Rings and Things

SWEET BLING: A couple of weeks ago I spied what looked to be a fun, easy Valentine-themed craft in "Family Fun" magazine. The only supplies needed were two pipe cleaners and a Hershey's Kiss to craft a sweet, showy "ring." Simple!

Unfortunately, the instructions (yes, even complete, with photos) in the magazine weren't that clear, but we managed to fumble our way through and came up with this ...

and these ...

MINDS ON MARS: Just after breakfast, I showed the kids a photo on my computer screen without telling them what they'd be looking at. I had them guess what it was. Annabelle guessed it was a close up of a cookie. CJ mulled it over a minute and then suggested, "Mars?"

IMAGE: NASA/JPL/Univ. of ARIZONA

Bingo!

The photo, on the Discovery News! Web site, is of barchan dunes, which are wind-driven piles of soil moving across the Martian landscape in the direction of their steepest slope. The photo was taken from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

In other news, we also watched a video about the potential use of "tumbleweed" rovers on Mars someday. Fascinating!

And today we took delivery of a stuffed "animal," er, planet. A soft and snuggable Mars! I challenged the kids to find Gale Crater on it, as that's where Curiosity will be landing come August. It took them a minute or two, but they did hunt it down.

TREASURE HUNTING: We went to the Goodwill in SoDo today. It's a big place and there's always lots to look at. Today, CJ seemed to have an eye for fine art. Like this ...

Oh, he so desperately wanted to buy it! He was sure it was some super valuable treasure - even after I showed him that under the $4.99 Goodwill price tag was atop a Ross Dress for Less price tag which also read $4.99.

A few aisles later, CJ spied this beauty and was again enchanted. You will be shocked to learn we also passed this gem up. Though CJ was bummed, he soothed himself by getting a players guide about the game Metroid.

SIDE TRIP: It was such a beautiful sunny day, on the way home from SoDo, I wanted to stop at a park. But not just any park. ... Ever since we moved to Seattle, I've been wanting to hunt down the curiously named Bhy Kracke park, on the southeast slope of Queen Anne hill. Just a couple of blocks from my paternal grandparents' former home, my sister and I used to visit it once in awhile when we'd be visiting Seattle.

Though we had not heard of crack in the '70s or early '80s, based on activity witnessed there in that time frame, I think it used to be "buy dope-y" park. But I digress.

Today, the park is and has a new looking play equipment that the kids enjoyed exploring, including a climbing wall they made short work of.

Annabelle talked CJ into going to the receiving end of the communication station and then took the opportunity to "Rick Roll" him. :) 

Oh, and in case you're wondering, words "by cracky" were used as a popular expression of surprise or delight at the end of the 19th century and Seattle resident Werner H. Kracke was known to say it all the time, according to the Seattle Parks and Recreation department. The words became Kracke's favorite expression of surprise or delight, to the point it became his nickname, though he spelled it "Bhy." Kracke lived for many years on the upper level of where the park.

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: Today, the moon hung in the bright blue sky. It reminded me we had yet to viewing some groundbreaking video beamed back from "Ebb," one of GRAIL's twin spacecraft. Taken on Jan. 19, it shows the far side of the moon - the side we Earth-bound humans don't ever get to see.

Before cuing up the video, the kids and I talked about how and why we only see the moon's "face" - because the moon rotates around its own axis in the same length of time that it takes to orbit the Earth.
I found one kind of OK video on YouTube on the subject, but we liked the "Synchronous Rotation of the Moon" video better.

We got a bit hysterical trying to recreate the Sun, Earth and Moon in our living room. I had the easy job. I was the Sun. I just stood in one place. CJ was the Earth, which meant he had to orbit me AND spin rather rapidly while doing it. Annabelle was the Moon, which meant she had to try to slowly spin while orbiting CJ. I think we'd need a much bigger living room to properly execute the experiment.

We finally got around to watching the GRAIL video. Neat-o stuff. In the footage, per NASA's explanation, "the north pole of the moon is visible at the top of the screen as the spacecraft flies toward the lunar south pole. One of the first prominent geological features seen on the lower third of the moon is the Mare Orientale, a 560-mile-wide (900 kilometer) impact basin that straddles both the moon's near and far side.
The clip ends with rugged terrain just short of the lunar south pole. To the left of center, near the bottom of the screen, is the 93-mile-wide (149 kilometer) Drygalski crater with a distinctive star-shaped formation in the middle. The formation is a central peak, created many billions of years ago by a comet or asteroid impact."

We watched it a couple of times.