Nature
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Here's a picture of the solarium I had added on to the back of the house. Keeps me out of the bugs and can watch wildlife without them seeing me.
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Nice @rockchalkintexas-0 . Are you able to take pictures from inside solarium or is it too tinted?
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@approxinfinity Too tinted. Birds would be so available too. They flutter around the massive sabal palm that sits right behind it, in and out of the firewood stacks, squirrels chase each other around the base of the tree, can see the flocks of birds in the garden, but mainly it was about getting away from the bugs. We can see the moon through the ceiling but not much else. We go out on my upper deck to gaze at the moon and stars. Perseid meteors coming up can be seen every which way. Mike and I used to lay down and watch them.
Which brings me to today's photo. I was devastated when they reclassified Pluto 20 years ago. After all, Clyde Tombaugh, a JAYHAWK, discovered it. I have this image of it from Cassini that is my background on my laptop and another older one as my background on my 2012 Nook that still works! Not many undergraduates enter the University of Kansas having already achieved worldwide fame. And, to date, only one has enrolled at KU after discovering a planet. His name was Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old amateur astronomer from Burdett, Kansas, who positively identified Pluto as the ninth planet in our solar system on February 18, 1930. The finding was the culmination of many years of scanning the night skies by numerous astronomers searching for what had been known as “Planet X,” an effort analogous to looking for a golf ball located 33 miles away. Here's a link to a great article about him: https://union.ku.edu/planetary-man
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Lindley Hall is getting a major renovation. The Tombaugh Observatory sits atop the roof and I hope they will keep that (and maybe update it as well). I used to go there as a kid and it fueled my in interest in space and astronomy.
I entered KU in 1983 with a dream of pursuing Astrophysics but detoured after Calc 1&2 kicked my ass. (My rural Kansas public school education did not prepare me well in Math.)
But, more to the topic: I was not at all surprised when Pluto was re-categorized as a dwarf planet — and not disappointed.
As a kid, I thought its eccentric orbit (it crosses paths with Neptune and is occasionally closer to Sun than Neptune) and irregular elliptical suggested that it was exogenous to our solar system. Astronomers didn't have any good explanations for these irregularities, and I felt it was most easily explained by a scenario where our sun drifted close enough to another star to pull a distant satellite away.
So, even though Pluto doesn't have planetary status, I think it should be recognized as unique gift to our solar system.
Rock Chalk!
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@bskeet That was my building as a geography major. Enjoyed my time there greatly. Math forced me to abandon my plans to become a cartographer!
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I spent the morning cleaning up my fossils and shells from the coast.
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@wonderofscience
Curiosity Rover spotted on the surface of Mars by the orbiting MRO spacecraft.
: NASA/JPL/UoA
https://x.com/wonderofscience/status/2084287182911533426/video/1 -
@RockChalkinTexas-0 It's the Gulf of America! Be proud that it is.
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@bskeet I watched a Nova called Pluto and Beyond and gained a new respect for the planet because even though it is now a dwarf planet, it actually grew to be King of the Kuiper Belt.
JOHN SPENCER: When we launched the New Horizon spacecraft back in 2006, we knew we wanted to fly to an object beyond Pluto, but we didn’t have a particular object that we knew we could reach with our spacecraft. So we started doing deep searches of the sky beyond Pluto.
MARC BUIE: One is, you have two circular objects that are close to each other, but they are orbiting each other, or it could be just some lumpy potato-shaped thing. And then the third is what we call a “contact binary,” two balls stuck together. And we think it could happen for Kuiper Belt objects. We don’t know, we’ve never seen one of these things before.NARRATOR: But when New Horizons finally brings Ultima Thule into focus, the results could be profound. This elusive object could revolutionize our understanding of how the planets in our solar system formed.
ALAN STERN: Ten, nine, eight,...NARRATOR: January 1st, 2019, 12:33 a.m.:
ALAN STERN: …one. Go New Horizons!
NARRATOR: As the world rings in the new year, the New Horizons team celebrates the moment of the spacecraft’s closest approach to Ultima Thule. But it will be hours before anyone knows if the flyby is successful.
JOEL PARKER: Ultima Thule is so far away that it takes six hours to send a signal from the spacecraft to Earth.
ALICE BOWMAN: We have a healthy spacecraft. We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby of our solar system.CROWD CHEERING
NARRATOR: That night, the first close up image of this distant object comes in.
JOHN SPENCER: Well, what we saw today blows out of the water anything we’ve seen. The first image was two or three pixels across. Yesterday, you could see, kind of, two lobes. And today’s image, we see it for what it really is: basically, two spheres stuck together, like this really is two things that formed as two different objects.
THIS IS WHAT THEY SAW!
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This was Mike's first attempt at making a #Jayhawk. It's head moves up and down. Sits right there by my swing when watching birds and hummingbirds.
