Finally, The BBC Does Something Awesome

So this BBC website www.howbigreally.com shows the size of natural disasters, war zones and man's forray into the heavens in comparison to things we can relate to. For example, the size of the moon when compared to main land Australia:

 How about the runway of the Space Shuttle centered over Central Park, New York?

Or, the same runway when centered over my house:

Now I live in Plymouth, England, and I wont pretend it's a big city. But just look at that! The Space Shuttle runway stretches pretty much across the ENTIRE CITY! Its HUH-YAWGE!! Now something thats comparitvly miniscule, the distance walked by the Apollo 11 crew, the first moon landing. This is how much was explored on the first moonlanding 40 years ago when centered over Old Trafford football stadium:

I think you can tell thats no real distance at all. Ofcourse by later missions they explored greater distances with the help of the luna rover. But still. I think thats pretty startling. As my hero Phil Plait would say, we need to go back!

I invite you to place the Space Shuttle runway over your house, or indeed you can plot the Apollo 11 distance over your town, print out the map and walk it yourself: http://howbigreally.com/

Perseids Meteor Shower

Heads up to the (two) people who read my blog, tomorow night, August 12th, will be the peak of the Perseids meteor shower which comes around every year, caused by Swift-Tuttle (what an awesome name for a comet.) I've spent the last two nights out observing Jupiter and I've counted eight shooting stars so far, and I wasn't even looking for them. So grab a blanket and look east, because it'll be beautiful.

Good Work, Astronauts (Even though you smell of wee)

Last week I read news that an emergency had developed on the Internation Space Station. What had happened was a faliure in the pumps that cycled ammonia through the massive coolent and radiators. It could have been catastrophic, but thanks to the fast work of Expedition 24 astronauts (Expeditions are long duration missions, STS missions are Space Shuttle Missions that last 2 weeks at the most) they Macgyvered the problems into a non-dangerous but urgent situation. If they're backup system broke down they could be in serious trouble. So, they shoved some spacewalks together, which is  HUGE thing since astronauts usually train for months to do a a particualar spacewalk these guys had about 2 days to prepare and no time to practise. The second spacewalk interested me particularly as I watched part of it live, and also, because it broke the record for being the longest ever spacealk at 8 hours 3 minutes and it was also Tracy Cadwell-Dyson's first ever spacewalk. Imagine being told you've got 2 days to (mentally) prepare for that sort of thing, but also that if they mess up they could be in serious trouble having one side of the station 200's and the other side -200'c. Just goes to show how smart and together these folks are. There was some ammonia leakage during the spacewalk that came in contact with the astronauts, that could have been bad, but they did a "bake-off" where they literally just float around in space for a while to late the ammonia disapate.

Well done guys, I'd be up there risking my life too if I had 3 PHD's and was born in texas.

First Year in Two Minutes

Something I've been working on for a couple of days. The frustration in it's creation took about a decade off my life, seeing as I was using Windows Movie Maker and its infamous for being the most unstable program out there. I'm happy with the end result even though I had to save it at a lousy low quality because even though it's only 2 minutes long it took way more RAM than my computer to handle to save, so I had to save it lower. Its almost completly in chronological order of my whole first year of uni. If anybody asks what my first year was like I'll direct them to this video. Tis about 70% of all the photos I've taken over the year and is in pretty much chronological order. I think it's interesting how visually you can see how I've grown my comfortable with the camera, at first I'm hesitant and but then I start getting closer to closer to people and they get used to me taking pictures all the time until now I can get some really beauitufl candid shots of really humans up close. 

Idiot

Dailymail comments section.

Carl Sagan was only the greatest astronomer of our time

Some More Art

A few things from the summer brief on "Gravity."

Note to self, get scanner.

Stripy

Had to take my cat to be put down at the vet today. We all knew it was coming, she's 18 years old, the bionic cat, too haughty to succumb is beneath her as death. Well the last few weeks she'd lost a helluva lot of weight and just peed everywhere. Then last night she went straight downhill. It was horrible to see her like that, eyes weeping, soaking wet from wee, couldn't stand. We decided it was time to do something. We weren't sure if the vet was open and my couldn't afford to have her put down. She suggested smothering. I off handly mentioned giving her an overdose of my mums insulin. Eventually I just said why the fuck are we even discussing this? Would it be better to let her suffer overnight than try and dispatch her our selves? Luckily it turned out the vet was open, only for another 20 minutes. I made the phone call and explained to her that our cat needed to be put out of her misery right now. She very kindly fitted us in, she said they would rather stay late at work than let her suffer. That just made me bawl.

I paid the bill. It seemed only right. Being only 1 year old when my family got her we essentially grew up together. We have 4 cats but she was the one I was closest to. She had this habbit of everytime you bent down to fuss he just would jump up onto your shoulder and hang there like a baby. Now I'm not one of those pet owners who treat their pets like children, but when my mum suggested taking her out ourselves to save the cost I flat out refused. The humane way was the only way. I told her its what makes us different. She said "It's what seperates the men from the boys?" and I replied "No, it's what seperates the humans from the monsters." So I paid the bill, and Stripy looked me right in the eye while they injected 3 times, finally in the kidneys because she was so dehydrated the couldn't find a vein. I think it was for the best. Stripy never meowed in her whole life, but this afternoon she was, pretty much, screaming.