How I spent a great portion of my childhood.

This doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but it's really, really cool.
Especially the soundtrack.
(Make sure you pause the Playlist on the sidebar so the Soggy Bottom Boys aren't singing over the video.)

My kind of R&D.

Why did it take 50 years for this?

Apollo 12 landing

On this date in 1969, Apollo 12 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

In stark contrast to the nerve-wracking Apollo 11 mission, Apollo 12 was filled with lighthearted fun.

From Pete Conrad's "Whoopie! That may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" exclamation when he first stepped onto the lunar surface to (presumably) the First Porn to the Moon (which was secretly placed into the lunar checklist flipbook by the backup crew), I think it's safe to say that Apollo 12 was the Animal House of lunar missions.

Why spaceweather.com is the best site on the interweb tubes.

Because where else can you see
video of Heidi's toolbag* streaking across the night sky?
Nowhere, that's where.

And if you can find another site where you can enter your ZIP code and find out when and where to look for a
flyby of Heidi's toolbag, I'll buy you a beer.


*By the way, "Heidi's Toolbag" would now be a great name for a rock band.

In a pinch, you can drink it as is.

The urine recycler on the ISS is back on the fritz.

"Hey, does this taste like pee to you?"
"Yeah, it kind of does."
"Dude, I think that thing's broken again."

Fly Me to Formalhaut

Scientists in Vancouver, BC, and Berkeley, Calif., have found the first solid, we-really-see-them planets in the galaxy. Orbiting Fomalhaut and a star pitifully named HR 8799, 25 and 130 light years from earth, respectively, the four planets are the first to actually be seen rather than just inferred based on dips in starlight and/or wobbles in their suns' or nearby bodies' orbits. They are big -- from 3-10 times as large as Jupiter.

According to the New York Times article discussing the discovery: "Both systems appear to be scaled-up versions of our own solar system, with giant planets in the outer reaches, leaving plenty of room for smaller planets to lurk undetected in the warmer inner regions. Dust rings lie even farther out, like the Kuiper belt of icy debris extending beyond the orbit of Neptune."

The two teams discovered the planets using the Hubble Telescope and the telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Stuff like this makes me wish I had been an astronomer, which would have been possible except for the simple facts that I am a math moron and I hate night work.

I am watching stars

Legend has it that the monk, Dom Perignon, upon tasting his first glass of what would come to be known as "champagne," exclaimed, "I am drinking stars!"

For people like the Ward sisters, of which there are six, drinking stars is only moderately less interesting than watching them. But the light pollution in my hometown of Atlanta, means a lot of effort (staying up until all hours and making sure there are enough blankets around) for very little reward.

So this year, I am heading to my parents' home near Amelia Island, Florida, where a few sisters have gathered cots, sleeping bags and a cooler full of stars to drink, and where we will set up camp outside next to the marsh to watch the Leonids in what is still a fairly dark sky. I am desperately sorry that one sister, Cathy, the founder and hilarious voice of this blog, will not be with us, but we'll be waking her up with the occasional drunken phone call to join her in singing "Aquarius" and intoning William Shatner's introduction to Star Trek: "Space, the final frontier..."

For those few of you who may read this and not know this stuff: The Leonids are the pieces of junk thrown off of Comet Temple-Tuttle. The shooting stars they produce appear to arise out of Leo, thus the name, and appear at the ungodly hour of 4-5 am in the northeast sky.

This will be one of those rare times when we are all sitting outside and someone yells, "Oooohh. Did you see it?" And everyone else says, "You're lying," but it really will be true!

Anyway, we will be toasting Cathy and all of you who are watching with us.

Ramblin' Wreck in Space

I graduated from the University of Georgia. But I have always pulled for Georgia Tech (except when they play the Dogs). Even more so now that my retired sportswriter husband is making money writing for the Tech website. Georgia has had its share of successes -- it was one of the only schools (if not the only school)to have had two Rhodes Scholars in the last batch. This means something to me because my brilliant stepdaughter is now in her third year as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

But the fact that three former Georgia Tech students will be aboard Endeavor when it launches is pretty cool. They are:

Sandra Magnus, who flew on STS-112 and is now scheduled for a 3 1/2-month stay on the ISS. She earned her doctorate in materials science in 1996.

Eric Boe, a native of Chamblee, an Atlanta suburb, who earned his master's in electrical engineering in 1997.

Shane Kimbrough, a native Atlantan, who earned his master's in operations research in 1998.

Of course, Endeavor will carry four other astronauts, who graduated from various decent schools.

Endeavor is scheduled to head off at 7:55 pm Friday, Nov. 12, weather permitting. It will deliver about seven tons of new equipment and supplies, including a new kitchen and crew facilities for enlarging the station’s resident capacity.

Today in space history.

Engineer astronaut Chuck Jones was killed when AAL 11 was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in 2001. Jones never got to fly in space; his mission STS-71B was cancelled after the Challenger disaster. He left space service the following year.

Holy crap!

I couldn't even get my Sea Monkeys to live in a 76 degree, pH-balanced, sunlit aquarium. With a castle![Above: A "water bear." Ain't they cute? If I'd have had a choice back when I was a kid, I would have had pet water bears instead of pet sea monkeys. Oh, snap. I think I just came up with a business model.]




Now this is scientific advance, y'all.


[Below: An actual, unretouched family photo of the Davisons, one of the many Sea Monkey families I grew and cared for. Or not.]