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 Mars, that honor goes to a fragment of ALH84001 in Washington D.C. (which I’ll post a photo of eventually), but it is always thrilling to be just a few inches from a piece of another planet.

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 after a write-in campaign from Star Trek fans. Never underestimate the power of geeks in great numbers!

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 large extraterrestrial impact occurred at this time and ultimately caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

There is a section of the K-T boundary exposed here in Texas, up east of Waco, but I haven’t had a chance to see it … yet!

Spotted via Skepchick

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.

In the fall of 2003 I took a class on the geology of Texas with my Staff Education Benefit, which was very fun and informative. As part of the course, we had to do a research paper on some aspect of Texas geology. The professor had a list of topics that people tended to choose from, but we had the option of suggesting our own topic. I had a growing fascination with Earth impact craters, and I knew of several in Texas, so that was what I proposed to do my paper on and it was accepted. It was a lot of fun to research and put together.

Shortly after the end of the semester, I went out to McDonald Observatory and on the way back we stopped and took photos of the central peak of one of Texas’ impacts - the approximately 100 million-year-old Sierra Madera crater, which is pictured here. Below is an image I made for the paper from the USGS National Map Seamless Server which shows the rim of the crater, which of course is heavily eroded.

Kip gave a lecture at UT back when I was a student (c. 1993?), so that was the last time I heard him speak in person. This time he came after being invited by two undergraduates, one of whom was my department’s recently-selected Rhodes Scholar Sarah Miller (we’re all quite proud of her!) and he made a point of mentioning that the reason he accepted the invitation was because it was students who asked, which I thought was very cool.

The talk was a good overview and synthesis of where we’ve come from and where we are going in the study of some of the weirdest parts of physics and cosmology. He started with an overview of relativity, black holes and the big bang and evidence for all of these. He spent a bit of time covering the search for gravity waves (which I think is what he talked about back in the 1990s when I last saw him) and the plans for upgrades to LIGO. He also spoke to the future areas of research for the primarily student-populated audience, especially areas like inflation and grand unified theory.

I’ll leave you with a picture of the man himself, holding a black hole:

From the information plaque at the museum:

NASA built several “boilerplate” Apollo command modules for testing and to train astronauts and other mission crew members. This one is made of aluminum with a fiberglass outer shell and has an actual command module hatch. It was used by Apollo astronauts, including the crew of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing mission, to practice routine and emergency exits. The interior was later fitted with actual or mockup components to simulate the Apollo-Soyuz spacecraft and the five person rescue vehicle planned for use if an emergency developed during the Skylab program.

Boilerplate #1102A is displayed here with the flotation collar and bags that were attached to the Apollo 11 command module Columbia when it landed in the ocean at the end of its historic mission.

Height: 3.2 m (10 ft. 7 in)
Weight: 1,814 kg (4,000 lb)
Manufacturer: North American Aviation

The reasons for this little bit of weather-blogging are 1) I’m a weather junkie and 2) I was born in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and lived there and in Houston for the first 8 years of my life, so keeping an eye on tropical weather was something I got from an early age. Even now, living in central Texas, we still have to deal with tropical weather, and not just from the stuff that comes in from the Gulf. We sometimes get the remnants of Pacific storms coming in from Mexico and dumping lots of rain on us.

Since we’re having a pretty hot and dry summer here this year, a nice soak from a minimal tropical storm wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Right now the forecast doesn’t take Dolly to hurricane strength, so maybe she’ll turn out to be one of those helpful storms. But of course, we all know how quickly the forecasts for the path and strength of a storm can change!

Update 7-25-08

Well, Dolly has now come and gone, leaving a lot of rain in the Rio Grande Valley. We got some here in Central Texas (see the view from my back porch on Wednesday evening), but not as much as I had hoped. It looks like the Valley took a fairly bad hit, but so far I haven’t heard anything of deaths or serious injuries, so that’s good.

The trend is pointing towards an active season, although I can’t imagine that we will see anything like the historic 2005 season. Only time will tell, but let’s hope that if it is a repeat of the 2005 activity, it isn’t also a repeat of the failures of that hurricane season.

I think this is fruit and vegetable abuse…