Hmm...midnight and I'm still online. Must be that Greg is still at WorldCon.

Didn't get as much accomplished today as I would have liked, as my cold made me feel fairly crappy this morning. But I did get the ASU Astronomy lab schedule done for the semester. Not a small task, coordinating four different sections of labs that meet each night at the same time, all needing to share the same equipment. Hopefully my TAs will not find any mistakes in what I've posted.

I finally read some brief summaries of Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. I remember enjoying them greatly when I read them years ago, and I am going to start reading Endymion next. I'm on a Dan Simmons kick, because I just finished Ilium, which was just unbelievable. Simmons at his most audacious, methinks.

I got distracted by NASA TV tonight. (Not unusual, really.) I was flipping channels and saw something that looked like part of a spacecraft against a black background. Then I saw a pale blue arc emerge. I realized that it had to be a view from the Space Station. Turns out it was live coverage of a Progress rocket bringing supplies to the ISS. I noted that the blue arc was getting broader and I realized that I was about to see an orbital sunrise. A brilliant harsh light broke over the blue limb of the Earth and it was so bright that the camera had to turn away. The starkness and purity of the light was amazing. We are so used to seeing sunlight diffused through the atmosphere, softening the light, but space shows the sun for what it truly is - a star, a source of tremendous energy concentrated into such a small volume. (Ok, I know the Sun is big, but just one coronal mass ejection can release as much energy as all of the power plants on Earth would generate in millions of years.)

Anyways, it just reminded me that I love to look at stars through telescopes. Most people think that stars are boring. Wrong. I especially love looking at stars like Vega and Sirius - there is something that moves me in the purity of their white light.

Rambling. Go offline, Lisa!