is that layer of film made up of dirt, mostly biological, that settles on things in the corners of your room, or floating in the air reflecting light. On a cosmological scale, dust is made up of a huge variety of materials, literally just about everything in the Universe. And once cosmic dust settles, it forms stars and galaxies. Cosmic dust also has a pretty large range in size, from just a few molecules up to a couple microns (µm). There really is no upper limit, but after a certain point, things obviously start to become asteroids and comets and meteoroids and such. There is a...

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Posted in Asteroids,Comets,Cosmic Dust,Intergalactic,Meteoroids,Saturn 37 comments

Delayed Cosmic Posting

No time to write the cosmic dust article right now. Since both of my parents are working on my birthday, they are deciding to do everything tonight. I should have it up either late tonight or tomorrow, the new poll will be up in a couple of minutes. I have also spent most of the day messing around with Firefox 4, which just dropped. I am enjoying it so far, just a little bit to get used to. I do suggest the Omnibar add-on if you get it though. That is probably the only Chrome feature I have really enjoys and am happy to see it implemented in Firef...

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Posted in Cosmic Dust,Firefox 24 comments

Mercurial Monday

I promised to give an overview of my trip to the Applied Physics Lab (APL) at Johns Hopkins University on Saturday, so here we go. The reason I went to the APL was for the Thrill of Discovery Workshop. Five hours of professional development in space science and engineering supported by NASA's Discovery Program. Though, it ended up being 6 hours as we got there half an hour early and it ran over by half an hour. There was approximately 3 hours in a classroom with hands on learning experiences and other educational tools. Then there was approximately 2 hours of lecture in an auditorium, with Q&A after each speaker. The rest of the time was filled with delays and stuff, I didn't really mind. So this workshop was happening at 4 different locations across the United States, the Jet Propulsion...

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Posted in Ceres,Dawn,Mercury,MESSENGER,NASA,Vesta 25 comments

Vernal Equinox Today!

At 23:21 UT (19:21 PM Eastern Standard Time), spring will officially be here for the northern hemisphere! It's been nice spring weather here for the past couple of days, but it's nice to have it be official. Although, I guess some people argue that it's really the middle of spring. I suppose both could be right, it's a matter of perspective and seasons are loosely based anyways. Wintery days can occur in Fall or Spring, and Fall can have Summer or Wintery days, and so forth. It tends to be more of an 'I know it when I see it' concept. That said, what makes the Vernal Equinox special is that it is a midpoint in the Sun's journey across the sky....

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Posted in Equinox 43 comments