More snow!

The past couple of weeks it felt like the winter was nearing an end. The past few days reversed that feeling. We have gotten a lot of wet, heavy snow. Good for snowballs, bad for shoveling. The problem now is that I need to lift every shovel full of snow over my head to get it on top or over the pile I've built on the side of my driveway. Here's a picture of me (to help you get a sense of the scale) sitting on the side of my driveway in the massive snowbank.

Don't bother zooming in on this picture. I'm not in focus, which is a little embarrassing.

I guess all the snow has an added benefit. Better home security! The door heading out to my backyard would take a while (not to mention a lot of effort) to open by a would be thief (not like we have those around where I live).

Discovery's final flight

The final launch of the space shuttle Discovery was successful! I'm so proud because I know I was instrumental in it's success. After all, could they have repaired it in time if I didn't take a picture of it from a mile away back in November? I think not! I've posted the picture before that was clearly instrumental to the success of the launch today (notice the expert analysis, where I pointed out that the shuttle is very big).

Here's a picture from my trip back in November. It's hard to believe that these tiles are able to protect the shuttle during reentry. They look so fragile.

I was able to watch the launch today live at work because nobody walked in my cubicle while I was watching it (it was only 5 minutes anyway). If you didn't get to see it, and want to, here it is!

      

Pale blue dot

I'm not sure why, all of a sudden, I'm coming across more and more space/planetary size comparisons. But I'm loving it! Here's the latest one, comparing the planets of our solar system to our star and others.



It's hard to even imagine how big the universe is, but it's fun to try!

That video reminds me of this picture, described by Carl Sagan himself in this video.

Learning to Cook

If I had anything else to add to better describe my cooking habits, I'd write them here. But, this flow chart sums it up perfectly. I'm about at the "I should cook more!" phase right now. It's only a matter of time until I buy ingredients and put some in a pan!

http://xkcd.com/ for more comics like this. Although be warned...the disclaimer at the bottom of the page reads "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

Editing marathon done!

I've been working, slowly but surely, on editing pictures from Christmas. Spent a few hours this morning to power through the last of them. Out of the 619 pictures I took, 79 of them made the cut to be edited and shared. Maybe about 15 of those I'd consider really, really good. Glad I'm not shooting with a film camera, this hobby would get expensive quickly.

Here is not one of those pictures. It's actually a picture of the room I had when I went to Germany last year...random, I know, but I was going through some old pictures and thought this would be an interesting one to post.

Jupiter is massive!

Look at this video of what the other planets would look like if they orbited at the same distance as our moon. It's incredible to imagine how it would be if we saw these planets rather than the moon in our night sky. Simply amazing. I love anything like this that sparks my imagination. This is just our solar system in our galaxy in our universe, and it's breath taking. The possibilities are endless in other solar systems, galaxies, and (perhaps) other universes. Is there someone somewhere who has a Jupiter sized object filling their night sky, wondering what it would be like if their planet was orbited by a small moon sized object?


Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.