Middling

ENTANGLEMENTS: #Dinovember continues, of course. Last night the Dinos decided to try their hands (feet?) (paws?) on a Rainbow Loom device.  Turns out they're NOT very good at it. 

JUNIOR GARDENERS: We spent part of our lunch break from our Shoreline classes today at lovely Skye Nursery. Such a pretty place, I could spend hours there. Today we had just one objective, however - it was to collect the rewards of the kids being in their Junior Gardeners' club. They each got a free indoor plant (tis the season!). 

Annabelle chose the type of plant on the left, CJ chose the type on the right. 

THESE GUYS:  Everyone remembers Apollo 11 - Buzz and Neil bouncing around the moon. The Eagle landed, one small step, one giant leap. Amazing mission! And everyone remembers Apollo 13 - the harrowing tale of three astronauts who never made it to the moon, but miraculously made it back to Earth after a disaster on board.  

But what about Apollo 12? Launched just four months after Apollo 11, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean did the moonwalking, while Richard Gordon remained in lunar orbit. It was on this day in 1969 that Conrad and Bean walked on the moon.  

Love this NASA shot of their lunar module!

Interesting factoid from the mission: Apollo 12 had the first color television camera to the lunar surface, but transmission was lost after Bean accidentally destroyed the camera by pointing it at the sun. Doh!

BUILDING BLOCKS: Yes, the European Space Agency's Little Lander Who Could, Philae, is asleep at the moment, but that thing did an amazing amount of work in the few dozen hours of life it had. For instance, the lander's 'sniffers' apparently detected organic molecules. As in, potentially, the building blocks of life. No big deal. ;)

In other Philae news, here's a neat photo taken by Rosetta's OSIRIS. It shows Philae drifting across the comet in its series of landing 'skips.' 

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 12 November 2014. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team 

MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA