So let it be written

11:50 pm - Currently reading

Good book. Recommended.

Here's the NY Times review. which includes this snippet:

Given their pervasive influence today, it is worth remembering that in the 1930s, before either reached the heights of reputation, both men were in disgrace. Churchill was a political pariah, alienated from his own Conservative Party by his opposition to the appeasement of Hitler. Frederic Maugham, Lord Chancellor in the national government, suggested that Churchill should be “shot or hanged.” Similarly, when the socialist Orwell wrote “Homage to Catalonia” (1938), a coruscating indictment of both left and right during the Spanish Civil War, he was denounced by many on the British left. His usual publisher, the Communist fellow-traveler Victor Gollancz, refused even to put out the book.

09:39 pm - Veil

( This time we started with the composite. Click here to see what a single five minute exposure looks like.Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1622304.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

09:33 pm - Trifid

( But wait! There's more!Collapse )

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09:17 pm - Omega

( And now...Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1621971.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

11:10 pm - Eagle

M16, the Eagle Nebula



( And now, for the really impressive image...Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1621701.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

04:33 pm - Lagoon

( But wait, there's more!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1621327.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

07:55 am - Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!

Happy Kalends of Junius! May Juno bless all your activities this month.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1621129.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

07:09 pm - May flowers

( Even more back here!Collapse )

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05:44 pm - The Heart

If you listen to podcasts, and are of a sex positive bent, you should check out The Heart. It's part of the Radiotopia family of podcasts, and it's really, really good. I could listen to Kaitlin Prest read the phone book, but what she's actually saying is much more evocative.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1620716.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

12:20 am - Names dropped in a poem

From The Dance of the Solids, by John Updike

All things are atoms
Earth and Water,
Air and Fire,
All, Democritus foretold.

Democritus is remembered today chiefly as the ancient Greek natural philosopher who formulated the atomic theory. Several biographies can be found online, so I won't pontificate at length about him. Suffice to say he was a wealthy man who could afford to travel, saw much of the world, and indulged his curiosity.

Swiss Paracelsus
In his alchemic lair
Saw sulfur, salt,
And mercury unfold,
Amid millennial hopes of faking gold.

Paracelsus, born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, was a Swiss philosopher, physician, botanist, astrologer, and general occultist of the German Renaissance. In his study of medicine he believed that sulphur, mercury, and salt contained the poisons contributing to all diseases. While this was wrong, it was at least a step toward observational diagnosis and away from more ancient medical practices. This was a time when alchemists were actively pursuing "the philosopher's mercury" as a cure for all manner of diseases.

Lavoisier dethroned phlogiston, then
Molecular analysis made bold
Forays into the gasses. Hydrogen
Stood naked in the dazzled sight of learned men.

Antoine Lavoisier was a French natural philosopher who is considered the father of modern Chemistry. He discovered Oxygen and Hydrogen, and proved the phlogiston (fat Earth) theory false. He is also, sadly, remembered as a victim of the French Revolution, who was sentenced to death with the statement that "The Republic has no need of a genius," for the crime of being a nobleman.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1620336.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

06:03 am - Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!

Happy Kalends of Maius! Festival of the Bona Dea, and a number of other things.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1620105.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

11:54 am - Oh, look, a cute graphic from the Russian Overlords

#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday

11:39 pm - It's Never Too Late To Be Brave

I've just finished a really superb book. It's written by Rosa Brooks, who has the unique viewpoint of being the daughter of antiwar activists (her mother is Barbara Erinreich) and the wife of a US Army Special Forces officer.

( Read more...Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1619865.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

12:41 am - Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!

Happy Kalends of Aprilis!

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1619539.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

12:49 pm - Looking for a reliable news source?

I've been reading The Skimm for about a month now. It's a nice "first look" at the day's news, and it catches some things that I don't get in my Early Bird updates. If that's something that looks interesting to you, give it a try.

http://www.theskimm.com/?r=eea78a80

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1619412.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

08:40 am - Happy Equinox!

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1619009.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

02:43 pm - Four Messier planetary nebulae

Here are the four planetary nebulae in Charles Messier's catalog.

( Click hereCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1618906.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

02:14 pm - The six Messier emission nebulae

Having now collected all the emission nebulae in Charles Messier's catalog, I thought you might like to see all six in one post.
( Here they are!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1618477.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

07:04 pm - Old traditions

I'm just back from a traditional Irish wake. The kind where the deceased is laid out in his own living room. Amazingly, I managed to get through almost 63 years of life before having this experience, in spite of having grown up in the Irish Catholic community of Detroit.

It was ... about what I expected. A few people I knew (the children of the dear departed), and a whole bunch I'd never met before.

On the plus side, Ed saved a lot of money by arranging to do it this way. Tomorrow morning the hearse will pick him up and take him to the church for his funeral mass, and then to the cemetery.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1618371.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

03:21 am - Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!

Happy Kalends of Martias!

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1617951.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

10:08 pm - Astronomical images

It's been a while. Here are some pretty pictures for y'all.

( Read more...Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1617792.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

10:11 am - Want a nice camera drone?

Details here:

https://store.boingboing.net/giveaways/the-choose-your-own-dji-drone-giveaway?gid=2308295

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1617608.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

08:56 pm - Pondering families

I've just recently finished REAMDE by Neal Stephenson.

It is, like most of Stephenson's books, a huge tome of over 1000 pages, with super smart tech geniuses in far flung parts of the world. But it's also a story about a family, and that's what inspired me to write this post.

Some few of you reading this may have read Louis L'amour's western novels about the Sackett family. Although L'amour wrote much tighter, shorter stories than Stephenson, I found myself wondering if Stephenson might have read L'amour at some point. Stephenson's Forthrast family (and his Shaftoe family in earlier books) is very like the Sacketts, in that if you tangle with one of them, you tangle with all of them. Furthermore, they have vast networks of friends who they can call on for assistance in time of need.

Zula Forthrast is a 25 year old Eritrean orphan refugee who was adopted into the Forthrast family after having spent the first 10 odd years of her life trudging back and forth between refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan. As the daughter of the almost painfully midwestern Forthrasts, she has grown up with a firm grounding in Midwest Nice behavior and a practical education in the maintenance and repair of all things mechanical and electronic, with the sort of easy familiarity around firearms that you can find in people who've grown up on farms in fly-over country. When we meet her she's a newly minted PhD in geo-engineering, looking for a job in her field. Her uncle, Richard, the major PoV character in the story, arranges for her to be hired by someone in the MMORPG corporation he founded.

Zula moves off to Seattle, gets into a relationship with an IT guy named Peter, and is enjoying a weekend with Peter at uncle Richard's ski resort in British Columbia when Peter makes a very bad mistake. It begins with him downloading a file named REAMDE (not README) to his laptop, and then inadvertently including REAMDE with a spreadsheet full of stolen credit card data that he sells to a broker in such things who it turns out was working for a Russian criminal cartel. In short order Peter and Zula are taken hostage by the Russian mob boss when the REAMDE file turns out to be ransomware that locks up all his files.

This leads to a global adventure involving a wide variety of very interesting characters, a whole lot of mayhem, and an eventual showdown between the Forthrast family and the evil miscreants who would harm one of their own. It reminded me, as the pages turned, of the denoument of The Sackett Brand, where Sacketts streamed into the Arizona high country answering a distress call from one of their own, and the Hash Knife Gang got mowed down in windrows before them.

Yeah, it's a great book. If you fancy a thousand odd pages of techno thriller, grab a copy and dive in.

But, more to my point, I'm wondering if such families really exist in our present day. I know L'Amour was inspired to create the Sacketts based on a real family he met in New Mexico back in the 1950s, but that was almost 70 years ago. Given the forces that have scattered families hither and yon across the US and the world, I wonder if there are any real families like the Forthrasts out there. When I think of my own eight siblings, I know we're just not that tight. I'm even less connected to my far flung cousins.

Do any of you know real life families who would come together in time of trouble, risking their lives and fortunes to help one of their own who'd run afoul of powerful enemies?

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1617220.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

08:38 pm - A couple of recent images

Greetings from the Undisclosed Location, somewhere in the desert southwest, where I'm working on my tan by day and continuing my remote observing efforts by night. It would be nice if I could observe directly from here, but it's been cloudy every night since we arrived, and rainy yesterday and today.

( Read more...Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1617108.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

11:03 pm - Jepp, Who Defied The Stars

It seems the last time I shared something I'd been reading with you was back last September, so perhaps I'm overdue. In any case, I have a beautiful YA novel to recommend to you all.



Jepp, Who Defied the Stars by Katherine Marsh, is the fictionalized story of Tycho Brahe's court dwarf.

Tycho, you may recall, was the eccentric Danish astronomer who made thousands of extremely precise measurements of the night sky. Those measurements would later become the basis for Johannes Kepler's three laws of planetery motion. Sadly, Tycho is best known for (a) having a silver nose, which he wore because the original was cut off in a duel, and (b) dying when his bladder burst in a beer drinking contest. Fortunately for the readers of this book, item (b) is outside the scope of the story, though we do see many instances of Jepp having to pick Tycho's nose up off the floor and return it to the great man's hand.

On the plus side, as the story progresses Tycho recognizes Jepp's intellectual ability, and promotes him from jester dwarf to library assistant to apprentice observer. We are also treated to an up close observation of Ulf, Tycho's pet moose who lived in the castle of Uraniborg and drank beer with Tycho every evening.

This book provides a fascinating look into the lives of Renaissance era court dwarves, and some of the larger than life characters who populated northern Europe in the closing years of the 16th century.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1616768.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

12:24 am - Happy Candlemass

Yes, friends, today we celebrate Candlemass. When St. Brigid and her pet groundhog take treats to all the good children lighting bonfires around the world.



This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1616454.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

12:20 am - Happy ground hog day

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1616158.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

01:17 pm - Fourteen years ago

Buildings shook in Texas. Columbia was coming home.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1616102.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

12:07 am - Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!

Happy Kalends of Februarias!

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1615638.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

08:40 am - Rabbit Hole Day

Some few may recall that back in 2005, we had the first LJ Rabbit Hole Day. The goal being "Let's have a day where nobody's life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let's all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what's there."

I imagine several among my loyal readership suspect that happened on January 20th this year. Or perhaps November 8th last year. In any case, I'm going to remind you all now and hope at least one or two will be inspired to write a Rabbit Hole Day post today.

I'll check in later, from my airship. We'll be ascending to 10,000 feet for a champagne lunch. You'd be amazed at how delightful the effects of champagne become at that altitude.

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1615440.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

11:44 pm - 42

In addition to being the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, 42 is also the number of Messier objects your faithful correspondent has currently photographed with the Slooh CCD cameras.

Somewhere on a shelf in my closet I have slides I shot back in the 80's using my Olympus OM-1 and the University of North Texas observatory's telescopes which add two more to the total, as well as a fair amount of overlap with my CCD images. I should be able to get CCD images of those two in a couple of months. (The Lagoon nebula and the Trifid nebula being the two.)

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1615120.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

10:48 pm - You guessed it

More astro photos!

This is a data dump, to get LJ caught up with my observations. Since the Slooh observatory in Chile is down for maintenance tonight, and the Slooh observatory in the Canary Islands is off line for weather, my faithful readers should enjoy a day or two of reprieve before I have anything else to share here.

( Read more...Collapse )

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10:56 pm - As-tro-nom-i-cal

( ObjectsCollapse )

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12:40 am - More deep sky stuff

Figuring out meaningful and pithy subject lines can be difficult when it all basically comes down to "Here be yet more pictures of stuff in the sky."

( Here ya go!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1614394.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

12:24 am - Various astronomical targets

More of my recent acquisitions, for your viewing pleasure.

( Behind the black velvet curtain...Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1614291.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

06:40 pm - Nebulosity

Here are several faint nebulae I've been building up archives of exposures for in order to create composite images. I think I've finally gotten there with these.

( As you can see.Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1614037.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

07:13 pm - Jellyfish Nebula

It's been a while since I posted any astronomical images here, hasn't it? Here's a composite of six 5-minute exposures of the Jellyfish Nebula, aka IC 443.

( It's a big faint red blob.Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1613627.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

11:01 pm - Cen A

Centaurus A, the brightest radio source in the constellation Centaurus and a very active galaxy.

( And it looks like this.Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1613315.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

07:08 pm - Galaxy Quest

A trio of face-on spirals.

( Behold!Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://wcg.dreamwidth.org/1613276.html. You may comment here using your Livejournal account; or comment there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth account.

07:34 pm - Sparkly!

Omega Centauri, the largest globular cluster in our galaxy, is thought to have once been the core of a satellite galaxy which got swallowed up by the Milky Way somewhere along the way.

( See for yourself.Collapse )

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