"Big Ben! Parliament!"

On August 11, 2008 at 07:42 Eastern Daylight Time, the Hubble Space Telescope's odometer reached 100,000 orbits of Earth.
That's 2.72 billion miles at 5 miles per second.

In honor of this milestone, the Hubble team released this dreamy commemorative image:

About the image, from the Hubble site:

In commemoration of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope completing its 100,000th orbit in its 18th year of exploration and discovery, scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., have aimed Hubble to take a snapshot of a dazzling region of celestial birth and renewal.

Hubble peered into a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 (upper, left). The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our Local Group of galaxies.

The three-dimensional-looking image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.

The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars already born in NGC 2074 is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas at center, bottom.

In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our Sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the LMC are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies.

This representative color image was taken on August 10, 2008, with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Red shows emission from sulfur atoms, green from glowing hydrogen, and blue from glowing oxygen.

3 days and counting.

[Photo is called "Raining Perseids" and it was taken by a man named Fred Bruenjes. Unfortunately, I can't tell you more because the website where I found it is all in Chinese.]

From SPACE.COM:

Every August, just when many people go vacationing in the country where skies are dark, the best-known meteor shower makes its appearance.

It is also the month of "The Tears of St. Lawrence," more commonly known as the Perseid Meteor Shower.

Laurentius, a Christian deacon, is said to have been martyred by the Romans in 258 AD on an iron outdoor stove. It was in the midst of this torture that Laurentius cried out:

"I am already roasted on one side and, if thou wouldst have me well cooked, it is time to turn me on the other."

The saint's death was commemorated on his feast day, Aug. 10. King Phillip II of Spain built his monastery place, the "Escorial," on the plan of the holy gridiron. And the abundance of shooting stars seen annually between approximately Aug. 8 and 14 have come to be known as St. Lawrence's "fiery tears."

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE FOR OPTIMAL VIEWING TIMES, ETC.

I don't know about anyone else...

...but this scares the hell out of me.

I will be chewing my nails to the quick on 10/23.

Which explains why Saturn has such a high-pitched, squeaky "voice."

Saturn, Jupiter Full of Liquid Metal Helium

Ohhhh, perchlorates.

For a minute there I thought, "Wow - there really IS an advanced life form on Mars!"

Happy birthday Jose Moreno Hernandez!

A very happy birthday to a true inspiration for anyone who feels as though the odds against them are insurmountable.
I don't care where you're from. I don't care how poor you are. I don't care what language you speak. I don't care how many people you shared a room with as a child.
This is America. IF YOU WANT SOMETHING BADLY ENOUGH, THEN YOU CAN GET IT.
Whining won't help. Bemoaning your lot in life won't help. Studying hard and working hard and believing in yourself - that will help.

Jose M. Hernandez was born August 7, 1962 in French Camp, California. He was one of four children born to migrant workers on what he calls the "California circuit", traveling from Mexico to Southern California each March, then working northward towards Stockton by November, picking strawberries and cucumbers. The Hernandez family would return to Mexico for Christmas and then start the cycle all over again.

"Some kids think it might be fun to travel like that," Hernandez laughs, "but we had to work. It wasn't a vacation."

One day, Jose was hoeing a row of beets, listening to his transistor radio. Over the radio came the news that Franklin Chang-Diaz had been selected as America's first Hispanic astronaut.
"I was already interested in science and engineering," Hernandez remembers, "but that was the moment I said 'I want to fly into space.' And that's something I've been striving for every day since then."

Jose learned to speak English at age 12, graduated Stockton High School at age 18, and enrolled in the University of the Pacific in Stockton, where he earned an electrical engineering degree.
He was then awarded a full scholarship to UC Santa Barbara for their graduate program. After this, he worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he eventually co-developed the first full-field digital mammography imaging system, which has proven useful in detecting breast cancer much earlier than traditional mammography.

During the astronaut application process, Jose walked into the oral board to find none other than Franklin Chang-Diaz on the panel. On May 6, 2004, Jose Hernandez was selected to Astronaut Group 19. It looks as though Hernandez will be one of the fortunate few from Group 19 to actually fly on the Shuttle. (The retirement of the shuttle will likely prevent most of this group from actually flying.)

He has been assigned as a Mission Specialist to STS-128, scheduled to fly no earlier than July 2009 or April 2009, depending on who you ask.

Garrett's replacement's birthday.

Happy 46th birthday, Greg Chamitoff!

Happy birthday, Neil Armstrong!

A very happy 78th birthday to Neil Armstrong, a very contemplative man who eschews the limelight, leading some to believe he is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
In fact, he's just extremely private, and if you ask me, the world could use a few more celebrities who embrace this quality.

A hilarious short: "Water on Mars."

You don't look a day over 200, baby.

[Above photo of USCGC Pt. Barnes and STS-41 liftoff. I found this photo online. The caption states it was taken by BMC Charles Kinnear. I fondly remember Chuck from the Pt. Barnes (which was out of Ft. Pierce, where I was stationed), and I hope he won't mind my stealing his picture.]


Happy 218th birthday to the United States Coast Guard, the military branch in which I served four years and from which my older sister retired as Commanding Officer of Station Port Canaveral.

In honor of the day, I would just like to mention the first member of the United States Coast Guard to go into space, Bruce Melnick.
I was stationed in Fort Pierce (just a bit south of Cape Canaveral) in October of 1990, and when we found out that one of us was going to be on STS-41, my roommate and I immediately made plans to be there.
We drove up early that morning and met up with Mr. K., the then-Commanding Officer of the Coast Guard station (Don't ask me why he wasn't at the station working. I don't make the rules. He was obviously very good at delegating.) on the Causeway.
It was the break of dawn, and everyone was happy and excited and Mr. K.'s wife had brought doughnuts and thermoses of coffee and beer (wouldn't be a Coastie gathering without it) and we laughed and listened to music and danced and waited.
We cheered as Discovery lifted off into the Florida sky, and more than one of us was so proud we were weeping.
Later, Mr. K. went down to the station and my roommate and I went to KSC. We were delighted at all the Coast Guard t-shirts we were seeing on other visitors. I distinctly remember being too warm in my Coast Guard sweatshirt. (I also distinctly remember getting a terrible stomachache after eating a freeze-dried ice cream sandwich on a dare, but that's a story for another time.)