Gegarin was the first, back in 1961
When like Icarus, undaunted, he climbed to reach the sun
And he knew he might not make it for it's never hard to die
But he lifted off the pad and rode that fire in the sky.I'm not quite old enough to remember the earliest manned space flights, but I do remember watching the first lunar landing on TV. I was too ( Read more... )

Today, plus or minus a day, is the earliest sunset of the year locally. (No, it's not the solstice. Pico-explanation: because the solar day isn't always the same length.) The first explanation of this I heard, and that I kind of grokked, was an earlier version of this essay by Larry Denenberg (which I just found in email from 1997). The Naval ( Read more... )

Serendipity (definition by example): receiving an invitation for Shabbat dinner from someone who's been trying to invite us for a while, on a night when my dinner plans are easily aborted and the service I'll miss as a result is being led by one of the grade-school classes. That's a no-brainer. :-) (And Dani agreed to go.)
I haven't been paying a ( Read more... )

Gegarin was the first, back in 1961
When like Icarus, undaunted, he climbed to reach the sun...
A few days ago, I was reflecting on Challenger and had started to compose an entry in my head. But this past week was a little hectic and I never got the words down in bits. Now, instead, I will write a slightly different entry.
I am old enough to ( Read more... )

This grew out of a conversation in eub's journal. I started to comment there, but it got long and off of his original topic, so here I am ( Read more... )

We have a beautiful full moon tonight. I attempted to capture it in bits. Earlier in the evening, about an hour after sunset, there was some gorgeous stuff going on with clouds that didn't photograph well because of interference from the city lights. (Someday I will be good enough to know what some of the settings on my camera mean, and then ( Read more... )

Earth's city lights.

Friday night while I was walking home I saw a neat optical illusion. The moon was full (maybe a day past, but I think full) and bright. The sky had clumps of fluffy clouds with plenty of gaps. The clouds were moving fairly quickly, together. The effect was that the moon appeared to be racing across the sky. Funny thing, perception...

It's really sunny out today. Painfully bright, to me. (My threshold is pretty low.) I'd really like someone to invent user-adjustable sunglasses. I don't mean photogray, where you can't control how dark or light they are, or clip-on sunglasses, which only have two settings (on and off); I want to be able to turn a dial and get more or less tint ( Read more... )