Where we are in the Universe . . .
You know what's been missing in my life lately? (Hmm, well, a life, but besides that.) Space geekery!
I'm on spring break this week, which really just means a little bit more time for working on term projects and a little bit more time for sleep. So my spring break bit of fun was going in to the NASM today.
Supervisor: You don't have any more exciting plans for your spring break than coming in to NASM?
Me: This is exciting! :D
I spent most of the day sorting photographs by their negative numbers and then finished up with a tiny bit of caption-checking in the database. It's not glamorous and it's not technically a whole lot more thrilling than the stuff I do at D. Oaks, except it is because it's a subject I'm actually interested in. I may not be overly fond of the insane amount of photos of dead Russians or my nemesis Wernher Von Braun, but then there's also stills from cheesy sci-fi movies and illustrations from crazy sci-fi novels and shots of the USS Enterprise arriving at NASM and WWII plane photos and random German poetry with an overabundance of exclamation points. I love this stuff! It fills me with glee. :D
On my way out, I stopped on the second floor to fangirl the Spirit of St. Louis and the Glamorous Glennis for a few minutes, as I do whenever I'm there, and then bought myself a cherry blossom t-shirt at the gift shop (woo, volunteer discount!). It was a lovely day. :)
Over the weekend, I visited my Arlington grandparents, who I also hadn't seen all term. So I was telling them about my European Adventures this summer and mentioned that I'll be going to Venice while I'm in Italy. My grandfather told me his memory of the last time he was in Venice, when he was riding on a gondola one evening, and all the gondoliers just stopped all of a sudden at the same time and they were all looking up, and my grandfather didn't know any Italian so he had no idea what any of them were saying except for one word: Sputnik.
In other space news (I am behind the times as with pretty much everything this term, but it's still cool!), a [ reverse lunar eclipse ] on February 10th (i.e., a lunar eclipse as seen from the Moon, so Earth eclipsing the Sun).
Think about it: for tens of thousands of years, humans have watched in awe as the Moon slowly gets eaten by the Earth’s shadow. Over the generations myths have been attributed to it, legends and stories told about the Moon being eaten by dragons and other fanciful tales. Eventually we learned what it really meant (the ancient Greeks knew, those clever people)… but it’s only been in the past few years that we’ve been able to be there when it happens.
~from the [ Bad Astronomy ] blog
And the name of the probe that captured the eclipse footage? Kaguya. :) (Kaguya is a Moon Princess in Japanese folklore; here's the [ tale ] at Wikipedia.)
(And while I was gathering the Kaguya links, I also saw this cool [ snapshot of galactic doom ] at Bad Astronomy.)
Somewhat less behind-the-times, NASA launched [ Kepler ] in search of Earth-like planets on March 6th:
Photo credit: [ DeepSkyJam ]
Also, 2009 is the [ International Year of Astronomy ], which means all kinds of cool exhibits and such. But in particular, I'd like to point you to [ From Earth To The Universe ] for gorgeous photos. (To get to the photos, click on For Visitors --> Tour the images. Or look to see if they are being shown anywhere near you around the world! For Visitors --> Plan your visit. I imagine they'd be even cooler in person, but sadly the exhibit is not coming to D.C.)
Here's a bit of a picspam of the pretties on From Earth To The Universe:
Coronal Loops (on the Sun):
Photo credit: Ultraviolet light by the TRACE team of the Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research and NASA.
Whirlpool Galaxy:
Photo credit: S. Beckwith for the NASA / ESA Hubble Heritage Team.
The Milky Way:
Photo credit: Eckhard Slawik.
Galactic Centre (of the Milky Way):
Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / S. Stolovy (SSC / Caltech).
Butterfly Nebula:
Photo credit: Johannes Schedler.
Okay, and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field just never gets old:
Photo credit: S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group (STScI), HST, ESA, NASA. (And click [ here ] for the ginormous original file at NASA's [ APOD ] archive.)
The Universe is just amazing. And beautiful. And aklsjhslghk. I really miss being somewhere with less light pollution.
I'm on spring break this week, which really just means a little bit more time for working on term projects and a little bit more time for sleep. So my spring break bit of fun was going in to the NASM today.
Supervisor: You don't have any more exciting plans for your spring break than coming in to NASM?
Me: This is exciting! :D
I spent most of the day sorting photographs by their negative numbers and then finished up with a tiny bit of caption-checking in the database. It's not glamorous and it's not technically a whole lot more thrilling than the stuff I do at D. Oaks, except it is because it's a subject I'm actually interested in. I may not be overly fond of the insane amount of photos of dead Russians or my nemesis Wernher Von Braun, but then there's also stills from cheesy sci-fi movies and illustrations from crazy sci-fi novels and shots of the USS Enterprise arriving at NASM and WWII plane photos and random German poetry with an overabundance of exclamation points. I love this stuff! It fills me with glee. :D
On my way out, I stopped on the second floor to fangirl the Spirit of St. Louis and the Glamorous Glennis for a few minutes, as I do whenever I'm there, and then bought myself a cherry blossom t-shirt at the gift shop (woo, volunteer discount!). It was a lovely day. :)
Over the weekend, I visited my Arlington grandparents, who I also hadn't seen all term. So I was telling them about my European Adventures this summer and mentioned that I'll be going to Venice while I'm in Italy. My grandfather told me his memory of the last time he was in Venice, when he was riding on a gondola one evening, and all the gondoliers just stopped all of a sudden at the same time and they were all looking up, and my grandfather didn't know any Italian so he had no idea what any of them were saying except for one word: Sputnik.
In other space news (I am behind the times as with pretty much everything this term, but it's still cool!), a [ reverse lunar eclipse ] on February 10th (i.e., a lunar eclipse as seen from the Moon, so Earth eclipsing the Sun).
Think about it: for tens of thousands of years, humans have watched in awe as the Moon slowly gets eaten by the Earth’s shadow. Over the generations myths have been attributed to it, legends and stories told about the Moon being eaten by dragons and other fanciful tales. Eventually we learned what it really meant (the ancient Greeks knew, those clever people)… but it’s only been in the past few years that we’ve been able to be there when it happens.
~from the [ Bad Astronomy ] blog
And the name of the probe that captured the eclipse footage? Kaguya. :) (Kaguya is a Moon Princess in Japanese folklore; here's the [ tale ] at Wikipedia.)
(And while I was gathering the Kaguya links, I also saw this cool [ snapshot of galactic doom ] at Bad Astronomy.)
Somewhat less behind-the-times, NASA launched [ Kepler ] in search of Earth-like planets on March 6th:
Photo credit: [ DeepSkyJam ]
Also, 2009 is the [ International Year of Astronomy ], which means all kinds of cool exhibits and such. But in particular, I'd like to point you to [ From Earth To The Universe ] for gorgeous photos. (To get to the photos, click on For Visitors --> Tour the images. Or look to see if they are being shown anywhere near you around the world! For Visitors --> Plan your visit. I imagine they'd be even cooler in person, but sadly the exhibit is not coming to D.C.)
Here's a bit of a picspam of the pretties on From Earth To The Universe:
Coronal Loops (on the Sun):
Photo credit: Ultraviolet light by the TRACE team of the Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research and NASA.
Whirlpool Galaxy:
Photo credit: S. Beckwith for the NASA / ESA Hubble Heritage Team.
The Milky Way:
Photo credit: Eckhard Slawik.
Galactic Centre (of the Milky Way):
Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / S. Stolovy (SSC / Caltech).
Butterfly Nebula:
Photo credit: Johannes Schedler.
Okay, and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field just never gets old:
Photo credit: S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group (STScI), HST, ESA, NASA. (And click [ here ] for the ginormous original file at NASA's [ APOD ] archive.)
The Universe is just amazing. And beautiful. And aklsjhslghk. I really miss being somewhere with less light pollution.