Thursday, October 19, 2006

Musings of Galactic Proportions

Song Stuck on the Brain: When the Saints Go Marching In. I've got it bad, too. I'm humming it, whistling it, singing under my breath. Any minute now I'm gonna pop up out of my chair and start boogying around the office.

It doesn't help that I've got a coffee buzz. One of my co-workers brought in Millstone Chocolate Velvette coffee. It's THE BEST COFFEE EVER. I drank it on an empty stomach, so the caffiene had absolutely no hindrance on it's way into my blood stream.

CFBA: Like Dandelion Dust by Karen Kingsbury is the book of the moment. The Book Shelf Reviews posted a great write up you might find helpful. Be sure to check it out.

Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog Tour: This is my first time posting for the CSFF. Usually it would be a book on tour, but this month it's a website.

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www.dkaMagazine.com boasts some great speculative fiction and is supported by reader and fan donations. Be sure to check out their site.

My Thoughts for the Day: Speaking of Science Fiction... I watched this really interesting special on the Discovery HD chanel called Unfolding the Universe. It was really interesting. Putting aside the fact that I don't buy the whole Big Bang Theory or Evolution, just seeing the photos from Hubble and other telescopes was phenomenal. Nothing puts you in your place like seeing how truly insignificant you are in comparison to the universe.


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Deep survey image of spiral and elliptical galaxies.

They used some computer generated images too, to give a better example of the scope of things. One image looked like a field of stars, but the closer they zoomed in, the more you realized that each point of light was a galaxy of it's own. Then, when you realize that the Milky Way has over a billion stars alone, you really begin to grasp the idea of how vast and massive The universe is.

We're quibbling over whether our little solar system has 8 or 9 planets. Big deal.

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A Supernova

They also talked about black holes, the creation of stars, super novas and galaxies destined to collide... like ours is destined to collide with Andromeda. Of course they don't expect that to happen for billions of years. Hmm.

I thought it was interesting though that after watching that last night, I found this article on Yahoo! this morning.
New image gives insight into colliding galaxies Tue Oct 17, 4:49 PM ET

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This photo, supplied by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), shows the Antennae galaxies in the sharpest image yet of this merging pair of galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2006. As the two galaxies smash together, billions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. The brightest and most compact of these are called super star clusters. The two spiral galaxies started to fuse together about 500 million years ago making the Antenna galaxies the nearest and youngest example of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. (AP Photo/NASA-ESA)
AP - Oct 17 7:50 AM

How amazing would it be to see these images for yourself? I so want to spend a day in Hawaii's telescope observatory.

A.

2 comments:

Camy Tang said...

Ooooh, that coffee sounds yummy.
Camy

April Erwin said...

It is, it is! I sound like I'm on another caffiene buzz. I'm not, but just thinking about that chocolate flavor gets me all excited again. :)

Oh, and I see your book is on the FIRST line up for next year Congrats!