A Roll in the Universe

I read about this very bright object being shot up into orbit around Earth earlier this year, just to twinkle in natural sunlight as an artificial star for a few months. And I noted that it would be visible from Norway on April 24-25 2018. I've had this date marked on my calendar since I read about the controversial launch of the Humanity Star . Although I understand the arguments against this bright object that the astronomers had, I thought I may as well take a look since it's up there. I read somewhere that it would be visible in my part of the world today or tomorrow. First of all, it's overcast now and it will continue to be overcast the next couple of days. Never fails. I guarantee that if they announce some awesome celestial phenomenon visible from Bergen, the skies will not be clear. I pretty much treat forecasts for southerly viewings of the Aurora Borealis as forecasts for rain now. (In case you're wondering, auroras are a polar phenomenon that weaken the fa...

I like that the word "parallel"—if written in a sans serif font—contains a parallel. What also contains a parallel, is astronomy and from there, astrology. Keep reading if you want to see me attempt to explain the tilt of the planet. First of all, let's get one thing in our heads: All the planets, except Pluto, revolve around our sun on the same plane. Now add to this the fact that the Earth tilts about 23 degrees and this is the reason for seasons. I once really messed explaining this to the point that I called the other person stupid. But I was the stupid one, so let's see if I finally have this straight (hah!) in my head. This is, of course, far easier to understand visually, so grab something and hold it at a tilt and then move it in a circle parallel to the floor, keeping the same tilt, i.e. the object is tilted the same way as you see it all around the circle. You'll notice that at one point, the bottom is closest to the center of the circle and the to...

Well, sort of. I wasn't actually there. But on the top of Mauna Kea is where Tom works and where he takes so many of his gorgeous pictures of the sunset. I have now learned that he has been goofing off (according to the gentleman on this video) when doing that. He should have been inside getting ready for work. ;-) (Found via www.sixtysymbols.com .)

Sometimes I do my best writing in other people's comments . Not fair to you, dear reader, so I'll repost and elaborate here. The discussion in the link above was about the weather. If you've been paying attention to my sidebar, you know that I now have another blog where I post weather forecasts made with astrology. So in response to another commenter, I wrote this about astrology: […]after years of hanging out with astrologers, I know that it is very hard to prove anything, especially with natal charts - people being what they are. Part of my psychology class back when included learning how psychology had to devise repeatable tests in order to be considered a science, something that took a lot of time to accomplish. It’s no easier for astrology with all its variables. That’s why I got interested in weather forecasting: There are rules in astrology for forecasting weather and they either work or they don’t. The weather either happens or it doesn’t. It’s the best method ...

I'm not the romantic kind. My version of romance doesn't involve notes, flowers, boxes of candy or trinkets because that's just not exciting enough for me (of course, it does depend on what you put in the note ;-) ). Laughing or crying together over a shared memory or adventure is much more my style, and the following video fits that perfectly. It turns out that even the universe has a romantic bent (at least as seen from Earth), so for the first time in history, I am sending out a Valentine's greeting. Enjoy - and Happy Valentine's Day ! (Found at http://www.sixtysymbols.com/videos/024.htm )

This brilliant film is making the rounds. I found mine over at A Pacific View . Here's the comment I left there after seeing this video: Absolutely stunning video! Finally one that clearly gave me an idea of scale. Especially going back home. If any aliens are visiting us, it must be purely by accident, because finding us is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or more like finding a partial needle in a 1000 haystacks. Thanks for posting this, Tom! So if you aren't impressed with the story of three wise men following a star, this journey through the stars ought to give you a nice sense of awe (play the HD version at full screen for best effect!):

The latest activity to capture the interest of the fringe and lunatics (never was that description more apt) is the fact that NASA/the US is going to set off a nuclear bomb and blast our dear Luna out of its orbit. Following the sage advice of others to consider Google my friend (though there are some that would disagree even with that), I have found what the current paranoid hoopla is about: It is the LCROSS mission , which is about finding water on the moon, to see if the moon can support a human space station there. NASA intends to shoot (or crash) a missile into the moon. Some people believe " missile " only means something loaded with explosives, and nuclear ones are the most likely. That has led some people to interpret this as not only damaging the moon, but as damaging it so much it would shift in its orbit or its shape would be changed forever. The truth is, it's all just simple mechanics and physics, and no nukes: Slam something hard enough into the ground a...

It has bugged me for quite some time that I couldn't remember where I was when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon exactly 40 years ago today . I knew I was in Norway, on Grandpa's family farm in Mundal (in Lindås , not the Mundal in Sogn that former vice-president Mondale came from) and that they had a TV. I can still see my granduncle's living room and the TV in the corner. So where was I? I'd forgotten something, but a Norwegian radio commentator reminded me today: With the time difference it was actually a few minutes past midnight on July 21 in Norway when man first walked landed on the moon. And at that time of night, an eight year old is in bed. Asleep. But I remember all the grown-ups talking about it the next day. They had stayed up and watched. I wish humanity could get behind something as equally awesome as going to the moon. All the can-do spirit, all the sharing of hopes and dreams, all the willingness to accept risk. Millions of individual...

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday Courtesy of xkcd - because it wowed me.

I have returned home from my roundtrip to Trondheim in connection with the celebration of St. Olav and just a general look around some of Norway's most beautiful parts. It was five days of heat, sunshine, miles and miles of roads through miles and miles of mountains, trees and farms to a couple of charming cities and some historical buildings and events. I still haven't quite wrapped my brain around it all yet, so I'll have to focus on sorting photos (sadly, because the bus never stopped at the really gorgeous parts, I didn't get to photograph any of the truly gorgeous panoramas; I'll have to tell you in words) and reminding myself of what happened where. Only five days, but so much happened, it feels like 15. One could say that my spirit has not yet arrived home. I am simply not here , yet, though physically my body is. My mind, however, is still in a hotel room somewhere. At a roadside café in the wilds of Norway's roof. On a bus, comparing the scenery spe...

I'm sending my name to the moon. My name - Keera Ann Fox - gets a ride with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , on a microchip. I love the idea of getting to send my name. Makes me go back to the giddy days of the 1960's and the space race and those who first orbited the moon. Go here and send your name to the moon, too! You have until July 25. (Thanks to Neatorama .)

"White nights" are what the Russians call the pale summer nights of midsummer according to the movie by the same name . In Norwegian, the term is "blond nights" but most people just say "long, light summer night". Because that's what is. I am talking about this because Jon asked me a question in a comment: Do the wonderfully long days help [my good mood]? And I answered truthfully that I was actually getting a bit sleep-deprived because the lack of true darkness messes with the circadian rhythm. But in general, yes, more daylight does brighten the mood as well as the world. The long pastel evenings of summer are gorgeous. Being able to sit out in the sun until well past 10 pm is wonderful. But the lack of proper darkness throws off one's inner clock, so lately my usual in-bed-by-10 routine has become in-bed-by-11:30 (which leaves me tired in the morning because 8 hours of sleep is needed all year round). Case in point: Last night I was ge...

My job interview went very well. The job was actually far more demanding and interesting than I thought. In other words, it is a very hard job to turn down - if I get an offer. I'll know by the end of the week. In the mean time, I went and talked to my boss about the job and he asked me if I really wanted it. I said that honestly, I'm just not ready to leave where I am. He said that he'd been given the impression that anything could happen in three years , including rebuilding the department rather than disbanding it. His strategy was to use external companies for anything we couldn't manage ourselves, but fight to keep an in-house printers/prepress. The point is to prove the board of directors wrong. We had a long talk, and when it was over, I realized that I'm one of the key people for our department. We really need to maintain the graphics design/prepress part. And not only that, when I heard my boss's thoughts and his strategy, I felt like staying and ...

Norway's channel NRK2 ran a couple of documentaries on UFOs followed by "Close Encounter of the Third Kind" . I taped it and finally sat down to watch it. I was delighted with the movie when it first came out. Now, the ending seems too cute and too easy. More importantly, though, I've discovered that my own fascination with UFOs has faded. It was a somewhat cynical Keera who watched (a very young) Richard Dreyfuss try to sculpt with mashed potatoes. What really got me, though, as a former New Age buff and heavily into the mystique of UFOs at one time, was that I no longer could remember what the heck the first two close encounters were. It's almost like losing one's religion. An entire area of interest and belief had faded away and stuff I used to know and discuss regularly is not even a clear memory any more. I still have the fascination. I'd still like to see something like the plot in Carl Sagan's "Contact" come true. I'd love for...

I watch "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and during the opening credits, this bizarre if-Saturn-were-hot-lava planet shows up, both confounding me and fascinating me: I was wondering if a planet can really look like that (I still am), when I came across this APOD image of Saturn, photographed in infrared:

On this planet we have deaf drummers and composers. Our planet may now be fostering blind astronomers. Via Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog, I have learned of a woman who had a marvelous idea : Making astronomy books you can touch so the seeing impaired, too, can discover what's up in the sky. Head over to the BABlog to watch a clip of Noreen Grice explaining her brilliant idea, or watch it and read the press release at the Hubble site . It impressed me to hear how Grice solved a problem, and it touched me to hear what it inspired in her readers. With technology, not even the sky is the limit. For anyone.

I read the Bad Astronomy blog, mainly because it's fun to know the correct thing about something. Like the fact that our planet (Earth, in case you were wondering) is not the only planet to experience solar eclipses. Saturn does, too, by virtue of being so far away, that its moons appear bigger than the sun. So I trip over this clock today at BAB, and it fascinates me. I vaguely remember having some fun with math back in my school days, and the number 9 has some interesting properties. The clock shown on BAB displays (!) quite a few. Now, this had the advantage of making me try out some software on my new iMac. I bought iWork and fired up its spreadsheet so I could play with the formulas and see how they resulted in the whole numbers a clock face usually has. And, in so doing, I finally learned what ! means in mathematical notation .

I just bought a book, Astronomy, Weather, and Calendars in the Ancient World , partly because of the introductory chapter. There, a method for "borrowing days" to predict the weather was mentioned: The weather on the day before the winter solstice forecasts the weather for the first month of winter, the weather on the day of the winter solstice itself forecasts the weather for the second month of winter, and the day after the winter solstice forecasts the weather for the third month of winter. This method applies to the summer solstice and equinoxes, too. Today we have gorgeous sunshine here in Bergen, and I'm hoping that'll keep be the case all weekend, too. Winter solstice (0 degrees of Capricorn for you astrologers) is on Dec. 22 where I live.

The title of this blogpost happens to be the title of my work-in-progress (WIP) at NaNoWriMo (see widget to the left). It's actually the whimsical title of a couple of galaxies, which was the Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 12 . For lack of a better title for a WIP, I stole this. I have no clue how to write a novel, in spite of having taken a few writing classes and having read a few books on writing (including Stephen King's "On Writing"). My cluelessness may be due to the fact that I have never written any fiction longer than a short-story. But the idea behind the National Novel Writing Month is to just put the words down - 50,000 in all - by midnight November 30. Still, that leaves the challenge of having words to put down. I submitted over 1300 words (daily target should be closer to 1700) on Nov. 1. I got bogged down in some goings on between two characters that I didn't know the end of, and one of them I had given such a trendy name to, that I go...