Aug
25
Picture of the Week #7
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Fragment of the Nakhla meteorite that fell to Earth in 1911. American Museum of Natural History, August 2006
This meteorite is one of the SNCs, or “snicks”, a class of meteorite that has one very interesting thing in common – they are all from Mars. This wasn’t the first time I have seen a chunk of [...]
Aug
18
Picture of the Week #6
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Space Shuttle Enterprise at National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. September 2006.
One of the coolest parts of visiting the new Air and Space center was a chance to see the Space Shuttle Enterprise. And of course, one of the coolest things about the Enterprise is that its name was changed from Constitution [...]
Aug
11
Picture of the Week #5
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Section of the K-T boundary. American Museum of Natural History, August 2006
The arrow points to the iridium layer that lies between the Cretaceous (below) and Tertiary (above) layers this cross section. This is, of course, the famous layer that led the Alvarezes to hypothesize that a large extraterrestrial impact occurred at this time and ultimately [...]
Aug
7
Happy Amazing Birthday to James Randi!
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Happy 80th trip around the sun to James “The Amazing” Randi! I can’t remember the first time he came to my attention, but I know the first time I read some of his works on skepticism was in the Pseudoscience and the Paranormal class that I took in college in 1994. I’ve been a fan [...]
Aug
4
Picture of the Week #4
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Venus and the crescent moon, May 2007
Not a lot of extra info on this one. I took this photo with my telescopic lens zoomed in and no tripod, so I’m kind of amazed that it actually came out.