Up and Around

FLYING HIGH:  Yesterday afternoon the kids enjoyed some indoor skydiving at a wind tunnel in Southcenter, iFLY Seattle.

We've been there a couple of times before, and it's a thrill each and every outing. You can't tell that by the look on CJ's face, awaiting his first go! Hahahaha!

What can we say? He's an intense wind tunnel flyer.  But I'll bet he was smiling when he (and an instructor) shot up a couple of stories in a second or two!

Just this side of Superman, wouldn't you say?  Christian has video we need to download. Hopefully that's to follow tomorrow.

SUMMER SCENES:  Last night, we were trying to escape the heat, and decided to head to the estuary between Lake Union and the Puget Sound, also known as the Ballard Locks.

It was postcard pretty. Sailboats on the sound and stand-up paddleboarders in the pond ...

an Amtrak rolling over the railroad bridge (with CJ hiding in the shadows) ...

and the first ripe blackberries of the season!

ROCKIN': Did you know today is Asteroid Day?  We puny humans here on our Earth should be aware of the threats a too-close-for-comfort asteroid poses for our planet. Dr. Brian May, an astrophysicist who also happens to the be guitar player for rock juggernauts Queen, is concerned. Here's what he has to say.


Asteroid Day even has its own trailer, complete with a Queen soundtrack.


As part of our asteroid awareness, we read a NASA handout we picked up at a science event, "Asteroids: Space Rocks with a Story." You can download a PDF of it here: file:///C:/Users/Kristine/Downloads/asteroids_fun_sheet.pdf


If you go to this NASA Web page: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/posters/en/#solarsystem, you can also download a four-page "fun fact" brochure about comets and asteroids—what makes them similar and what makes them different. The booklet, Comets vs. Asteroids, includes lots of fun facts, plus a comet vs. asteroid wordfind.

WAIT A SECOND: Did it seem like a long day to you? Might be that extra second that was added to the clock today. For real!

NASA issued a press release to explain our "leap second.  In it, Daniel MacMillan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, explained, "Earth's rotation is gradually slowing down a bit, so leap seconds are a way to account for that."

The rotational slowdown is due to a kind of braking force caused by the gravitational tug of war between Earth, the moon and the sun. According to NASA, scientists estimate that the mean solar day hasn't been 86,400 seconds long since about the year 1820.

Leap seconds are usually inserted either on June 30 or December 31. Per NASA, "Normally, the clock would move from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00 the next day. But with the leap second on June 30, UTC will move from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60, and then to 00:00:00 on July 1. In practice, many systems are instead turned off for one second."

So one little second is kind of a big deal!

"In the short term, leap seconds are not as predictable as everyone would like," said Chopo Ma, a geophysicist at Goddard and a member of the directing board of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. "The modeling of the Earth predicts that more and more leap seconds will be called for in the long-term, but we can't say that one will be needed every year."

This latest leap second is only the fourth to be added since 2000. 

For more information about NASA's Space Geodesy Project, check out:
http://space-geodesy.nasa.gov/