Friday, August 18, 2017

Twilights and Rogue Planets and SCRAMBLING THE FAIRIES

The commonality of occurrences of the names of Twilight books? Twilight happens once a day, as does breaking dawn. Noo Moons happen about once a month. Eclipses, eclipses happen less frequently.

Alternative way of thinking about it though: depending where you are on the planet or in space, each of those things is always going on. Woo.

People are beginning to, um, swarm basically. Anyway. Come out of the woodwork, except not? The jets are scrambling...? The flock to eclipse viewing destinations has begun, is what I mean. So, folks are beginning to turn up. Will I be leaving the house for days? There's church on Sunday, but meanwhile hopefully we're stacked with what we need for now, and won't have to shop for anything...

I got interested in astronomy (but it's always been churning in the back of my mind, what would make a good, scientifically accurate astronaut flick) with these posters on the wall at the library, all on astronomical junk what with the eclipse coming up. There's an exoplanet, whose name I've memorized let's see if we've got it right, PSU J318.5-22 (looked it up quickly, dang I'm one letter off, it's PSO J318.5-22) that doesn't have a star attached, not part of any solar system, just discovered by accident looking at something else and it happened to be floating right there by complete cosmic coincidence. You figure that such a coincidence is bound to happen eventually, especially when you figure that they figure that there are billions of rogue planets in our galaxy alone (and by they I mean Neil DeGrasse Tyson.)

From my research of rogue planets and stuff, I was looking into the Alpha Centauri/Proxima Centauri star system (it's a binary system!) which is less than 5 light years away which is holy crap amazingly close in the astronomical scheme of things, and then I started wondering about the Oort cloud and researched how far Voyagers 1 and 2 are into space from there, and all that.

No comments:

Post a Comment