The Big Think

How about this for a nerd-tastic vacation?

And it’s pulling us in.

That’s no moon….

The sun (you know, our sun) has just finished its very first spotless month in a whole century. To solar watchers this is… disturbing.

But not this far! How long would it take you to walk a light-year?

Set your watches for August 21st, 2017. That’s the date of the next total solar eclipse that will take place in North America. More info here.

The Tunguska event.

I’m still in the design phase of the telescope and I keep going back and forth over whether or not it’ll be motorized. There are definite plusses to having a motor on it (easy tracking, astrophotography, coolness, etc), but I still remain nervous that I would mess up the beautiful design by hanging an ugly and inaccurate motor off of the side. And what about power? Would I have to run an extension cord to the house? Batteries? I’m starting to think that going drive-less is the way. But then I got a look at this picture:

and thought “that’s it!” I’ll make a solar panel to drive the motor!

[beat]

on a telescope.

[beat]

(rolls eyes at self)

The Mars Phoenix lander finds water ice! Exciting discovery, as water ice is one of the prerequisites to much more interesting chemistry, including the possibility of life.

Had a rather long night last night with a bout of insomnia from 4-6:30am. No matter, though, because I was able to get some good mental design work done on the telescope. I have a good rough idea of the case that I’m going to build for it. It’s roughly modeled after a beautiful paduak and curly maple briefcase I saw. Still have to figure out a way to do the inlay work, and the exact design/materials for the inlay.

Speaking of inlay, I’ve come to a decision about a spectacular detail on the tube of the telescope, but I’m going to keep that one under my hat. Grin.

It may not look like it, but “work” is proceeding on the design. 99% of it is mental at this point (in more ways than one), but once I get the design figured out in my head and go through a virtual imaginary assembly, I should have most of the build issues worked out. That’ll save me grief and time once the construction begins. I still anticipate that it’ll be 4-5 years until the whole project is completed. It’s been a real joy to just be able to spend months thinking and incorporating different ideas that I see into the design. No rush to commit to anything or start building immediately- I’ve got plenty of other stuff to build in the meantime.

Speaking of which, time to go to the shop this afternoon. The sides of the ent. cent. are almost finished (except for the trim and doors). Next step is the center case, then I’ll go back and face frame the whole thing. Then build doors. Construction stalled this past week because of other commitments, but it should get back on track this week.

Did you know this is the earliest Easter for the next 220 years? More cool Easter date info here.

If you were a lucky insomniac yesterday morning (wednesday about midnight am), and happened to be looking in the right place of the sky, you would have seen a mega-explosion that happened halfway across the universe (note: not “galaxy”). This super-explosion happened approximately 7.5 billion years ago and the light was just visible with the naked human eye wednesday for a few minutes.

“No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked eye at such an immense distance,” says Swift science team member Stephen Holland of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We don’t know yet if anyone was looking at the afterglow at the time it brightened to peak visibility. But if someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time, they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid.”

Scienceblog has more.

The Catholic Church decides to put up a statue to Galileo in the Vatican. Yes, really.

Avalanches on Mars caught on camera. Awesome.

The Earth-Moon System as seen from Mars.

How to commit mundicide. I love this kind of thinking. Wait, that sounded wrong…

Handmade Orrery. Beautiful. Here are some super detailed closeups from the buyer.

Three Racine, Wisconsin sophomores find a new asteroid. Pretty cool, and definitely on my list of things I’d like to do.

Here’s a nice wooden telescope.

Japan has just released high definition pictures taken from lunar orbit. Wowsers.