It’s Star Wars Day
May 4, 2009 on 6:08 pm | In Space Oddities, Superheroes | 1 CommentMay the Fourth Be With You…
Star Wars was released when I was a kid and it captivated my entire generation. For years afterward most of our play-acting revolved around the series’ theme and characters.
Of course, every girl wanted to be Princess Leah.
Sometimes competition for the role got a little out of hand. In that case, it was acceptable for a girl to take on the role of a robot or android instead. In what may have been a bit of foreshadowing, I played the part of the obnoxious know-it-all linguist C-3PO more often than not.
Some thirty-two years later, my little nieces have many different heroic characters to emulate in their games. But the character of Princess Leah was the first empowered woman I encountered in mass media.
By the way, if the Force is a space-age religion, wouldn’t she be a jihadist?
2009 Crop Circle Season Begins
April 21, 2009 on 6:42 pm | In Art, Space Oddities | Leave a Comment
The first crop circle of the 2009 season was reported on April 19, according to Crop Circle Connector. It appeared in a field of rapeseed (a.k.a. canola in America).
It reminds me of a symbol commonly used to designate Internet podcasts, such as this logo for Disneyland™ podcasts.
I believe it to be man-made because in two photos I can see lines defining quadrants in the circle running through the center disc, and one line (running left-to-right in the top image) is slightly off-center.
NASA goes all ‘American Idol’
March 1, 2009 on 11:48 am | In Space Oddities | Leave a CommentNASA’s allowed the public to ‘vote’ on a star system to point the Hubble at.
Unfortunately I found out about this scant hours before voting closed. I got my vote in but wasn’t able to let many others in on the fun.
FEBRUARY 16, 2009
Star searchWEB POLL
You Decidehttp://youdecide.hubblesite.org/
It’s not every day that we get to direct a $2.5 billion, school-bus-size instrument. But this month, NASA is celebrating the International Year of Astronomy by letting us decide which object the Hubble telescope should target next.
You get to choose from six heretofore unexamined regions of the universe: two planetary nebulae; two spiral galaxies, visible from different angles; the amorphous “Star-Forming Region NGC 6334”; and — the current front-runner — two “interacting galaxies” that appear to be merging and go by the joint name Arp 274. Voting closes March 1. NASA will post the results on March 2 and photos of the winner in early April
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