Archive forAugust, 2006

Pluto is dead. Long live Pluto!

August 25, 2006 @ 13:51 · Filed under

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Neil Armstrong

You know, recently I found a picture of the Blue Marble and it quite frankly stunned me. I mean - how beautiful is that? Not the follow ups created from satellite pictures. Undoubtedly they’re beautiful as well, but this “original” picture just gets it right. (High resolution picure is about 6 MB big.)

By the way, Neil Armstrong wasn’t on that mission, I just liked that quote.. ;)

On another (and far more current) note: Pluto isn’t regarded as a planet anymore. And rightly so. Small, cold, far away.. who wants him/it/her(?) anyway? So due to some wish to not entirely abandon it (along with Ceres and 2003 UB313) they created the new category of dwarf planets and set up three rules required for the status of a planet:

  • it must be in orbit around the Sun
  • it must be large enough that it takes on a nearly round shape
  • it has cleared its orbit of other objects

Especially the third rule is promting quitew a bit of dissent according to the BBC. We’ll see what comes from all those protests. And to be quite frank: I don’t believe that this naming discussion will change the way astronomers work very much.

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Returning from the end of the world..

August 21, 2006 @ 00:26 · Filed under ,

..or at least from the Celts’ (and Gauls’) “End of the World”. But more on that later.

Anyway, I’ve just finished going through about 500 pictures taken during one week, of which about a hundred seem to contain nothing other than gulls. And sea and rocks. But mainly gulls.
I believe you have already guessed where this is leading: holiday-picture post! And an enormous picture post indeed. So you dial-up users (both of you!) consider yourself warned.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

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Paris, France

August 11, 2006 @ 00:05 · Filed under ,

yay! I picked up my ticket to rennes, france (actually my tickets to paris, rennes, paris and back to vienna again) today.. going to visit my family who is on a three week vacation there atm and looking sooo forward to it. :D Only staying for a week, but I’m in urgent need of a week of pure nothingeness.. and books of course..

Yes, I remember promissing a picture entry a (long) while ago and yes I have indeed bought a shiny new digicam for myself (a wonderfull Fuji FinePix F10 with 6.3 MP and a chip to reduce noise significantly apearantly.. stupid thing uses xD-cards, but I suppose you can’t have everything.. ). The only problem is that I haven’t made a single picture with it as yet. Well apart from the 50 trying to figure out the ultimate setting(c). On the other hand I was able to make a colleague of mine give me her photopage-url and am hereby posting it (my previous post was written after our visit at the “angelibad”, btw.

Anyway- I really need to stop reading the MIT blogs and website seeing as I will get another chance at the earliest in two years as a transfer and obviously my chances of being admitted there are very very slim.. might as well try though and I’m anyway certain, that I don’t want to stay in Vienna for any longer than necceassairy. Any suggestions where I should try my luck (yeah, going to ask in person as well ;) )? So far I’ve got the Free University of Berlin on my list (cause Berlin apparently rocks badass!), ETH Zürich, Caltech (“’cause not everyone can go to MIT”) and MIT of course.. I must admit that I haven’t really been searching and those were just the more or less obvious choices..

I need to really get a life soon now about which I can blog.. the whole point of starting a blog was after all to get an interesting life. I hereby promise that the next entry will be an interesting one with many pictures that will all be awesome. Awesome! Yeah.

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