Luna Makes Her Way To Venus

As I look at this skymap and watch the glorious Luna ascend toward her cosmic compatriot, Venus (our night "light" for now) I realize how steady the universe seems. How predictable at times, which is fine for most - we like to know what we can expect to see. But our little galaxy alone is plastic and malleable, and one never knows what to expect. For instance, there's a comet on the way.But for now: Tonight, Tuesday 27th if you're up around twilight in North America, look to the West-Southwest to see a very dim crescent moon - or better still follow the bright Venus down to it's lower right. Binocs needed to see the waxing crescent.By the 28th Luna will continue to rise, and the finale is the 29th when she will shine in a bright waxing crescent only 5 degrees to the lower right of our beautiful Venus. Who knows what these ladies have to discuss!

Then Luna takes her leave on the 30th rising high and even brighter, making me think perhaps Venus shared a bit of her energy with the mysterious orb we love.

This is a North American event, and you'll of course need to be in a clear big-sky area. Get those binocs yet? I swear if I had the $ I'd get everyone a pair of good binoculars, you'd actually drop your jaw watching the Perseid meteor shower as it seems to descend right down upon you. Above picture of Comet Lulin's blue-green gaseous tail
So about that comet! It's called "Lulin" and is being touted as "the"comet of the season. As it's watched all over the globe, from Australia to India to Africa, it makes it's magnitude 5 way toward earth. As it speeds up, it may reach 6-7 which diminishes its brightness. Early in February it will be making its way to constellation Virgo.

On the night of February 23rd it will near its peak brightness, and make its way toward Saturn. This may be visible to the naked eye, depending on Luna's interference, since she loves the attention.

Lulin's closest approach to earth will be February 24th. By now this comet wil be visible in the night sky easily and remain so all through the night. Afterward it makes its very speedy way in opposition to the sun, about 180 degrees now that's over 5 degrees per day - that comes to 1 arcsecond every 5 seconds. In case you long forgot from my old Journal about arcseconds, it's just 1/60th of a degree, and looks like this: ^ So if you see 5^ you know it means 5 arcseconds, or MOA (minutes of arc). Isn't astronomy amazing?
A bit of minutia: Lulin is traveling backward.
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Basics as usual courtesy of S&T, UAG, JPL, NASA, Gryphon, sky charts

A New Standard In The Free World

There's a time and a place, isn't there?

The reporter who asked our new President a complex question involving a subject he couldn't possibly have any knowledge about - that was a hit below the beltway.

I have mixed feelings about President Obama. I have extremely certain feelings about the office he holds (glorified oligarchy) And I have anxious feelings about the man himself. It's all dependent upon future decisions made. He may be an ethical, honest person but he's got a hard, lonely, misunderstood job no matter how many experts he surrounds himself with. At day's end? Alone.

Happily, he got straight to work, setting a closing date for Gitmo, that being one year. He also proposed the appointment of a special prosecutor for the many trials to be held for those prisoners.

He's shown his belief in and support of embrionic stem cell research - and for those who feel we have no business fooling with an unborn fetus just to gain certain precious stem cells, educate yourself a bit more - we can grow these cells in a laboratory and have been doing so in California for years. Many little poor paralized mice are scattering all over with not one human fetus being invaded.

His massive trillion dollar economic stimulus package is being called too expensive and will take too long, and frankly it will be at least 3 years before those thousands of jobs become available, but I say, get more bipartisan you Rebuplicans and support at least the office if not the man. He's extremely anxious to get down to work and pull this country out of the muck. We've slowly become a second and soon a third-world country and I personally can't expect my government to fix it all. You and I wil be making big sacrafices.

It must be difficiult for Mr. Obama to re-live the inaugural flubbing over and over, which I'm sure he's been doing. The Chief Justice was supposed to say:

"I, Barack Hussein Obama".... then shut up. He didn't, and his gaffe threw Mr. Obama off his game, well-rehearsed as is customary. Personally, I thought his inaugural speech was neither encouraging nor mediocre, but again, he gave the world a small idea of what direction he intended to take on grave matters.

Another inaugural tidbit: the glorious music given us by Itzak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma was pre-recorded. Only if you were sitting close to the platform would you have heard them playing to the recording, which was done to insure all would hear it. And speaking of music:

Why do we sing "let freedom ring" to "God Save The King"? When is someone going to pass legislation that would hire a good composer to write proper music for our anthem "America" (better known as "My Country, Tis of Thee" and always known in the United Kingdom's 19th-century empire as "God Save Our Good King George") We fought a bloody "at home" war to kick the English out, why are we still singing that anthem to their music??? Yikes.

Hey don't you think it a double-standard crime that Caroline Kennedy was politely asked by NY's Gov. David Patterson to "do the right thing" and withdraw her intention to run for Hitlery Clinton's empty seat? Talk about obvious. I realize he had someone already in mind for the job but he should've told her before she made her public declaration, and think about this - what if John Kenndy Jr. were still alive, and he voiced interest in the office, think he'd get it? You bet he would. Mr. Patterson, you said your decision was not a matter of race or gender but it certainly is to Ms. Kennedy (she being a woman and all? Geez - glass ceiling).

It tugs at my heart to see and hear folks talk about "It's our turn" and "hope is in the land" and "free at last" kind of talk. That only tells me you voted Mr. Obama into office by reason of race. Being partly white must be difficult when dealing with people like that, who think from a racist core,

Whatever's ahead, we already know the world is in big trouble. It's been common to look to the leader of the free world, our President, for guidance. Fortunately, Mr. Obama has a moral compass and he allows his better nature to direct him in an ethical way. I expect alot from him in these trecherous times, but I also know our President will need each and every American to carry their share.

Ready?

Dinos, Stars and Other Dangers

I'm still on a cloud about our first broadcast Thursday, and in a few hours we'll have another. So where do I go? Here of course, to yammer about my favorite topic: the universe. I better turn on my alarm, just in case I miss my own show lol.

And if you want to hear us at 9 pm EST here's our site just click in and you'll hear the broadcast immediately - we put in a link directly to the radio broadcast, you might enjoy it. NOW! Back to the skies:

If a star (not ours, not Sol) lost its fuel and went supernova, the radiation would kill all life here on earth, yes? And perhaps some forms of lower life would survive, marine life perhaps, and small mammals - sound familiar? Kind of like the last extinction called the KT (that's the dino extinction name for short, the actual name is End Cretaceous-Tertiary). But it's the same thing - something killed off those impossible-sized creatures. I've looked at alot of choices, and discovered the answer for me is, it was a combination of 3 cataclismic events befalling the planet.

It may've begun with the smallest of killers: microbes. As these reptiles ate and drank from the same places, including eating each other, and as the water receded, this dangerous creature we sometimes call worms, would've laid its eggs in the body cavities of the dinos, causing havoc with their immune and digestive system. It would've weakened, sickened and eventually killed off many reptilian species.Another killer was the volcanism existing at the time, bursting magma into the air, causing an early winter, a loss of vegetation, acid rain, everything that mega-volcanoes kill. That includes life, and the largest are the most susceptible arent' they. When you're as big as a big house you have to eat constantly, move constantly, and you can't procreate that often - I'm thinking of today's equivalent, the elephant. Very similar. It's not easy being big. It's harder still when your world is dying around you.

Why would it be dying? Well we know "something" slammed into the Gulf near the Yucitan approximately 65 million years past during the cretaceous. This "thing" was most likely a stray bullet from the Ort Cloud, where asteroids hang out. It was monstrously huge, big enough to spew earth and sea into the atmosphere, causing first an immediate kill of anything living within thousands of miles. The resulting cloud resting permanently in the atmosphere would've blocked out any life-giving sun and that would dispose of the remaining reptilian life.

All three together in short order, happening within a few hundred years of each other, could've been the cause of our last extinction, the great dino kill. It would be naive of us to think just one event brought this kingdom to its knees, a dynasty of reptiles which existed for over 200 million years! In comparison? Humans havn't even existed a half million. So the age of the reptiles was a long and successful one. To a point.

My problem with the asteroid theory being the only cause of their extinction is, if this planet was crawling with mega-life, which then died out in a cosmic instant, where are all the remains? Why don't we have more dinosaur bones? In museums and collections we have a very small, limited amount of dino skeletons and we really should have thousands upon thousands, enough for every dino-fascinated 10-year old kid on the planet. But we don't, why is that?

Could it be many of the creatures were already dead?

Hundreds of years before the asteroid hit, those microbial killers could've wiped out tribes and herds of dinosaurs, it's as possible as it is today. If that were so, their remains would've decomposed and become the biomass we use today - that's only a small part of it. These remains could also be in a completely separate and much deeper layer of the earth's crust than archaeologists have always looked. We usually stop digging when we find something, don't we?

Using the sophisticated equipment we're rightfully proud of, we could detect objects deeper and further down into the earth, the only problem being we would've be able to accurately identify anything and it would cost a zillion. But I'm sure others have pondered a mass eradication of life long before the asteroid hit - long before the volcanoes choked off air making it impossible to breathe - long before those pesky worms sickened the largest of the reptilian life. Oh and there's another cause of mass weakening and death for this dynasty: insects.

We know these ancient flying killers very well, they were preserved and kept almost completely intact by being caught in tree amber, and these flies and mosquitoes carried disease that certainly helped eradicate the dinos.

The answer is anyway you approach the situation, it's whatever your personal research and understanding leads you to believe. Some people don't even believe such creatures existed, that the skeletons we've been fortunate enough to collect are man-made. We live in a diverse world.

And it's bio-diversity that keeps any world alive and thriving.

So I look to star-matter and wonder, "Is one of you about to die?" If so, and if it's close enough to this planet, we won't have to worry about the coming depression. All questions about life and death will be answered. But does it matter? We're all temporary. Once we've fulfilled this particular time, finding the answers to our eternal questions won't matter, because those questions won't be relevant to anything.

I wonder what that dinosaur thought as it watched a giant ball of fire stream through the skies of ancient earth ........

FIRST BROADCAST 4ALLofUS

You might remember the group I espouse and belong to, it's on my pane, http://4allofus.com and it's exactly what it sounds like. I know a few of you registered after I posted it in JLand and I'm humbly grateful, though it's you who'll reap the benefits.

We complain because sometimes it looks impossible to affect real change; we know the criminals in Washington should just be tossed out, we know Bush and Cheney will never be held accountable for their admitted crimes, and something's got to be talked about we get too bust to notice. I know you all care. This "system of government" lies to us, robs us, kills our children in wars they start, and have you noticed your civil rights slowly drip drip dripping away? Political winks and nudges that get criminals elected are JUST NOT ACCEPTABLE! (Al Gore won in 2004 but we got Bush again, thanks to vote tampering in Florida - remember "hanging chads? come on doesn't that burn you up??!!?? A bunch of crooks in suits and label pins saluting a flag they don't care about, we all know what color they salute)
GENUINE START OF A SOLUTION? TALK ABOUT IT !!!
If you can't, LISTEN TO OTHERS TALK ABOUT IT!!

Ever hear of Revolution Broadcasting? Restore the Republic? Ron Paul Radio? (Dr. Paul would've been our answer in Wash.)

If you feel like listening to the beginning of 4ALLofUS make their first radio broadcasts, here's the time and place.

THURSDAYS and SATURDAYS at 9 pm EST
Click - http://revolutionbroadcasting.com (which is now known as Restore the Republic Radio )

Click in to Revolution Broadcasting and you'll immediately hear the radio, all the time, with someone discussing a topical issue and accepting calls - there's even a chat going. You can click "Schedule" to see what programs are being heard.

As for ours, in "Schedule" you'll see under Thursdays and Saturdays at 9 pm "Freedom Fighters 4allofus with John and Matt". These guys can see through the b.s., and offer truth, solutions, hope.

ANYONE WHO'S HEARD OF THE BILDERBERG GROUP WILL TUNE IN THURSDAY. ANYONE WHO HASN'T, SHOULD. Like anything else, if it's not your cuppa, tune out. But please give it a first listen in it's infancy stage in radio. Isn't change what we were promised, and isn't that partly our responsibility to see it happen? Involve yourself, friends.

THANK YOU for being awake and not sheeple just going along with anything thrown at you. Depression won't be fun, kids.

This noble country has never been the problem. We know who the problems are, it's people who create a population of homeless children and insist they don't need to eat more than once a day. Remember a Reagan cabinet member actually saying that when the food stamps program was slashed? No, it's not America, this proud young experiment in equality and freedom, it's the privileged elite we allow to hold and abuse too much power. ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY.

Please tune in? . http://revolutionbroadcasting.com
Thursdays and Saturdays at 9:00 p.m. EST

Nostradamus Revisted

We've become familiar with this name from all angles of history. Michael de Nostradamus, a physician and seer, whose quatrains of predictions never cease to startle the world. I love a good mystery, love to plunder into the paranormal, and one of the reasons is to try and get at the true heart of what I'm questing about. I don't want to believe just because it's more seductive and defies logic or science, and I do love science.

Think upon this a bit: Nostradamus wrote his many quatrains, or 4-line paragraphs of prediction (some say warning) and modern man looks to them for explanations for so many historical events. But all of his predictions happen after the fact. People only look back to them after something has happened. If indeed he predicated 9-11, where were the true believers on 9-10? The Nostradamians, they're called. I proffer my respect but truly, if I had a book foretelling the coming of Napoleon, the birth of the Anti-Christ, the burning of cities and the horrid deaths of millions, I think I'd tell someone. Why are his quatrains only valid after the fact??

In specific, on 9-11-01 many saw his predictable hand in one of the quatrains which talked about "towers of the new city falling in blood and terror" etc., as in the picture above. There were hits all over the net, and people read the quatrain and said "Yeah look at that! He knew it would happen!" This really could have so many other explanations, many cities have crumbled in firey defeat, even a Major Arcana tarot card bears that picture. This is an image from an old deck of tarot cards and clearly it's a tower afire. Even without it's meaning in tarot, it could be any event, anywhere. But I want to be fair, let me examine something I'll never understand about Mon. Nostradamus.

In a very famous quatrain, he tells of a man who will come to destroy millions, a man of great power and persuasion, who he names Hister. How many times have people assumed this certainly must be Hitler, with his name disguised? Rewind: Nostradamus had to write his predictions in grimoire or "hidden" fashion so as not to anger the powered nobles of his time, those who threatened to imprison, probably kill him for practicing witchcraft. So he wrote in "riddle" and disguised many names, places, events, leaving just enough to encourage thought. Here's my problem with that:

No one in his time ever heard of Hitler, why didn't he just write HITLER? Who would be angered? Did he just get the spelling wrong? If he wrote "Hitler" no one would've known who he meant, hence no danger. What's the reason?
He is said to predict the oncoming of Napoleon. He wrote the name as "Nau - po - leon". Not hard for you and I to distinguish, but for contemporaries of Nostradamus a complete mystery. So why not just say "Napoleon"? His quatrain on this prediction says that "a small soldier shall rise from the ranks to become king and ruler". Doesn't that describe Harry Truman too? Truman was a soldier who rose to become president and the first human to drop the A-bomb on other humans. It could also describe JFK, a PT boat pilot who went on to become a great ruler. It's just a small ripple in my thoughts on this man, one I realize was gifted, but I caution those "Nostradamians" to be alert and aware. It's so easy and seductive to be carried from logic into the hazy zones of mystery, just because it tickles our fantasy.

"Did You Know?" A Short Ode (repost of February 2007)

"Did You Know?" A Short Ode (repost of February 2007)

Dedicated to one who needs no name.

Did you know that I picture you in winter?

Are you mindful that I watch you in the snow?

Is your heart thinking how my world would splinter

if another caused your love to up and go? Did you know?

Know it well, then, that you are with me daily;

Keep it clearer in your mind how deep my love -

Never worry that another would assail me,

for I am truly yours alone, my sweetest love.

csr

Old Questions For New Friends

Greets to one and all. Back in February 2007, our friend Dawn of Carpe Diem fame sent around a little question thing which helped us know each other better. I notice I have alot of new "blogger" friends with my AOL die-hards - I'd like to know you better. Copy and paste and put your answers in a post, I'll go look at every one. Eternal thanks, and please don't be as pretentious as I was!
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Mary's Questionairre via Dawn

I found this at http://journals.aol.com/princessaurora/CarpeDiem/ and suggest you have a go as well. My answers are not what's expected I know, but nonetheless true today.

l. Name something you don't have but really want. Whatever I don't have I don't need hence I don't want.

2. Name something you have but don't want. Too much joy, as it makes me over-content which leads to ingratitude.

3. Name 2 favorite material possessions. Nothing I think is mine is more favored than any other thing.

4, What is a relationship breaker for you? For me, lying. For the other, I can't possibly know.

5. What is the best part of your relationship with your partner? My partner.

6. Describe what sadness is to you. Your pain. His, hers, theirs.

7. Have you ever been in therapy? Yes, happily.

8. What is your favorite thing to do as a pick-me-up? Sleep, to program and learn from my dreams.

9. Who made you laugh last? You.

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WOW is that how I sounded back then? A wonder I still have friends!

Spooky, Spacey For You

Visionary Art by Nicole Mizoguchi - World Relaxation Soundtrack from Astronomy Records on Vimeo.

Ok here's another "Vimeo". Click the arrow to play it, then click on that "flower petal" icon to get FULL SCREEN....takes a few seconds to start. You just can't watch these things without full screen, honest. Made by Nicole Mizoguchi. GO TRIPPIN!

Here's Where...

For spacey friends who enjoyed this video, I accidentally found it in "Astronomy Picture of the Day" which I have on my right pane, and sometimes gives you an animated, musical show like this one. When you click the picture, it becomes larger, but doesn't always give you extras. So this was just yesterday's "show of the day" lol. If you Google "Vimeo" you'll see it's just a video publishing company, like You Tube. This guy named Till Credner made it, you'll see his name and the spanish caption. If you click on that spanish caption you'll see the video again. Great eh? Yea...