I took a late-afternoon walk around the condo complex. After observing a beautiful monarch butterfly grazing on a neighbor's flowering bush, I rounded the corner of the building and saw a small telescope sitting next to the trash bins ( Read more... )

Congrats to my grad-school adviser, Mike A'Hearn, and his EPOXI team for another spectacular close encounter with a comet!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/science/space/05comet.html

I just stumbled across a blog called Women in Planetary Science. I like the tag line: "Women make up half the bodies in the solar system. Why not half the scientists?"

Somebody needs to tell the Second Astronomy people that press conferences happening at the Winter 2010 AAS meeting really are happening in 2010. Unless "Monday, Jan. 4, 2009" is a genuine date in Second Life.

Despite my current tech woes, I think I'm prepared for tomorrow's transition to digital television. The living room TV is powered by cable (when the cable box is not getting zapped by lightning). The larger of the two TVs in the bedroom has a digital converter box. The smaller of the bedroom TVs doesn't have a coax hookup, so I'll be taking it to ( Read more... )

Hubble is up and running again! Yay!

Father Teczar is in the news again. I've posted about him before; he was at my hometown parish in the early 1980s. He was one of two priests who abused children in my parish around that time period -- Teczar liked boys, the other liked girls -- but I was in my 20s and living away from home by the time those ( Read more... )

Forgot to mention it earlier: Happy 50th Birthday, NASA!!!! Now, are you going to join AARP?? :-) :-)

Read at will. Or not.

lesliepear's alma mater will have the greenest roof in town.

Interesting article about the Hubble constant. (I wonder how all those undergraduate labs on the topic are getting changed to reflect current data.)

A story that at least a couple of men on my f-list might be interested in: could polygamy be the key to long life? And hey, ( Read more... )

Why, yes, it IS a slow day at work today. Why do you ask? :-)

One more bit about the eclipse: some great photos of the eclipse combined with the Washington Monument.

What's up with all this violence at UMass-Amherst? Is there not enough to do in the Happy Valley? (Amherst is not exactly Teh Big City or even suburbia.)

The Virtual Filksing -- for ( Read more... )

Every time I've heard in the last 24 hours that the next total lunar eclipse (after last night's) will be in December 2010, I kept thinking, "I wonder if that's due to the saros cycle?"

So, I just did a little snooping around on teh Intarwebz (because it's a really slow day at work today) and I found that my hunch was correct -- the eclipses of ( Read more... )