(Personal journal post) -Listening to the ‘Elizabethtown’ soundtrack right now. Never saw the movie, but the soundtrack is amazing! Used to listen to it all the time many years ago… it’s bringing back some great memories :) I can’t think of many things more relaxing than writing in the observatory with a cool breeze coming […]
By keeping a personal (hand-written) journal, I’ve found a different method of venting my thoughts and ideas. Unfortunately for this blog, it’s the thing that has suffered from it the most; I just don’t post as much stuff as I used to. I had an idea to remedy this while scrolling through pictures I’ve collected over the […]
:: The Hopewell 1 rocket :: Seeded by my lifelong love of all things space, technology, and science, and inspired by the amazing computer game Kerbal Space Program, I decided to build my own rocket – complete with a science experiment! I had previously designed and built my own rover in an attempt to (crudely) mimic […]
I waited months for the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the night sky this July where the two planets would be separated by less than a full moon’s width. For weeks leading up to the event we had record rainfall and complimentary cloud cover. I feared the uncommon event would pass without a chance to […]
There’s a reason why Jodie Foster’s character (Ellie Arroway) in Carl Sagan’s Contact says, “They should have sent a poet.” Whenever you deal with something as vast and complex as Nature, and science’s interpretation of the world around us, it’s easy to fall into bland descriptive tropes and get overwhelmed with cold data. In order […]
I recently stumbled upon something that practically blew my mind. It was amazing to me because not only did I not realize that a machine – a single machine – was even capable of performing this type of extremely delicate, complicated, and massive task, but that it was actually up there doing it now (and […]
I just wanted to share some pictures I took on my commute this morning. It was a summer morning in early Spring – that’s Ohio for you. An unaccustomed warmth accompanied the fog over the cornfields. The Sun rose optimistically in the east while the birds sang their springtime pop songs… I drove past the […]
Messier 3 Discovered on May 3 1764 M3 is a globular cluster. A globular cluster is just a compact collection stars; basically a tiny galaxy within a galaxy. In fact, they may be smaller galaxies captured by our much larger Milky Way galaxy. M3 is one of the finest northern globular clusters. It’s super […]
I took advantage of the good weather we had the other night and spent some time under the stars. I had originally planned to keep the observatory closed and just use my dobsonian to do some old-fashioned star hopping and maybe sketch some of the things I saw. It just turned out to be too […]
Journal entry for 2015/04/26 ~9PM – ~10PM It’s a very calm, cool, clear evening. I honestly can’t remember a more clear night here in Columbus. There are stars visible I didn’t know you could see from here given the light pollution and usually poor viewing conditions. These are the nights we astronomers live for; a […]