Sky Watchers

LIGHTS OUT: It's less than a month until a total solar eclipse will occur across a swath of the United States.

I'd love to think we can find a spot in the path of totality (all dark during the daytime), but we've been scheming for months (over a year, actually) and weren't able to get reservations anywhere in the path. 

However, I am buoyed by the fact that if we stay local, we will have a pretty darn good eclipse experience - 92.3 percent of the total eclipse. 

It might be fun to have a little solar eclipse party, in fact! Wherever we watch, I've already ordered multiple solar eclipse glasses. Get yours now (many choices on Amazon.com) before they run out!

At this website, you can plug in your zip code and find out what your vantage point will be like:

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/25/16019892/solar-eclipse-2017-interactive-map

OUT WITH THE OLD: Hey, here's our second post about toilets in less than two weeks. How did we go from being science-centric to toilet centric? We bought an old home in need of remodeling, that's how.

All of the toilets here are old and enormous, like five-plus gallons of water per flush. That's about 4 more than you need (and our water usage is metered). 

So one of my first orders of business has been sourcing 'new' (to us) toilets. We love to recycle (and be frugal), and so far we've scored two great new (literally in the box in once case) toilets. I can't believe I found a hard-to-find NEW wall mount toilet on Craigslist for $600 of list. It replaced this old commode.

I thought surely it was destined for the dump, but Christian encouraged me to post it to Craigslist. I'll be darned, within 5 minutes of posting, we had a taker. Go figure. Awesome that it's out of the landfill, and I assume the new owner is on a well.

HELP WANTED: We received an intriguing email from the Library of Congress today. They are looking for schools/students to help in archiving Web content.

Here's part of the announcement: 

Your Students Can Help Archive the Internet – Apply Now!
July 25, 2017 by Cheryl Lederle
Beginning with a pilot program in 2008, the K-12 Web Archiving Program has engaged hundreds of middle and high school students from schools around the United States in selecting, describing, and preserving Web content. Through September 17, the program is accepting applications for new and returning partners from middle and high schools.

Participating in saving history and culture offers those students a unique perspective on how history is recorded. Students identify websites to be archived, sort them into collections, and write metadata to describe the sites and provide context to help future scholars understand the importance of the archived sites. 

I think that this project might be a good fit for we research-and-Internet loving people here at MPA. Don't know if we're big time enough to be considered, though. But I think it worth applying. The application is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScBvZ7-sOqCkHm5HlmIcvWw0lseu1dKxImS3YD_AG4dwHwg8g/viewform

FIRST FLYOVER: If you follow MPA, you know that we love us a good ISS flyover. 

How many times did we run to our roofdeck on our old campus to watch the International Space Station orbit overhead? Too many to count!

I've been looking forward to our first ISS sighting here, and tonight was the night! At 9:55, we watched a lovely 6-minute flyover. We have such a nice 180-degree view east-to-west here, and can see more of the sky. 

And not only did we see the ISS tonight, we saw a satellite bisect its trajectory. Super cool! And we were buzzed a few times by a bat while watching. Really awesome! (And our talk immediately turned to building a bat house or four - there are so many mosquitoes here and bats help with that.)

But back to the ISS. There's a crew of just three on board right now: NASA's Jack Fischer, Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, and NASA's Peggy Whitson. Whitson has accumulated 377 days in space between two missions, the most for any U.S. woman at the time of her return to Earth. Whitson has also performed six spacewalks, totaling 39 hours and 46 minutes. She is awesome. :).