Cosmos

Someday very soon, the privately-financed Cosmos mission will be launched by a submerged Russian submarine. The objective is to test an honest-to-goodness solar sail. If you've never heard of this sort of propulsion system, they're quite interesting. The basic idea is to leverage the power in the photons (light) streaming out from the sun, by capturing them or reflecting them from a large "sail" constructed of ultra-lightweight materials.

Here's the Cosmos site, and here's a good Wikipedia article on the whole idea...

More wildflowers!

Debbie and I took a very nice hike on the East Side Trail along Cold Stream in Cuyamaca State Park today. The wildflowers are within a week or so of prime at the altitude of Green Valley Campground.

Go read all about it (and see all the pictures!) at the link above. You can also click on the picture at right for a larger view.

Overlapping galaxies

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) brings us this photo (click on the photo at right for a larger view) of two galaxies that just happen to line up from our perspective on Earth. This has some scientific benefits (see below), but what strikes me as I look at this is simply the sheer beauty of it. And also what seems like a vanishingly small chance that something like this could "just happen", and how fortunate we are to live in an age where such things can be discovered and shared. The explanation from APOD:

NGC 3314 consists of two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line-up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust are also seen to echo the face-on spiral's structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of visible light can be used to directly explore the distribution of dust in distant spirals. NGC 3314 is about 140 million light-years away in the multi-headed constellation Hydra. This color composite was constructed from Hubble Space Telescope images made in 1999 and 2000.

Quote for the day

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

   Richard Bach