All The Feels for Cosmos

  
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Something happened to me as I watched the "Sky Full of Ghosts" episode of Cosmos.  While cool science guy forever, Neil deGrasse Tyson, was talking about the most recent discovery of the oldest cluster of galaxies picked up by the Hubble Space Telescope, I felt tears stream uncontrollably down my face.

Why?

I've always loved science and space and the Universe in general.  My horrible math skills prevented me from exploring my love for space at the college level, so I'm here on the amateur level.  But all the stuff that has been featured on Cosmos so far, I've always known - thanks to my wonderful science teachers - and other stuff I've picked up through the original Cosmos (on Netflix, y'all!), regular Google searches, the Star Walk app, The Universe, the History Channel and its sister channel, H2 and, dare I say it, Ancient Aliens.  Why was the information about how fast light travels making me cry?  Because the way it was presented on the show was mind-boggling.

I know the star light we see in the sky is older than we think it is but the way it was said and expressed on the show was too much for me to handle.

I think it was a mix of the knowledge of the oldest object in space picked up by the Hubble, the fact that it's going to take the Voyager1 40,000 years to fly by the next star, the fact that the "ghost" images of supernovae are thousands of millions of years old but we're JUST NOW seeing them and the fact that we're looking into the past every time we look into the night sky...that's just mind-blowing.

Anyways - I hope you have been enjoying this new version of Cosmos as much as I have.  I mean, anything with Neil deGrasse Tyson means it's going to be AWESOME.

How is your week going?

Comet ISON: #missedubro

There was a lot of talk about ISON burning up as it made its way around the sun.  The gif below suggests there might be some of it still floating around...


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I'm so happy I updated my Star Walk app because the pop-up notifications and the links to the VITO Technology blog kept me pretty tuned in to ISON's journey through our solar system.  I was looking at purchasing a telescope right before I got my notification that ISON was visible to the naked eye (via Start Walk) but nothing really caught my eye...and I would've had a tough time seeing it because of all the light pollution and...well...the sun is kind of a LARGE obstacle.  My old man and I had talked about going to the mountains for a nighttime viewing of the stars (and possibly ISON during sunrise or something) but November was just TOO BUSY!!!  I didn't even get to put in "FADE OUT" on the script I was working on during NaNoWriMo.  UGH!  I'm not upset, though, because November was a blast!  I just wish I could've been able to contribute to the Flickr pool.  Oh well.  You can check out the photos here!

I think the reason why this was kind of important to me was because I remember being able to see the comet Hale-Bop in the 90's.  It was kind of a huge deal for me, my friend, and her neighbors.  They bought a fancy camera with a long, fancy lens and had a Comet Party.  It was pretty magical and I guess that's what I was kind of expecting for ISON since it was kind of a biggish deal.  But I guess not since it wasn't really all over the news or anything.  Either way, I'm glad I was still able to track it with Star Walk and their blog - which made it a different kind of magical.

So now that ISON has burned through our Sun, what's up with the Black Knight satellite???