This is worth noting: Einstein Was Right – Euclid Just Captured Space-Time Warping in a Perfect Cosmic Ring Which references: Euclid: A complete Einstein ring in NGC 6505
I miss having neat nature to take photos of. Utah was full of that. Illinois… well, it’s here, but usually obscured with buildings, power lines, light poles, etc. Still, every now and then something worth taking a photo of emerges.
The second Starship/Superheavy launched today. Vastly more successful than the first flight, but both stages were still destroyed. This sort of thing would be unacceptable for a modern NASA launch system… but it was common in early launch vehicle development. Atlas and Titan kerploded with regularity. This sort of thing is not desirable, but it…
There is a fox that seems to hang out in my back yard from time to time. It’s incredibly skittish; any noise and *bam* it sprints over the fence. So getting decent photos of it has been a challenge, but today i got these. In previous, kinda cruddier photos it looked mangy, but now I…
Starships first not-exactly-successful launch was filmed not only from the ground, but from the NASA WB-57 flying at altitude. Apparently at least five cameras were trained on the launcher; video from two have been released, while three remain classified. i would *assume* that the classified three display some combination of: 1) better tracking 2) Better…
Of my four cats, two (Speedbump and Banshee) like catnip. Buttons has never cared for it; Billy shows no interest, though he’s still young (cats apparently don’t become interested in catnip until sexual maturity). Speedbump’s interest is polite. He will sit silently and watch me carrying leaves and stems and will gently take a leaf…
I have no idea if it has been apparent or not based on recent blog/Twitter postings that the last few days have been frazzling for me. But the short form is that Buttons has been quite sick… and terribly miserable. Several days of vet visits finally culminated today in the conclusion that he *probably* is…
Elephant guns at 82,000 frames per second create some interesting phenomena. Especially interesting are the very brief flashes upon contact with the ballistics gel.
Clothes are throwaway items now. Back In My Day, socks with holes in them were repaired; now, often enough, shirts are worn only a few times then tossed. Sometimes sent to thrift stores and the like, sometimes simply thrown out. But thrift stores have more clothes than they know what to do with. So often…
