One step nerdier (can it be?)
Today while I was cleaning up my work inbox I found an e-mail about a beginning astronomy course at the university observatory (just 3.1 miles from my house) and decided, on a whim, to register. God knows it's hard to know less about what's going on up there than I generally do. Tonight we learned how to understand the horizon coordinate system that uses altitude and azimuth and how to spot satellites in the night sky - there was even a practice session after class. One set of communication satellites, originally launched to support satellite phones, briefly flare when the sun hits them - at the brightest point of the flare (you can download the coordinates, trajectory, and flare magnitude - but who is figuring this stuff out?) they can be 100 times brighter than the brightest planet in the sky. I had hoped for something more romantic than looking for reflections of abandoned and outdated human-made objects in orbit, but actually they were surprisingly nice - like slowish shooting stars whose arced path across the sky has been minutely calculated by giant nerds. Meanwhile, every single satellite that we looked at during our practice session appeared somewhere around the Cygnus constellation, and I am wondering if maybe it is time to get paranoid about the various cygni suddenly making an appearance everywhere in my life...
posted by Pangea at 10:49 PM
3 Comments:
Wow, that class sounds like fun. When I was little I wanted to grow up to be an astronomer, but it never really went anywhere because I was more interested in identifying objects in the sky than in the actual physics of those objects. (It's like someone who wants to be a linguist because he or she wants to learn to speak languages. It shows a limited understanding of the field.) I still have fantasies of becoming more familiar with the night sky, but like all other of my potential hobbies, I'll have to put amateur astronomy on hold. It makes me happy that you're learning something about it, though.
I have always been really into astronomy. But you know I'm a big nerd.
My grandfather was a navigator for the airlines before they had inertial navigation; they would use the stars to fly the planes. He taught me a bunch of constellations when I was little. He wanted to name my mom Vega (after the star in Lyra). My grandmother wasn't so psyched about the name, though--so she was Christina instead.
Hi, Colliculus. We used to have a Chevy Vega hatchback. I think your mom got off lucky. Maybe your grandfather would have had more success selling Lyra to your grandmother.
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