Don’t you think there’s a writing contest there? I mean, if you read through the titles of the pictures Denny has linked to, it’s like reading the table of contents of RHP. I’d love to read a very short story or poem called Seven Dusty Sisters or Near-Perfect Symmetry in Red Cosmic Square.
Without our illustrious Bloomfield to be in charge, though, I fear it will remain but an idea, a thought experiment.
It’s a code. Denny is an unwitting mouthpiece for the next great alien invasion. I had a feeling they’d come gunning for that Eric Von Daniken character eventually.
Hope they don’t land in America, though. If they say, “take me to your leader”, and we do it, they’ll probably die laughing. More cadavers for Roswell. Sheesh!
Whoops, was that political? 
Klaatu barada nikto.
(Code? What code?)
djm
Actually, most all of these pictures come from the APOD website (Astronomy Picture of the Day) at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod
Authored by Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell. These are the ones who deserve credit and thanks!
The archives at this site are also fantastic!
Casey
they are…it is
What a coincidence that you brought this up today. I hadn’t given that much
thought to the titles until I saw the Near-Perfect Symmetry in Red Cosmic Square title.
I thought it was the most lovely and terribly sad title I had ever seen. It sounded
like a very bad but beautiful translation of the words on a Soviet poster—maybe the real meaning
of the words would be, I don’t know, something like Harmony in the Paradise of Red Square.
If I could write a poem or story with the title Near-Perfect Symmetry in Red Cosmic Square,
which I can’t, it would be told in the voice of that young woman in this poster
whose head has been pasted in just under the smallest and ring fingers of Stalin’s left hand—
that head that is just a bit too small. She would probably tell us about the weirdness
of seeing her face pasted into that crowd of other near-perfectly pasted-in people who were never there
and who were separated from each other by flowers lightly tinted to reflect the oddly flame-like flags behind them.
Casey is quite right.
I found the APOD archive site a few years back and had been checking it every few days since.
One day I had a thought…insert joke here…
since the site is updated with a new picture at midnight eastern time,
I could post the new picture after 9 PM here,
so that it would be there in the morning.
That’s all I do,
Denny
Seven Dusty Sisters,
older than most,
viewing us as we go on with our normal lives.
Sitting silently they observe and smile.
They watch us play.
Cringing when we hurt ourselves,
feeling young when we laugh,
we both enjoy the simplest things.
They realize that we
learn our own lessons,
in doing so
re-learn important lessons
The Sisters chose to be young again.
Cynth and I.D.10-t:
That’s what I’m talking 'bout! (Cynth, I’d seriously rethink your conclusion that you couldn’t write that story. Seriously.)
Molecular Cloud Barnard 163
Breathing a bit heavily, Barnard turned the last page of Venus by the Lake. “Excellent” he thought, “That was even better than Aurora Over Alaska”. Bodice-rippers were a guilty pleasure of his, and once he got wrapped up in a book, he lost all track of time. But his current mission was mind-numbingly tedious-- mapping the minor black holes of the Cone Nebula Neighborhood. While large black holes could be detected by changes in the trajectories of nearby stars, small black holes could only be found by sending out sprays of tiny probes, at obsessively frequent intervals. He had travelled up and down this sector, following his assignment to the letter, and had found nothing. Barnard glanced at his control panel (all indicators at zero, as they had been for the last month) then stared moodily out into the emptiness of space. “Are we there yet?” he muttered aloud. In the back of his mind he knew he would be breaking contract by skipping even one data collection site. But, come on. This was rediculous. The Arms of NGC 4258 were beckoning…
Barnard settled into his seat, with a fresh-brewed pot of Earl Gray tea and his favorite porcelain cup and saucer nearby. Even in space, especially in space, one must have one’s luxuries. He sighed contentedly…Every chapter or so he paused to make a quick survey of the control panel, snorting irritably when it prompted him to initiate the assigned probe sequences. No one would know if he skipped a few.
In the middle of chapter 9 Barnard realized that his Gravitation Differential Indicator was beeping plaintively. “Oh shit” he said, and then made a decision he would regret for the rest of his life. Before he marked his place in the book, he took a few seconds to skip to the end of the chapter. Yes, his heroine would indeed survive the dreaded Bullet Pillars in Orion…
When he finally turned to the instrument panel he found a chaos of blinking lights and maxed out indicators. “Oh SH*T” he said again. For the next few minutes Barnard struggled frantically with the controls. His hands began to tremble and he found it increasingly difficult to remember the emergency procedures. Part of his mind split off to recall a lecture he had heard during his student days-- a lecture by the brilliant Neil Degrasse Tyson-- not the original of course, but his umpty-umpth clone. He could recall the words with an eerie clarity:
"The gravity at your feet, if they’re close to the black hole, is a little bit stronger than the gravity at your head, and you feel that as something that is tearing you apart. Stretching you from head to toe. The tidal forces unrelentingly getting stronger, as they exceed the molecular forces that bind your flesh…as you snap into two pieces and those two pieces snap into another two pieces…And so you end up moving through space-time like toothpaste through a tube. And if I were to pick a way to go, that’s how I’d want to go. "
As Barnard began to feel an odd sensation in his lower legs, he considered that in spite of the brilliance of Degrasse Tyson, in this particular instance he disagreed with him.
Several weeks later, Neil Degrasse Tyson 137 looked out over a crowded classroom, and in a mellow voice enhanced by centuries of experience, intoned " Matter falling into a black hole is a lot of stuff trying to get into a very small place. And so it is like trying to fill a dog dish with a fire hose; most isn’t going to get in. The black hole chokes on the influx, and the high speed whirlpool of matter produces a powerful magnetic field, coiling around the black hole and shooting the energy outward.
These enormous jets of energy, hundreds of millions of times the power of the sun, can blast right out of the galaxy.
And this, kids, …is the story behind Molecular Cloud Barnard 163."
Neil Degrasse Tyson quotes adapted from
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3314_blackhol.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/program.html
I saw Tyson on a PBS fund raiser the other night. He referred to this black hole entry process as “spaghettification”.
djm
Carrie??? What did I miss whilst on vacation?
Ah yes, Weeks, you are right–an explanation is in order. So much has changed since I chose my last screen name. Here then, is the explanation of what the letters stand for:
c Well, this one hasn’t changed; it’s still the note I use a thumb hole for.
ar My new favorite element, argon. You see, erbium, while it has its charms, just wasn’t able to keep up. To be frank, I changed, and it just didn’t.
ri I’ll be honest, I just lost interest in my little nuclear physics hobby. I guess once I started consulting for Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, all my creative juices flowed into that field.
e This stands, of course, for the mathematical constant, the base of the natural logorithm. Since it’s transcendental, and therefore irrational, it just seemed so me.
So much water under the bridge, eh? Hope this clarifies the change!
I knew that… really, I did…yikes. 