Intersection Logs

Asteroid conspiracy theorists may be even worse than solar activity conspiracy theorists.

Five+ hours in the slow cooker was probably too long for a mix of red lentils and dried vegetables previously boiled for ten minutes, plus a coarsely chopped^H^H^H cut up onion. Tasty enough (if rather the reverse of appetizing in appearance) but pretty close to mush in texture.

The indicator light on my coffee maker seems to have died. Fortunately the coffee-making function hasn't.

The derelict car dealership just up the road is going to be a car dealership again. I don't know whether the extensive gutter-cleaning exercise holding up traffic along their frontage for the last couple of days is at all connected. And that can't be the only reason why buses that are supposed to be running at ten-minute intervals between here and the far side of the city have been turning up in pairs more often than not for the last fortnight.

I was just starting to work on re-convincing my system that 65 F is a perfectly comfortable indoor temperature, and we get a heatwave.

We had a magnificent M-class flare and prominence eruption from the Sun this morning, as explained in the video below.

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And those external shots of the space station and Endeavour from the departing Soyuz finally came back from the chemist, as seen on NASA websites and elsewhere. I think they were worth the wait!

The Sun has been pretty active this week. The highlight was an X2.2 flare on the 15th (that's a big one, though still less than a tenth of the size of the monster flares of late October 2003; the biggest so far this cycle by quite a margin.) There might be aurora tonight even here -- though it'll probably too cloudy and/or moonlit to see much.






Below the cut is yesterday's APOD (2kx2k pix), showing the flare at the 193 Angstrom wavelength as seem by AIA.
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The images at the Sun Today site look a little odd the last few days, but it's not something wrong with the instrument -- just an aesthetic choice in need of some fine tuning, as far as I can tell, that's currently making most of the colorized images look overexposed. The FITS versions look fine. I think I approve the choice to ditch the cherry-pink for the 304 images in favor of orange, anyway.

Heroic efforts to keep the bits NASA Goddard needed for the Shuttle and SDO launches open through the Snowpocalypse.

Launch Party in Second Life

Video showing the shockwave as the rocket hit the sound barrier and a thin layer of cloud.

Another video of the shockwave, taken by a 13-year-old girl and showing the destruction of a "sundog" in the cloud.

So Britain has a shiny new synchrotron! I'd never heard of this until I saw the BBC story.

This brings back memories; in my postgrad (US: grad student) days, I did some work at both the old Daresbury synchrotron and the ISIS Spallation Neutron Source at the Rutherford Appleton lab -- which is on the same site as the new facility. The SNS was the shiny new thing in those days -- so new that it barely managed to squeeze out enough neutrons for my project. Google maps shows what is obviously the new thing under construction, as well as my old familiar stamping ground, the HRPD building, off in the other corner of the site.