Real Football Involves Kicking

I’ve been testing out a Celestron NexStar 6SE for a story I’m working on, and after a night of headaches getting its StarAlign feature to work last night, I was pleased to get the scope working well this evening. Celestron also sent me a NexImage CCD, which I used to capture this image of Jupiter. It’s actually a stack of about 600 frames with a little bit of tweaking with the levels. Not bad for a first shot with such a cheap CCD. I’ll try a few more Jupiter captures, as well as a couple of deep-sky objects, over the coming weeks and see how far this thing can go.

Maya’s going to be four months old in a few days, and she’s using her hands more than ever now. So we thought it would be a good idea to get her started with an activity saucer. This Evenflo ExerSaucer comes with more toys than she knows what to do with, but it’s reconfigurable to grow with her even after she starts standing and walking. We put her in it for a few minutes last night and this morning, and she was a little overwhelmed by it all. She seems to like the little smiley creatures on it, though.

Four 10-minute exposures shot with GRAS 13 and stacked with Registax.

Also fun is this little snap I took of Jupiter simply by holding my pocket digicam up to the eyepiece of my neighbor’s telescope, which shows a surprising level of detail in the planet’s bands for such a half-assed effort:

Today, in the wake of unimaginable challenges, heartbreaking setbacks, and several grave tragedies, NASA continues to study the surface of Mars.

She was a lot more into it early in the first half.

I was inspired to write this, because today — for the first time — I tried e-mailing a PDF document (a copy of Max Tegmark’s paper “The Mathematical Universe”) to my Kindle, and the conversion came out beautifully. It’s still considered an experimental feature, but the Kindle converter transferred handily what began as a fairly complex PDF document loaded with hyperlinks and multi-column formatting.