science and art!

introducing the periodic table of elements printmaking project! a great way to learn a little but about a function of each element thru art!

long nights ahead

i'm heading up to cerro pachon today to start a 6 night observing run on gemini-south. the weather has been pretty crappy for the past week, which already makes for difficult observing, but the nights are also llllooooooonnnnngggggg this time of year so it'll be a work-full week! i'm not-so-secretly hoping for a snow storm, which appears to be in the forecast for two nights from now. it's not that i dont want to observe, it's that i love snow and i havent seen any in a long time other than what sits on top of distant mountain peaks!

i'll leave you with a little entertainment for now. this year marks my 10th time around the sun since graduating high school. thru the wide world of internet connections like facebook and myspace, old friends are contacting each other daily! i was pointed to a 20 minute video collage of my graduating class made by scott roberts. as i was strolling thru memory lane looking at all the familiar faces of my past, i saw a picture of myself that i'd never seen before!! i thought... "wait, was the ME???" this shot comes from around 4th grade with my friends ashley and melissa..... i wonder what they're doing these days? look at that necklace.... and the bandana tied to the belt!! classic! i have NO memory of this outfit or this event, but i stopped the video and laughed out loud for several minutes before gaining my composure again. this photo demonstrates one of the 2 perms i've had in my life and just how blond my hair was!! hahaha! enjoy...

yellow submarine

brown is for the mama llama, suzie's hair and fred's pajamas, chocolate pudding, mud and dirt and half the sand on grand bahamas.

but what is green for?



the person who leaves a comment with the right answer gets a surprise sent to him or her from chile.

what the world eats

i've been on a food kick lately. not sure why... maybe it's some form of preparation to return to the US....

anyway, i saw this photo essay by peter menzel showing what 16 different families around the world eat in a week, and i think it's fascinating!



via andrea harner

i've always wanted a treehouse!

xkcd

more space blogs

the 6th installment of carnival of space is up and running at music of the spheres.

my contribution, pale blue dot, comes from last december for the 10th anniversary of carl sagan's death. i talk about his contributions to astronomy, space exploration, skepticism and science public outreach. i tell the story of how i decided to go into astronomy.

i also added a link in the side bar to a great collection of astronomy blogs!

rosetta nebula

another spectacular image posted on APOD today. the rosetta nebula...


towards the top right of the image you can see many bright stars with the same apparent color, crammed together in a cluster. these stars formed all at once and very recently from all the dense gas in the area. when those stars initially sparked and started to burn hydrogen gas in their centers, they started to send a consistent flurry of light particles, photons, out in every direction. as the photons from the brightest and hottest stars started to reach the gas that surrounds the newly-formed stars, the gas began to glow excitedly from the extra energy it gained from the photons! different types of gas glow with different temperatures that astronomers can isolate by using filters during their telescopic observations. here, the red shade is sulfur, the green is hygrogen and the blue is oxygen. individual exposures are taken with each filter, colors are digitally assigned, and then all images are added together to form this beautiful composite!

the above image focuses on a portion of the rosetta nebula, shown in its entirety below. the full gas cloud covers an area on the sky big enough to fit 5 full moons. you can clearly see the stellar cluster in the center of the image.


the open star cluster (NGC 2244) was discovered in 1690 by english astronomer john flamsteed. the diffuse and much fainter nebula around the star cluster wasnt discovered until later. The rosetta nebula is about 50 light-years across and 4,500 light years away. star formation continues to occur in this nebula of gas and dust, so it should shine brightly for many millions of years to come.

bobby

yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination robert f. kennedy... the closest person i have to a political hero. i read a great tribute article by jim booth describing his experience as a teenager on that day nearly 40 years ago. a quote from rfk...

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the great enterprises and ideals of American society.

knit graffiti

stockholm, sweden. wonder how long this awesome graffiti will last?



link: maskerade

real food

with rising food prices across the US, i was pleased to find a resource to find quality, locally grown products!

enter your city and state at localharvest.org to find farmer's markets, groceries and restaurants that distribute food provided by local farmers. this is one case where i feel that the technology of mass production for cheap is not the advantage!

People worldwide are rediscovering the benefits of buying local food. It is fresher than anything in the supermarket and that means it is tastier and more nutritious. It is also good for your local economy--buying directly from family farmers helps them stay in business.

also, learn what are the world's healthiest foods along with some yummy recipes.

UPDATE: found another cool website listing farms where you can go to pick your own fruits and vegetables!! it also gives techniques for canning and preserving what you pick. awesome!

you're how old, grandma?

i was born and raised just north of cincinnati, ohio, USA. as a kid i loved playing in the woods and grabbing creatures that lived in creeks! there was a small creek near my house, but my favorite one was in a nearby park. i would ride my bike the miles so i could go search for fossils. they were everywhere! i didnt know much about these easily-found trinkets, but i knew that the region was special for having so many fossils and i knew that these little creatures eternally stuck in rocks were really really old!!!

these fun memories happily flood my mind as i try to come to terms with a new feature of my hometown....

the creationist museum....

introducing the most ridiculous thing to come from religious zealots in a long long time... and it's located in the city where i spent my childhood and where most of my extended family resides. somehow i feel hurt by the presence of this museum.

i try to recognize, learn about, appreciate and accept that people in every part of the world live differently. no one else is like me (thats a good thing!) and i'm not like anyone else. these differences i cherish and i have no real interest in spending time pursuading people to believe in all the same things i believe in.... but i have an even harder time understanding how people think the universe is only 6,000 years old, than i have understanding how people still believe everything revolves around the earth!

Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, has said some wonderful things about this issue that i would like to share. please read his top 10 reasons why the universe, the sun, earth, and life are NOT 6,000 years old. he goes on....

There are many and varied ways that modern science has confirmed the history of the Universe, the Solar System, the Earth, and Life on Earth. All of these methods, while independent, are in agreement and they ALL tell us that Life, the Earth, and the Universe are many orders of magnitude older than 6,000 years. There is no scientific room for errors of this many orders of magnitude. It would be like measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles, and determining it was less than 1 inch. In order to agree with a Young Earth Creationist picture, essentially every facet of modern science - on which we base every aspect of modern technology, our vehicles, our society - would have to be completely incorrect, implying almost everything we base our modern lives on would not work as it does.

why should this be a concern at all? because 3 american republican presidential candidates stated that they do not believe in evolution. these men seek to lead the current superpower nation yet they reject scientific consensus on biology, geology, cosmology and physics because of their literal interpretation of words written in a religious book. to be frank, this scares that crap out of me!

i dont know how i knew when i was so young that the fossils i found were so old, but i'm glad i had the freedom to investigate my intuition and to arrive at my own conclusions. this intellectual freedom is severely denied by the stout belief in any single religious text... yet three men wish to continue spreading "freedom" around the world as they believe they are defending it in the US.

read other reactions at pharyngula's creation museum carnival

what is a melody?

i've discovered that chileans are very uncreative when it comes to naming streets. every city that i've traveled to in this country (that has at least two streets) has one named Prat and one named O'Higgins**. in general, when you find prat, you've found the main street and you know o'higgins will be cross somewhere nearby! arturo prat was a chilean naval officer in the second half of the 19th century who sailed on a ship called "O'Higgins" which was named after Bernardo O'Higgins - one of the commanders that freed chile from spanish rule in the early 1800's.

in La Serena, prat is a one-way, one lane street dominated by pedestrian traffic. the buildings are mostly two stories tall with shops at ground level and extended porches above. the small stores range from new to used goods, selling clothes, shoes, books, wine, electronics, dollar store stuff, office supplies, etc... vendors stand along the blocks selling a couple dozen manjar sweets. there are often people sitting on benches and others leaning against the building walls with paper cups extended for loose change.

after my spanish class this past wednesday, i was walking along prat wondering about who this historical prat figure actually was when my thoughts were dramatically disturbed by a loud, chaotic and persistent whistling sound. across the street was a man sitting with an overturned bucket and a cup on top. he held an old plastic recorder in his hands and rapidly moved his fingers over the holes as he blew continuously to make some of the most awful high-pitched sounds possible!! there was a slight twinkle in his eye like he knew he couldnt really play any songs, but he was making the effort to entertain, which in his mind must have been worth some monetary donation! i actually laughed out loud at this sight. i'm not sure why i found the situation so funny, but i stopped to survey the scene. i wanted to see how long he would continue "playing" and i wondered how others were reacting. i saw some cringed noses, but mostly people just walked on past without dropping any money. that lack of action says something because i've noticed people here are very generous with their loose change.

the man just kept on playing, so i walked across the street and dropped a 100 peso coin in his cup... i definitely felt entertained!

**almost every US city i've been to has a martin luther king, jr blvd

buenos aires birthday

i spent a wonderful 5-day vacation in buenos aires, argentina to celebrate the big day... sultry tango shows, malbec wine, incredible (cheap) steaks, walking, talking, freezing, taking pictures, european architecture, south american comfort, old friends, new friends, new spanish, new music, new perspective....



























see the full set of photos here

once in a blue moon

mmm... blue moon beer.... i miss it...



wait, beer is not what this post is about...

tonight is a blue moon... depending on where on earth you live!! a blue moon is the second full moon in a single month. there are 4 full moons in may, june and july...

2 May at 10:09 GMT
1 June at 01:04 GMT
30 June at 13:49 GMT
30 July at 00:48 GMT

but since they occur at the ends of the months, the occurance of a blue moon will be different depending on your time zone! for those of us in the americas, we can call tonight's full moon our blue moon. most of the rest of the world will have a blue moon in june, except for those in line with new zealand who have a blue moon in july!

also, keep your eyes up to see a very bright jupiter near the moon (low in the south when viewing from the northern hemisphere). the closest star to the moon is antares, but jupiter will be nearby! and you cant miss the bright "evening star" venus early in the evening. saturn and venus are moving closer to each other from our point of view and will appear closest in our sky early in july.... stay tuned!

"space is amazing"

i'm really enjoying the carnival of space series... a weekly collection of blogs about anything and everything that has to do with... wait for it... space!! the 5th installment of the carnival of space is now up and running!

i contributed a post about heliocentrism and i really enjoyed the post from universe today about dark matter annihilation at the center of the milky way.

spiral galaxy

the hubbles space telescope captures yet another fantastic image!


this beautiful spiral galaxy sits in the northern constellation Ursa Major, and can be viewed with some detail through binoculars. it is one of the brightest galaxies in earth's sky and was originally discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1774 who described it as a "nebulous patch." the light from this galaxy takes 12 million light years to reach us! as far as i know, this galaxy doesnt have a creative normal name, but astronomers refer to it mostly as M81 (messier object 81) or sometimes as NGC 3031.

the above image was taken with light that is visible to our eyes. the center of the galaxy looks like a bright fuzz ball where lots of gas and so many stars swirl around the center that we cannot make out individual stars among the masses even with hubble's resolution! towards the outside of M81 the gas and stars are clumped together in long swirling arms that give this galaxy type the name "spiral". the light in the outer arms looks bluer than the yellow light near the center mostly because the stars are younger. you can see darks patches throughout the galaxy which loosely line up with the spiral arms and then show more intricate patterns on smaller scales. these are patches of "dust"... thicker molecules that block us from seeing the light given off by the stars behind them... harbor nurseries for new stars. gas in galaxies recycles over and over unless it gets locked into a small star that lives longer than the age of our universe so far.....

cool stuff. thanks apod and hst.

carnival of space 4

check out carnival of space 4 for another series of great articles about astronomy and space! i have another contribution hidden in there somewhere!

birthday

i'm heading to buenos aires for a long weekend to celebrate my birthday!

many pictures and stories to come, i'm sure!!!!

in the meantime, enjoy this:


ironic sans via pzmyers

iraq blog count

for anyone with an interest in the happenings of iraq, i found a very interesting blog called the Iraq Blog Count.

i got lost for a while reading thru stories and personal realities in this war torn country. i'm pleased to see such honest expression and shocked at the urgency of daily life.

heliocentrism

heliocentrism is the idea that the sun, not the earth, is at the center of our solar system. nearly 500 years ago, the polish astronomer, nicolaus copernicus, introduced a model of the solar system which successfully described the observed motion of the planets and the sun across the sky... with the planets orbiting around the sun. the definitive work of copernicus, on the revolutions of heavenly spheres, was not published until 1543, the year of his death, because the religious doctrine of the time literally interpreted the christian bible to mean that the earth was at the center of the universe.

over the last 500 years, astronomers like kepler, galileo and newton have further solidified our knowledge of the detailed mechanics of exactly how the planets orbit the sun. even more recently we've begun to understand how the sun itself orbits about the center of our milky way galaxy from a distance of 30,000 light years! today we use the detailed knowledge of the motions and positions of planets to send spacecrafts out into the outer regions of our solar system.

we sent the Galileo spacecraft to jupiter several years ago to explore the planet's atmosphere and several of its moons. we first sent galileo toward venus and then back past the earth for a couple of close flybys. this allowed it to use the planets gravity to accelerate to higher speeds in a cosmic game of slingshot! the spacecraft would have required 16 times more fuel if scientists had not utilized the gravitational mechanics of the nearby celestial objects! to do this, very precise predictions of the planets in their orbits must be known over extended periods of time!

for this reason, i was utterly shocked to read a recent blog called "heliocentrism is an atheist doctrine". oh. my. please. help me... breathe. i mean, seriously..... i cant believe anyone actually still believes that the *earth* is the the center of the UNIVERSE! and to make this phenomenon more unbelievable... this post comes from a blog dedicated to electing sam brownback for president. not only does this topic have NOTHING to do with american politics, but it is just plain ridiculous!

are these people denying the beauty and wonder of the spacecrafts that have landed on mars and sent back some of the most amazing pictures ever taken by humankind? because if our models about the solar system were wrong, we NEVER would have landed anything on mars!

in general, i have no interest in choosing a candidate so so so far before even the primary elections, but i know one politician i definitely wont consider for 2008. ugh.

santiago, chile

rachel and i took an overnight bus to santiago last weekend with no particular plan. it turned into an amazingly fun trip!




i bought two fantastic paintings from this contagiously happy man!




we happened upon a fun parade.




on mothers day we walked into plaza de armas to find los bomberos doing flips off their firemans truck onto a big inflated cushion. on an impulse, rachel asked them if we could jump too. much to my surprise (and everyone in the square i think)... they said yes!




green beans seem to be a popular topping on sandwiches.



the most intriguing theme restaurant i've ever been in! every inch of the place was covered with "viking" stuff. they served a yummy traditional chilean meal!