Not a Normal Thursday

IN GROUND AND OVERHEAD: Newsflash - we planted more stuff in the garden today! I know, no real surprise. ...

Into the garden went six kale plants, and our three Trinidad Moruga scorpion pepper plants. CJ handled the pepper plant relocation.

Hopefully they'll like they're new home at the top of our lot. 

While we were toiling in the soil, I heard a drone of aircraft unlike the range of what we normally hear. Imagine our delight when we were buzzed by four WWII era aircraft! They flew RIGHT over our lot and fairly low. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera in hand.

CJ went and fetched it, and lucky for us, they made a second pass, though not as low this time, and I didn't have my zoom lens, so you can't see much detail, but they were super cool!

We figured perhaps they're in town for a D-Day event at The Museum of Flight.

Also outside, Annabelle scrubbed the deck ... 

and CJ lounged with the dogs (as he's been known to do on more than one occasion). 

FINAL!: We did it! Today we finished our "AstroTech: The Science and Technology behind Astronomical Discovery" Coursera class with professors Andy Lawrence and Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh.  

All in all, it was a wonderful course and we loved learning about the inner workings of land- and space-based telescopes. It makes us appreciate the Hubble all the more, and we can't wait to see the images from the James Webb Space Telescope, under construction now.

Image: Artist's rendering of JWST from NASA
JWST is expected to launch in 2018 from French Guiana on a European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket.


GOING AND GOING:  More good news from the folks at Space College/Project Reboot, who have recaptured control of a loooooooong-ago mothballed NASA exploration craft, ISEE-3.  On their Facebook page today they announced "analysis of telemetry from ISEE- 3 shows that *ALL* of its science instruments are still powered on. Telemetry also shows that ISEE-3 has a power margin of +28 watts - after 36 years. It is important to note that ISEE-3 has not had a functioning battery for decades. Indeed, this power capacity is what was projected for the spacecraft to have had in 1982 after 4 years in space."  Amazing! 

HAIL TALES:  Scijinks, one of NASA's (many, many!) educational Web sites has just undergone a major reno, and so I pointed the kids in its direction today:  http://scijinks.jpl.nasa.gov//, a site all about weather. 

The kids had a grand ol' time poking around, playing fun games (like Spectrix, where you have to create perfect combinations of colors to produce vital information about weather and the environment, and Slyder, where you solve a weather photo puzzle).  They also checked out an interactive page all about weather folklore.  Afterward, I asked them to write a folk tale explaining hail.  I sent CJ's back to his 'desk' for some fine tuning. In the meantime, here's Annabelle's. 

Once upon a time, there was a god. This god was known as Yawada. There was only one problem: He didn't have anything to rule over! As the son of the rain god, Shiwana, he asked her if she could give him something to rule over. Shiwana replied, "I shall see. For now, please be patient". Yawada was devastated. He would never rule anything! Little did he know that Shiwana was making some snow, as it was a very cold night. What turned out wasn't snow, however: it was hail. Shiwana called for Yawada, saying she had something for him to rule over, and thus, Yawada became god of hail.

MADNESS: I was on the phone with a friend today around 3:30 and I told her I couldn't hear her for all the planes and helicopters and sirens near my environs. After we hung up a few minutes later, I soon found out why, via email alerts and social media posts. There had been a school shooting very near our home, at Seattle Pacific University. 

News reports started coming in fast and furious, and initial accounts had 7 gunshot victims, and two gunmen. It turned out there were 'only' four shot and 'just' one gunman (of course, any number over zero is too many). 

According to a story in The Washington Post, as of February this year, there were at least 44 school shootings on K-12 or college campuses in 24 states — an average of more than three a month — since the homicidal bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

This has got to stop.