Ethan, genius
My 7-year old son Ethan is continually amazing me with his insights, thoughts, and questions. He’s not the most verbal or social of kids, but he is a (young) man of ideas.
Today, entirely unprompted, he came up with the idea of intergenerational starships.
After all, he figured, you can’t get to the nearest stars (he started with Pluto, but that’s almost correct as well) in one lifetime. So you’d have to have multiple families on a starship - and the people who started the voyage would never live to see the destination.
He also wondered how they would be able to take enough food along, and I explained that they couldn’t: in fact, they’d have to take entire farms along instead.
Wow. I’m impressed.
Tags: ethan, starship, inter-generational, john koetsier
Pluto: we still love you
Hrm … sorry, but I don’t really care what astronomers say. I still think Pluto is a planet.
Some astronomers are still sane:
Although yesterday’s decision was reached by a majority vote, some of the most senior scientists involved are dismayed. “We now have dwarf planets which are in fact not planets. I consider this a linguistic catastrophe. I think the union is going to get a lot of flak for this, in doing it in such a muddy way,” said Owen Gingerich, chairman of the IAU’s official planet definition committee.
“It’ll cause a rewrite of the textbooks. I think a lot of the astronomers at the meeting were really just trying to correct the mistake made in 1930,” he added.
Others, however, are saying things like don’t worry, be happy, Pluto is still “interesting to study.”
But Iwan Williams, president of the IAU’s planetary systems sciences and an astronomer at Queen Mary, University of London, was happy with the decision. “It was a clear majority and Pluto is still an interesting body to study,” he said.
The current silliness is just a continuation … a few short days ago, they were going to call Pluto and Charon, its moon, both planets. Ah well.
Don’t worry Pluto. We still love you.
Tags: pluto, astronomy, astronomers, charon, planet, IAU
The trackball telescope
OK, so this is seriously cool: one man basically inventing a new kind of telescope virtually by himself.
One quote I particularly like:
I didn’t want to be influenced by what others had done, so I purposefully didn’t look for other designs until I had come up with one on my own.
Borg me baby
How would you like to see Mare Imbrium in high def … just by looking up into the night sky?
You get a telescope in your eye, of course. I want one.
There are some problems, of course. I don’t think the focus or magnifying power is adjustable at this point, and I’m sure your field of view narrows as the magnification increases.
But still: very cool!
“Amazing” Images
I’ve uploaded a couple of my more astronomically-oriented to Space.com’s gallery of amazing images.
I’m not sure that these are incredibly amazing, but they are very definitely mine: here they are.
Mars
I hadn’t been keeping up too intensely on matters astronomical the past month or so, so late last week when I went for a night run and saw an unusually bright “star” in an odd location, I assumed it was Venus.
It was intensely bright and yellowish-hued - I could barely help seeing it even during my run. As soon as I got home, I quickly got out my Sony DSC W1 and a tripod and snapped a couple of pix. None turned out too well, but I was happy to capture the sight.
And, of course, when I checked up on it, I realized that Mars is now very, very close to Earth and hence very visible. Without further ado, the ‘god’ of war:
And here’s another, with some post-processing to make it ugly. I was trying to capture the trees in the foreground as I shot east and up towards the top of Glen Mountain. But they were so dark I had to resort to some extreme Photoshop tricks to bring them out … hence the massive amount of noise in the shot. There are probably ways to reduce that noise selectively, but I’m neither a Photoshop expert nor in possession of vast amounts of unencumbered time …
Ummm … Mars is the bright speck near the trees …
Astronomy blogs
Saw this link to astronomy blogs on my site’s Google Ads.
It’s basically a blogging service like any other (perhaps a bit more amateurish than most) but aimed at astronomy buffs.
Fairly empty so far, but there are a couple of interesting astronomical posts.
Conjuction photos
The moon, Venus, and Jupiter were in stunning conjunction tonight, so I grabbed the camera, tripod, and binoculars and drove fairly close to the top of the nearest mountain.
That was fairly easy, as I live on Glenn Mountain in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
The conjunction was beautiful but fleeting … it was near the horizon when the sun was setting, and there was really only maybe 30 minutes of good viewing between too bright and too close to the smoggy haze.
Here’s a couple of the shots I took:
and a little later in the evening …
(I guessed I could have straightened that one - it was tough getting the right angles with the tripod.)
In case you’re wondering, the moon is obvious, Venus is the bright dot, and Jupiter is the faint I’m-934-million-kilometres-away-from-you dot.
Venus, Jupiter, Moon conjunction tonight
There’s a major conjunction just after sunset tonight: Jupiter, Venus, and the moon.
I’ll have to see if I have a good line-of-sight … if I do, I’ll try to take some pictures and see if any work out.
Starseeker chair
Whoa. Very, very, very cool - a rotating chair that holds your binoculars and tilts back so you can stargaze in comfort.
I saw it first here, and there’s more info at the manufacturer’s site.
From that site:
- Comfortable: A reclining chair supports your entire body
- Fun: Counterweighted mounting bar holds your choice of binoculars
- Simple: Convenient joystick gives instant control of speed and direction
- Precise: Built-in green laser lets you quickly select and view any object
- Rugged: Base is made of case aluminum and rotates on Teflon® bearings
- Portable: Carry it anywhere — Covenient setup requires no tools
(By the way, I noticed that the company that makes this also makes a very cool laser that would be great as a star-pointer.)
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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