BLOOMIN' BOULEVARD: We took a walk up and over the hill this morning, enjoying a lovely first day of April.
Blossoms are bursting out all over.
Along the way we found a looooong earthworm making its way across a sidewalk. We determined he was a foot (and a paw) long.
Even the neighborhood baseball field looked amazing to our eyes, infield freshly groomed and not the muddy mess it has been for months now.
OUR SOLAR SYSTEM: This morning we started a new online class, "The Science of the Solar System." It's a 9-week class taught by professor Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech. Brown told us the class we're taking is actually the same one that's taught to sophomores at Caltech who are in the geological and planetary science track.
The first three weeks are all about Mars. We watched three lectures this morning, all of them fascinating. We're hooked on the class already!.
I love photo of Lowell from 1914, observing Venus during the daytime via his 24-inch (61 cm) Alvan Clark & Sons refracting telescope. It was installed in the summer of 1896 at the Lowell Observatory.
The first three weeks are all about Mars. We watched three lectures this morning, all of them fascinating. We're hooked on the class already!.
One of the graphics introduced today was this great drawing Johannes Kepler made of the geocentric motions of Mars relative to the Earth.
It was published in Astronomia Nova (1609). We love the retrograde loop de loops! It reminded the three of us of a Spirograph drawing!
NO JOKE: We had fun reading April Fools stories online today, including one about shuttle Endeavour being 'liberated' and launching from a Los Angeles museum, one about a new condo complex for rabid Seahawks fans, and a Facebook post from The Museum of Flight announcing a special display of Area 51 artifacts.
However, one of the most fanciful and untrue stories we saw today was about Percival Lowell's 'observations' of the Martian made canals on the Red Planet.
The story was published on page 11 of the New York Times on December 9,1906, when Lowell was declared "the greatest authority” on the Red Planet. Lowell founded one of the oldest observatories in the United States, in Flagstaff, AZ.
It seems Lowell took the observations of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli too literally. In 1888, Schiaparelli made a detailed map of Mars, complete with numerous canali, or channels (map is below). 
Professor Brown contrasted Schiaparelli's map with a recent photo of the Martian surface. The map above is pretty darn impressive!
And then, there are Lowell's fanciful drawings of the canals and constructs he 'saw' on Mars. ...
If you start researching Lowell, you'll quickly come across a quotation attributed to him. Lowell purportedly said, "Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points."
Professor Brown suspects Lowell saw what he wanted to see when gazing at Mars through his telescope. (Fun fact: You can read Lowell's entire book on Mars, published in 1895, online: http://www.wanderer.org/references/lowell/Mars/)
Another one of Lowell's claims to fame is that he predicted the planet Pluto (then Planet X). Quite a feather in his cap, except now Pluto has been stripped of planethood, darn it! Ironically, per his bio on Coursera 'our' professor "is best known for his discovery of Eris, the largest object found in the solar system in 150 years, and the object which led to the debate and eventual demotion of Pluto from a real planet to a dwarf planet."
I love photo of Lowell from 1914, observing Venus during the daytime via his 24-inch (61 cm) Alvan Clark & Sons refracting telescope. It was installed in the summer of 1896 at the Lowell Observatory.
We learned a little bit more about Lowell from a great BBC Web page with video clips about him. Lowell was laid to rest in Flagstaff. This public domain photo of his mausoleum is from the Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC USA. Fittingly, the name of the place he's buried is Mars Hill.
A couple of other things we learned about Mars today: Its obiquity, or tilt with respect to the orbital plane, is similar to Earth's. We're at 23 percent, Mars is at 25 percent. Mars' rotational period is 24 hours and 40 minutes, less than an hour longer than Earth's rotational period.
Professor Brown told us to find Mars in the night sky this month - it rises in the East shortly after sunset and is overhead about midnight right now. He recommended we resource Skymaps.com to get a monthly night sky map for where we're living. We've printed one out and I'm going to keep it up on the roofdeck, so we can refer to it as we're checking out the night sky.
Initially, the great heresy of the early astronomers was not so much saying the system was solar-centric but that the motion of the planets was elliptical rather than uniform circular motion. The doctrine was that it had to be circular because circles were signs of the "perfect" Creation. Apparently, ellipses aren't perfect - who'd have thunk it.
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