Back in the Saddle Again

The temperature was 52° F this afternoon.  The sun was shining.  The snow and ice are gone for now at least.  The bicycles are back from the shop all tuned and adjusted.  My wife came home in the mid-afternoon, I suspended my work.  We loaded the bicycles onto the truck and headed for the trail.

The sun was warm and the wind was at our backs all the way to Holmesville, five miles north of here.  As we turned around and headed back the clouds rolled in and we now faced a 10-13 mph head wind.  Most of the time it was blunted by trees and brush but we had about a mile to mile and a half that was pretty brutal.

It felt really good to be back in the saddle again.  I’m looking forward to the prospect of a full season of riding.  A tip of the helmet to Alvin Raber for the tune-ups…the bikes rode great.

Get Jesus

Kids have so many choices these days…should I get the Jesus Action Figure or the Chicken Chucker?  Mommy I can’t decide.

Oh, Honey, why don’t you get Jesus.  Maybe you can get the Chicken Chucker the next time.

The GI Joe action figure had all kinds of accessories you could buy…from hand grenades to pup tents.  I didn’t see any accessories for Jesus.  But I could think of a few…

• Earthen jars full of water to be turned into wine.
• Twelve disciples.
• Five loaves and two fishes.  Twelve baskets for mom to put the crumbs in are included in basic kit at no extra charge.  The extended kit ($$) has 5000 inactive but hungry figures.  Extended kit requires the twelve disciples kit.
• Ten lepers but only one thankful.
• And perhaps a Cross…

When I saw this display this afternoon it caught me way off guard.  I guess I live in a far too sheltered world.  Or at least I don’t go shopping enough to see this kind of thing.  I had multiple reactions to it, all fighting for top spot.  Astonishment, amusement both at the existence of a Jesus action figure and at its placement next to the chicken chucker, pig catapult (not shown), and cat-apult (not shown), and sadness for the same two reasons.  What does it tell our children about Jesus to have him represented by an action figure?  And displayed right in there with the chicken chucker?  Is it any different to call it the Son of God action figure?  Does it  get thrown in the toy box with the Chicken Chucker and the other toys?  At the end of the day does it get sent to the landfill with the other old, dirty, wornout and no longer valued toys? 

What does it say about us?

Comet Lulin — Updated

I woke up sometime shortly after 3:00 o’clock this morning…didn’t feel well, couldn’t sleep.  I got up and looked out the window.  The sky was clear.  When the sky is clear in February and there is a visible comet in it, a person cannot let the opportunity to see it pass.  I got dressed in the dark to avoid destroying my night vision but I couldn’t find my shoes.  I used a little LED keychain light to help me find them.  Then I realized that I didn’t know where the comet was supposed to be.  Its location is changing rapidly from night to night, so I checked the finder chart I have hanging on the refrigerator.  Ahh!  It is close to Saturn so it should be easy to find tonight.  I pulled on my coat went outside.

It was cold.  I took a few seconds to get my bearings and to locate Saturn.  I swung the binoculars over to it and then offset them a little “down and to the left”.  There it was!  The same little smudge of light I saw the other evening.  It was easy tonight.

I got my camera and tripod and took a couple of pictures.  I posted one.  Everything conspires to make it difficult.  The comet is small and dim…I used a 200 mm zoom.  The comet’s orbit is right on the ecliptic…the motion of the stars due to the Earth’s rotation is the maximum there.  I used a 30 second exposure, the lens wide open, and an ISO of 1600.  Saturn is the bright object in the upper right hand corner.  The comet is the little blue smudge to the left of the center (and down just a little).

I tried to set up the dual barndoor tracking adaptor that I built twenty years ago (and haven’t used since)…lots of issues setting it up.  I had never used it with the tripod I have or with the camera.  I had trouble aligning it to Polaris.  Some clouds rolled in.  The ball and socket adaptor and the camera were laying down against the barn door so that I couldn’t sight the camera.  By 4:30 I had given up.

Maybe tonight!

Joy

Joy

1 a: the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires : DELIGHT b: the expression or exhibition of such emotion : GAIETY 2: a state of happiness or felicity : BLISS 3: a source or cause of delight
 
                                                 – Meriam-Webster Online (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joy)

 
A lot of people aren’t feeling much joy these days, especially as in definition 1a, above.   Our employment, investments, and prospects for carefree retirements are all in turmoil.  We listen to the news for some glimmer of hope, that things are finally beginning to turn around…we are accustomed to short downturns and quick recoveries.  But everyday we are disappointed.  I have experienced definition 1a but most of it fails me now every time I listen to the news.  As far as part b goes, gaiety is not an attribute of my personality.

Definition 2 is a little bit different.  I had a good friend at my former workplace who always thought I was unhappy, presumably because I wasn’t smiling, laughing, etc. all of the time.  I hope, through our discussions and working with me, that he came to understand that I was happy but at a different level.  I still am.  Here’s why.

I live in a world full of definition 3s.  I am fortunate to be surrounded by a cloud of family and friends whom I love and who love me.  I do not take them for granted but they are not the sources of joy and delight that I am talking about here.  There are common ordinary objects and situations that suddenly, sometimes without warning, instill in me a deep sense of peace, the “well-being” and “prospect of possessing what one desires” parts of definition 1a.   These will be familiar to regular readers of The Quiet Way…they motivate almost every post.  In fact they motivate the posts and pages of my other blog, Murmurs from the Earth…Whispers from the Sky, too.  They are not affected by the economy.  Nor by Democrats nor Republicans.  They are not affected by terrorists or other mean-spirited people.  Most of them are available to anyone but as I think about it, they are not free.  They are available to me because I invest time and thought in them.  I wait patiently.  They are my only reward for those efforts. They have no financial value but they are worth every second I invest in them.

I have learned only recently that this is contemplation.  I used to think that meditation and contemplation were the same thing but I read only in the last month that while meditation is what we do, contemplation is a gift returned to us when we do nothing but open ourselves to it. Something easier said than done.

To me these things are a mystery.  I associate them with God.  Other people may not.  Either way they are most welcome gifts in these times of turmoil.

Comet Lulin

I have been anticipating the apparition of Comet Lulin.   The observation of comets in northeastern Ohio is always made difficult by our typical cloudiness and light pollution.  Add to that the difficulties everyone else deals with, moonlight and low surface magnitude…a lot of people don’t bother.

I do.  I am fascinated by these icy visitors from the outer fringes of the solar system.  Some of them are well known and their return to our part of the solar system is predictable.  Others like tonight’s comet are newly discovered.  Relatively speaking, they are tiny and fragile, formed of ice and rock, and surrounded by a cloud of dust and gas.  Although their orbits can take on the shape of any of the conic sections many are highly elliptical.   And their orbit can change if the comet passes too close to a planet.  If you are lucky enough by virtue of the comet’s orbit and the weather you can track its progress across the sky from night to night, week to week, or month to month.

So I went outside tonight, hoping that the cloudiness from tomorrow’s storm system hadn’t arrived before Comet Lulin rose high enough above the horizon to see it.  I was rewarded with a glimpse of the faintest little smudge of light in my binoculars.  No photographs of this one; it is just too faint.  It was in the right area.    If I get a clear evening or two next week I will be able to confirm that it is the comet by its movement across the sky.

Lulin is not an “easy” comet, at least for me, but it is worth looking for.  After all, comets don’t pass by this way that often.

Distributed Systems

One of the things that makes the internet work as reliably as it does is that it does not rely on one or two suppliers to provide servers and connections…it is a distributed system.  If one pathway breaks the traffic is routed via a different path.

This morning I heard a news article on the radio about how food manufacturers buy their components, in this case, peanut based products, from one or two large specialty processors instead of producing those components themselves.  Maybe the peanut fiasco would not be as widespread if all of the companies affected would be processing their own raw materials. 

Distributed peanut processing…

Winter Morning

Our January thaw finally arrived…in February.  The days are lengthening.  The birds are singing in the frosty morning air.  Lake Erie was mostly covered with ice this year so our lake effect cloudiness has diminished a little bit.

The Hunger Moon is setting.  Even if it lasts another six weeks, this is my favorite part of winter…the end.

Windy Weather

Last night a strong low pressure system blew through the area.  I measured a wind gust of 48 miles per hour out of the southwest before the front went by.  I had gone to bed earlier than usual but woke up before midnight and then couldn’t sleep.  I saw a few arcing power lines through the curtains and listened to the appliances and computer power supplies complain but we didn’t lose our power.  I listened to wind gusting against the house.  Around 12:30 the sound changed…the front had passed and the wind shifted to the northwest, the other end of the house.

As I lay there listening to the wind, I marveled at how gusty it was.  It would be very still, at least from my perspective inside, and then suddenly blast the house with a strong gust.  I wondered what the velocity field looked like in a several cubic mile block of atmosphere around our house…what are the spatial dimensions of a gust of wind?  I assume that the wind is more uniform at altitude and that there is some kind of boundary layer interaction that differentially slows the wind near the surface depending on the wind direction, terrain, and vegetation.

During one of the still periods I drifted back to sleep…

Awestruck Again

I have been reading snippets from my Astronomical Calendar when I have a minute here or there and have identified a couple of very interesting events coming up in the next several months.  I hope the weather cooperates with clear skies on these days.  There will be blog posts on these events at the appropriate times as they are quite cool.

But I also ran across an historical note that caught me off guard, something that I vaguely knew but never thought about the implications of it.

The orbit of the Earth around the Sun defines a plane called the Ecliptic.  The orbits of the other planets define planes of their own that are inclined to the Ecliptic plane, generally at angles less than 3°or so.  Mercury has the steepest inclination at 7°.  Pluto used to hold the record when it was a planet but lost that distinction in 2006 when it was demoted to a ”dwarf planet”.  Pluto’s orbit is inclined to the Ecliptic at an angle of 17.2°.  Relative to the planets its inclination is large but 17° is not a particularly steep angle.  When you project that 17.2° angle out to the mean radius of Pluto’s orbit it amounts to almost 12 astronomical units, the number that caught me so off guard.

At its highest point, Pluto is roughly 12 times the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun above the Ecliptic, further than the distance from the Sun to Saturn. 

I’m awestruck again…

Travel at Your Own Risk

 

Located in the Lake Erie snow belt of northeastern Ohio across the road from my wife’s parent’s home, heading east into Pennsylvania.  Taken the day after Christmas 2008 it is unusual due to the lack of snow on the ground.  The most recent report is that they have twenty inches on the ground today.  Erie, PA has had 129.5 inches of snow so far this year.