The Stellar Survey for August 31 - September 13
The Stellar Survey for August 31 - September 13
HYBRID EDITION!
Lightning strikes generate temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. Who knew? | Also: climate change is making them more frequent. Because apparently we all don’t have enough to worry about today!
JWST has discovered star clusters in a galaxy that was around 400 million years after the Big Bang. | Don’t you just love the JWST? I do! Just keeps on truckin’ for science, even as the world burns.
In a few months, Saturn’s rings will vanish from view. | But fear not! They’ll be back.
Three weeks ago I was all ready to begin writing a new Sunday Letter in preparation for the weekend. And then I made the mistake of taking my computer in to get some of its pesky keys fixed, once and for all. I figured it would take maybe three days, tops, for them to order new parts and fix what needed fixing. Three days without my computer felt like a lot, but I was sure I could manage.
It took eight days, in total. I almost fell apart.
Should we regulate the moon? Scientists say yes. | Unsurprisingly, Amanda says no.
Four billion years ago, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was struck by an asteroid bigger than the rock that killed the dinosaurs. | It’s not a competition, but Ganymede definitely wins.
By the end of the 2020s we might have satellite navigation on the moon. | Just in time for GPS to send a moon rover into a crater. The GPS says there’s a road!
Come to the virtual Under One Sky conference in November! | This free, annual conference talks all about protecting the sanctity of our night skies, and fighting light pollution. It’s going to be a good time.
I didn’t think a week without a computer would derail me, but it did. I was so anxious I couldn’t sit still. One day about halfway through that eight-day period, I tried sitting in meditation for half an hour and basically spent the whole time feeling like I was about to burst out of my skin. (I meditated every day, but that stretch felt particularly rough.)
Partly I was anxious because I had work to do, in addition to my own writing. I’m mentoring now and it involves reading and critiquing and so much of that was beyond my grasp sans computer.
But another part of it—a large part—was that I was already anxious and worried about life (see this entry! And this Instagram post!), and what do you know, one small thing disappears and all of the breathing and thinking and meditating and sitting and reading and doing nothing I’ve been doing for the last two years suddenly feels entirely inadequate.
My life is a house of cards, I kept thinking. And here I thought I was doing so well.
It ended, eventually. These things usually do.
NASA’s new solar sail is now visible in the night sky. | Look up, my friends! Look up!
A Harvest Moon Supermoon lunar eclipse is coming this month! | Fun times with the moon yet again.
Here are some new images of Mercury from a most recent flyby. | They were captured by a probe named BepiColumbo, which I just find delightful.
Catch this first teaser trailer for “Alien: Earth”, a new series coming to Hulu in 2025. | I will not be. ;)
SpaceX’s rocket explosion from last year left a huge hole in the ionosphere. | Sigh. But, you know, business as usual when it comes to space exploration, etc etc.
My computer is back now. It’s been back for almost two weeks. I got caught up on all of the mentoring work that needed doing and everything is fine.
Other keys have now detached or are wobbly (I feel like I took my car in for an oil change and came back with bad brakes!), which means I will probably need to get a new keyboard in the nearish future. Another thing to add to the list of things that need to be fixed.
It’s easy to worry about all of this. And then I remember: everything worked out. Everything will probably work out here, too. So why worry ahead of schedule?
An annular solar eclipse will take place over Rapa Nui (Easter Island) on October 2. | An annular solar eclipse is when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, but doesn’t completely cover the Sun’s disk.
Boeing’s Starliner has landed without its crew. | Stuck in space until 2025! Sounds like a soap opera. :)
Watch a 100,000 mile high plasma tower erupt from the Sun! | 100,000 miles…is a lot of miles. Whew.
SpaceX plans to start launching unmanned flights to Mars in 2026. | If these go well, manned flights will follow a short time after. Will Elon Musk be on one? I guess this remains to be seen…
Aurora lovers! Listen up! | A particularly active “Aurora season” could be just weeks away.
China has plans to build a lunar South Pole moon base by 2035. | Cue the For All Mankind music.
One thing I often forget is that the Universe is constantly rolling out support to us, in a hundred different ways. I have this image in my mind of a safety net as this grand thing of gossamer and lace, suddenly unfurling beneath me as far as the eye can see.
Congratulations! You’ve won the lottery! You’ve inked a book deal!
But sometimes—most of the time?—the safety net doesn’t look like that. It comes in little bits. A connection here, a small gift there.
Here—take some mentoring work. Or—look! Here’s fresh vegetables from your garden, for free, to cut down on the grocery bill.
Day by day, everything arrives exactly when I need it.
“It’s nerve-wracking,” I said to an acquaintance a few mornings ago, as we strolled around the park with our dogs, “but I guess freelancing really does force you to be active and present in your life in a way that I’d forgotten.”
Things sort themselves out. This is what we do, as a species. We sort ourselves out, even if ever-so-slowly. :)
Two supermassive black holes may be the closest pair ever discovered. | Doesn’t it boggle your mind, knowing that we can see this kind of stuff now?
Check out this first teaser from Star Trek: Lower Decks Season Five! | I WILL BE WATCHING THIS FOR SURE.
The Polaris Dawn astronauts have completed their first spacewalk! | Their billionaire founder got to go too. See what out-of-this-world riches money can buy now?
And finally: some musical entertainment that’s truly out-of-this-world. | Watch this Polaris Dawn astronaut play the “Star Wars” theme in space!
In other news: I am writing. Writing, writing, writing. It’s all I want to do with my day, all I think about, everywhere my focus goes. You can tell by the state of my sinks and the layer of dust on my cabinets. :)
My mind is in the clouds. My mind is in space. My mind is with Jess, wherever she is.
It is not, even accounting for the anxiety, at all a bad place to be.