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Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Mail hail 
| | Apparently messages sent to my searls.com address are bouncing, though ones to my ssc.com address are not. So hold off on nonessential email while I get it fixed... |
| | Okay, it seems to be a DNS issue. Some DNS servers at some providers are still sending the mail to the old IP address. Do u se the ssc.com address for the next few days. |
Courage explained by one who knows
| | holding an airplane aloft with your sphincter muscle needs a different adjective |
Widentity
KPIG lives!
| | KPIG's live stream is back up in 128kb MP3. They're still promoting the $5.95/month RealOne Radio Pass, but... I'm getting it free with an MP3 client (at the moment, iTunes). |
| | Right now they're playing Double E by Neil Young & Crazy Horse. That followed Stephen Still's Treetop Flyer and Hellecasters' Mad Cows at Ease. Now they're playing Canned Heat's On the Road Again. Man, they're making it hard to work. I'm pounding my armrests here. |
| | If you want to be reminded of what great radio has always been about, you gotta check out the Pig. If you're lucky enough to live in Santa Cruz or Monterey, you don't even need a computer. Just tune your radio to 107-oink-5. |
Martian Distraction
| | Mars has terrific publicity these days. It's closer to Earth than it's been in 60,000 years, and won't be back this close for another 600 centuries. The closest approach point was reached in the wee hours of this morning. |
| | So last night a star party was held atop a local park. These things have been held before. The Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit has excellent star parties at the Natural History Museum, at the Westmont College observatory, atop the Santa Ynez mountain ridge, and on Figueroa Mountain. Usually a handful of people show up — sometimes as many as a few dozen. When the skies are clear there are always plenty of sights. It's the nature of the heavens to abound. |
| | But last night was Mars Night at Elings Park. It got a nice mention in the local paper. Add that to the frenzy of interest whipped up by the unusual mathematics of matter, and what do you get? Traffic jams. We waited forever in the half-mile-long line of cars backed up at the entrance to the park, before the line started to move... but only because they closed the entrance after the park filled up. So we drove to a backroad entrance, parked about a quarter mile away, and walked in. |
| | I'd guess there were at least a thousand people on top of the hill. Lines for the telescopes went for hundreds of feet and moved slowly. Since we're going to visit an astronomer friend with a big telescope this weekend, and Mars will hardly be much farther away, we decided to bag the lines and put on a show of our own, with Starry Night on a 17" G4 Powerbook, which features one of the best displays that ever graced a laptop, plus the only internally illuminated keyboard, a necessity for any portable planetarium. |
| | We zoomed in on Mars, activated the orbits of its two moons, Phobos and Demos, set them in motion at 3000x normal speed and watched them spin past the stars. We travelled to the Martain surface and looked at the heavens from there. We flew to Jupiter and Saturn, then to a vantage outside the Milky Way, saw how Deneb, the brightest member of the constellation Cygnus, is the most distant bright star in the sky. We also visited Rho Cassiopeia and Mu Sagittarii, two of the most distant visible stars (Rho Cass' is one of our best supernova candidates too. Keep an eye up). We jumped around the universe from one galaxy to another. |
| | Naturally, we drew a crowd. "That's the coolest thing I've ever seen," said this one guy, who turned out to be a science teacher. He insisted I come show it to his class. Two different families from Brazil were amazed to find their small home towns listed in the program's location database. Then their minds were blown when we flew to each town by rising off the ground in Santa Barbara, gliding southeast across Mexico, Central America, the Andes and the Amazon before settling gently on their home turf. One woman was brought nearly to tears by seeing the Southern Cross and both Magellanic Clouds in the computer's sky. "That's home!" she said. |
| | The real Mars Story is about publicity, not astronomy. Yes, Mars is relatively big on this pass, but for most viewers on all but the biggest telescopes, the difference between this pass and others is about the same as between two LEDs. Either way, it's a little orange dot with some barely visible features (including a little white ice cap). Interesting and cool, sure; but no match for any number of galaxies and nebulae also visible in the same sky and spectacular by naked eye or ordinary binoculars. On a clear dark night, Andromeda is about four Moons wide and looks exactly like what it is: a big-ass spiral galaxy. |
| | A few years back, when comet Hale-Bopp came by, I marveled at how few people cared, simply because it didn't get the big publicity Halley (no relation) and Kohoutek had received in earlier frenzies. The same thing happened (or didn't happen) when Comet West came by in '75. Seeing that comet and Andromeda in the same North Carolina sky is what got me interested in astronomy. West was even more spectacular, as a naked eye object, than the few photographs suggest. |
| | Anyway, it was a fun party. It was nice to get a chance to show a few partygoers that the fun never ends. |
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