Category: astronomy
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No astronomy for average Americans!
Someone apparently showed John McCain — and by “John McCain”, I mean, “one of his aides” — how to twitter. So we’ve been treated to a list of his Top 10 Porkiest Projects in the 2009 Omnibus Spending Bill. Most of them are science projects, but nothing makes me more irate than his #2 pick:…
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The hell with Pluto (the dwarf planet AND the minor Disney character)
I was recently reminded that I simply do not understand the emotional attachment that people had to Pluto as a planet. It’s another dinky ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt! I don’t want to get caught up in semantics, but we should at least lump it in with similar objects in terms of composition…
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Dorky Fun with Wordle
It seems that wordle is all the rage these days. And I decided to look at what comes out of the RSS feed of astro-ph. Let’s take a look (click image to enlarge): I didn’t realize that “magnetic” would be number one!
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Planet: A self-gravitating body that is nearly round
The other day I was looking at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) database table on photometric classification. I needed to recall which type was a star and which was a galaxy. So I was interested to see the following two listings in this table buried deep in the SDSS information: Galaxy: An extended object…