Good morning!

It’s totally morning and gah, morning has presented me with a ripe uppercut. I went to Kung Fu for the past two nights, which alone isn’t that unusual. Last night, however, I helped instruct and was thus very physically active from 6:15 until 9:30. By the end of the night I was wholly exhausted. What was kind of neat was that no one part of me was particularly tired, it was full body weariness.

Interestingly, this resulted in a very unique sleeping scenario. I was physically exhausted, but my mind was in alert kung fu mode and I had trouble falling asleep. So instead, I read some astronomy stuff.

Fun facts from last night’s readings:

– I know I’ve talked about parsecs before, but did you know that the closest star to us is Proxima Centauri and it’s a mere 1.2 parsecs from us? That’s about 4 light years away. We’re pretty much bff on a universal scale.

proxima.PNG

– When describing brightness, astronomers refer to a star’s absolute magnitude which is how bright it would appear if it were located at a distance of 10 parsecs

– Spectral analysis allows us a pretty sweet understanding of the elements in distant stars.

And in non-astronomy book news: Some dude figured out that you can see the reflections of Earth’s oceans on the dark side of the moon (dark side meaning the side that’s not reflecting the sun… not the side that we can’t see). It’s called EarthShine and it’s AWESOME for a bunch of reasons.
1. it gives me a new thing to try and notice with my telescope
2. it means that someday if we find moons orbiting around distant planets, we can look at them to figure out the surface structure of the parent planet. Whoa!!

3 thoughts on “Good morning!

  • 4/9/2009 at 10:43 am
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    This is one of your better mspaint’s imho and may make a sweet shirt.

    Reply
  • 4/10/2009 at 12:02 pm
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    Oh man. That was going to be my comment too. Shirt, please!

    Reply

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