Halloween Begins

So if you care to find me
Look to the Western sky!
As someone told me lately,
Everyone deserves a chance to fly...

The comment I get most about my bicycle from people is "you look like the Wicked Witch of the West on that thing." I decided to have a sense of humor about this, with damn impressive results if I may say so myself. (Though I was going more for the Elphaba from Wicked type of witch rather than the one from the movie.)

This picture's from a Halloween party I went to last night. If you missed my dressing up I'll be doing it again on Wednesday, of course.

The pumpkins my friends and I carved yesterday afternoon. It was a fun time.
My pumpkin this year- my family traditionally didn't do jack-o'-lanterns but rather pumpkin carvings even before that idea spread, some of which were incredibly intricate. We didn't have really nice and proper pumpkin carving tools yesterday and I was a little late, so this is what I did on short notice.

Though for the record, I think everyone was a little disappointed. You see, my design last year might have not been too complicated but it was certainly the one that everyone talked about-
This was only exasperated by the fact that one friend who shall go nameless promptly picked up the pumpkin and went around with it pretending to be the Headless Horseman. Ah, memories!

(And before anyone asks, that's my friend's ball python on my wrist. He's a great snake, though a great deal bigger now.)

There will probably be more pictures here on Wednesday, when it's actually Halloween and not just the Saturday closest. Stay tuned!

Fall Break 3- Newport, Rhode Island

My mom, dad, and I weren't sure what to do on Tuesday before our respective flights left Boston (my brother had to leave a day prior), and then my dad mentioned Newport, Rhode Island. We'd never been there and it's only an hour or so outside Boston and supposed to be very nice, so why not take a look? Always on the lookout for a new state (I've been to 27 at last count, but never Rhode Island), I thought this was a great idea so Tuesday morning we set off.

This is what most of Newport looks like- a nice little New England seaside town, complete with lots of little tourist stores and places that sell wonderful clam chowdah. Start heading towards one direction of town, though, and you start seeing big piles of stone like this-
Back in the Gilded Age (and even now, to some extent), all the wealthy Yanks came up to Newport for summer and built lovely places that they called summer homes and everyone else called mansions. Now a lot of them are museums so you can go and see impressive pieces of real estate.
As we were there for only a few hours, we only toured one house: The Breakers owned by the Vanderbilts. It's quite large and has a nice view onto the ocean, but to tell the truth it wasn't the most exciting and lovely place I've ever toured. It was built to imitate a French or Italian villa, but was also built to impress anyone who might be visiting the Vanderbilt estate, so true to the era it was built in every surface is gilded or flourished or embellished. A touch overdone so the house overall isn't that pretty, but I suppose if your aim was to impress everyone with how much money and power you had it would work pretty well.
There aren't too many pictures of Newport just because I wasn't there for very long, but I wanted to show this last one from the main street. Why? Well if you don't know, it clearly means you're not a fan of Family Guy so I have to tell you that in Family Guy the town the family lives in is Quahog, Rhode Island. (And the bar is called "The Drunken Clam," hehe.) Further, I admit that the entire day I had one of the Family Guy songs stuck in my head called This House is Freakin' Sweet from an episode where the Griffins inherit a Newport Mansion of their very own.

Anyway, I like Newport well enough, though I suspected that a great deal of this had to do with the fact that I went in October and not the summertime when the tourists must be elbow to elbow to each other! Plus hey, now I can say I've been to 28 states! Even if that number's not going to budge for awhile, as most of those states are the boring ones in the middle you don't even get airport layovers at. Oh well.

Fall Breat 2- Boston

Hooray for Boston! I love this city. It's got to be one of the best ones there is, and we headed over Sunday evening because my dad had buisness in the city on Monday.

Of course, everyone knows what's going on in Boston right now that would make it really fun to spend a night on the town in Boston, right? That's right, baseball!
Sunday night was Game 7 of the last round before the World Series, which was against the Cleveland Indians. I'm really not a baseball fan for various reasons (the same thing happens over and over, the Pittsburgh Pirates were never good, etc), but it's a bit infectious to go into a bar filled with rabid Red Sox fans. I do confess that I ended up telling people who asked that I went to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh rather than Case, just because I didn't think it would be a good idea to say I had any affiliation whatsoever with Cleveland.

Except, of course, we didn't pay all that much attention to baseball because the Steelers were playing!
This is my brother and his friend from high school proudly showing their stuff. We found the one bar in Boston that was airing the football game in the basement, and I decided I liked baseball so long as there was a football game to watch too.

The next morning, we went exploring a bit around town...
This is the view from Cambridge towards downtown Boston. The Hancock Tower is the big shiny glass one on the left, which was famous when it first opened because large plates of glass kept falling off of it due to the wind.
Because it was right next to our hotel, there was a brief forray made into the Boston Museum of Science, where I spent a ridiculously large amount of time as a child considering the fact that I never actually lived in Boston. (But you can't tell, right?) I hadn't been there in years, though, so it was nice to walk around thinking "aha, there's the tree ring display with the giant sequoia slice!" or "man, I will never tire of the lightning show from the giant van de Graaff generator." This particular shot shows a sculpture (Archimedian Excogitation) they have in the lobby where little balls follow metal tracks in various cool ways- enlarge the picture to see what I mean. I spent many a happy time observing the motions of the balls as a kid and still did for several minutes now, but who was counting?
This is Prudential Center in a pretty nice sunset shot if I may say so myself. I will note that it gets dark freakishly early in Boston- nearly an hour before the sun sets in Cleveland- and I guess that's what the time zone/ change in latitude does for you.

It was also nice because the unseasonable warmth meant you could still eat outside for dinner, which I couldn't imagine ever doing in late October in Boston if I hadn't done it myself!

Ah, Boston Boston Boston. Remind me to live here at some point in my life, as I'm sure I'd enjoy every minute of it.

Fall Break 1- New Hampshire

Time to start putting up the fall break pictures! I was in New England for virtually all of it, which is always really fun to do in the fall because of the leaves changing-
So pretty! For the weekend part (Saturday and most of Sunday) I was in New Hampshire, and the weather was utterly, completely gorgeous to match. Blue skies, unseasonably warm... to be honest it made the leaves not quite as nice as they often are in most years due to the warmth, and despite being past the peak for foliage there were still quite a few green leaves out there.
This is my mom and dad, canoing by. I post it because my mom made the astute observation that it was the sort of weekend that they take all the postcard and tourism photographs in so as to get everybody to visit New Hampshire, so I'm doing my part.
I paddled along in a kayak, as kayaks are way cooler than canoes will ever be.
This is probably my favorite tree I saw, just because of how vivid it is. Don't get me wrong, the red trees are nice too, but they're a little overrated and trees that turn pure yellow are much more stunning.
We also took advantage of the scenery by climbing up a little hill called East Rattlesnake not too far away on Saturday. East Rattlesnake overlooks Squam Lake, which is where the movie On Golden Pond was filmed (which if you're my age you probably haven't seen or heard of, but almost won the Best Picture Oscar in the early 80s).
My brother, Patrick, deciding to end it all at the top of East Rattlesnake. Ok not really, he was jumping to a ledge not visible to the camera in an attempt to get a good Facebook picture, but we had to do it over a few times to get it timed right from several angles. And all the while my mom and dad were criticizing us for some unknown reason...
Rainbow! Saturday just before sunset there was a very brief rainstorm, which resulted in the most beautiful and perfect rainbow I have ever seen. It was vividly bright and went from one side of the sky to the other without breaking, and there was even a double bow... ah, so beautiful! The colors even repeated a bit in the rainbow itself- as in, there was a second stripe of purple under the first- and I'm not exactly certain what causes something like that but I'd never seen it before. Some odd reflection within the water droplets I guess?

Anyway, New Hampshire was gorgeous and if you ever get the chance to go there in the fall you should unquestionably take it. Here's one last nice fall picture for the road-

Comet Holmes Pictures

I should act before I write. I just went out for a lovely few hours, and took a look at Comet Holmes! It is really bright out there and easily visible to the naked eye even from downtown Cleveland- here's a picture from my friend Steven Janowiecki that he took earlier and has kindly allowed me to repost here-
The point of light circled in red is the comet (click to make the image larger). Notice how starlike it looks right now: Comet Holmes has no visible tail, which is completely weird and I'm not getting over just yet. The reason for this is it's still so far out that no tail has developed and most comets don't get bright enough until a tail is developed, whereas Holmes won't be at its closest to the sun until December 1. The fact that it still has over a month to approach the sun, during which it will release more gasses and (very probably) increase in brightness, means the show probably is just starting with this puppy. I'm incredibly excited!

Through the telescope was also interesting. The most obvious feature of the whole thing is that it's yellow, with a greenish tint. Astronomical objects rarely have color, especially not comets so far as I can recall, because your eye just plain isn't sensitive to such faint colors. Further, it has a very compact center with a nice ring of haze surrounding it- a very compact coma! There is not even a hint of a tail either, which is how the comet can look so starlike in the night sky.

Here's a picture that I took. Please realize this was just with my little digital camera placed against the eyepiece of the telescope in a rather cheap operation, and I didn't even bother to set the exposure longer than the default of the camera. (My camera isn't really one made for astrophotography.) However, the fact that my camera could image Comet Holmes under such conditions is impressive in itself! If you want to see some actual astrophotography, though, take a look at the spaceweather.com galleries as they're shaping up to having a great collection.

Last but not least because my sister asked- Comet Holmes is just barely visible in many parts of the southern hemisphere, but it really depends where you are and if you know where to look. People have already sent in pictures from Queensland, Australia so it's definetely doable, and a quick game of latitude reveals that you ought to just see it with an unobstructed horizon from a latitude like Melbourne or Auckland.

I can't find a southern sky finderchart, but here is the northern hemisphere one. Happy comet hunting, everyone!

Comet Alert!

Yesterday, Comet Holmes exploded in the night sky from 17th to 2nd magnitude, which corresponds to 400,000x brighter in the course of just a few hours. Incredible! It's now visible to the naked eye in Perseus after sunset, so if you have clear skies the next few days you should check it out (finderchart here).

So this begs the question: who in Cleveland wants to go comet-hunting with me during the weekend? Our weather's not looking perfect, but according to clear sky clock we might have a few clear hours and it's not going to fade so quickly that the 9.5" refractor won't make it look cool. (You never know, it might still brighten! But I get ahead of myself.) Let me know.

PS- I have many nice pictures from fall break, but I've been too lazy to post them. I'll get around to that soon.

Top Ten Most Important Astronomical Images

No Quarked this week due to midterms, but I had an article in the Journal of Young Investigators this month that I don't think I've mentioned. So who wants to read a run-down on the top ten most important astronomical images? As chosen by my own personal authority, of course, because everyone knows these lists are just as authoritative as the opinion of the person who writes them.

This article appeared a few weeks earlier this month, but I haven't posted it here until now because I've had some problems with it. For obvious reasons, it was rather important that the right images go with the right pieces of text for the article, but the graphics guy (in the trend of graphics guys everywhere) took the liberty to find some "more interesting" images when he happened to not think one of mine as cool enough. Now for a few of these it worked out alright, but the graphics guy completely messed up when it came to extrasolar planets. The image I chose (shown to the left) was considered "too boring," so he substituted in an artist's rendition instead!

I find this to be an interesting premise, you see. I mean, if I were going for the "prettiest" images then yes, the extrasolar one probably doesn't cut it, but images that are the most aesthetically pleasing rarely translate into the ones that contribute to real science. (I'd expound on this point more, but I already did in said article so I won't regurgitate.) And while I like my editor and think JYI is a nifty organization and laud their goal to produce an undergraduate science publication, I've noticed that it's really, really hard to get mistakes corrected once they're printed. You know how it is in the college world- everyone has ten million different things going on so it's kind of hard to convince anybody to go back to a job that's already "done." Particularly when no one's getting paid to do anything and it's midterms month.

I could probably go on about this but I don't think it'll help much. Besides which I have other things to do- it's the last day before fall break and I have a plane to catch to New England a few hours, and lots to do before then! So see you guys next week; I should have lots of pretty "New England in the fall" pictures to share.