Slacker Hiking

Ack!

A week without a new post…  Yep, I’m doin’ nothing’ but confirming my complete slackerdom…

*sigh*

Anyway, since it’s been a while since I put up some pictures, I figured I would try to make amends by posting a handful of random shots from my last few hikes.  There is no rhyme or reason to these, they’re just shots I took to give folks — those folks who have never been up here, anyway — a feel for what the place is like, both in beauty and in variety.

Oh, by the way, the last few shots should be an illustration that I have no fear of heights…

Nerd Alert: Astronomy Stuff!

Okay…it’s time to really get my nerd on. For those of you frightened by forays into the darker, scarier reaches of nerd-dom, now might be a good time to look away…

What’s got me all geeked-up, you ask? Direct imaging of planetary systems.

And, no, I don’t mean our damned system. Don’t get me wrong, I love the cool-as-hell pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and Pluto to which we have been treated lately, but they don’t get me well-and-truly going. Not the way “pictures” of other star systems do.

Think about it: should I get all hot and bothered about an uber-detailed picture of Jupiter’s storms…or by one that shows a gas giant orbiting another star? That’s like arguing about which is better, The Phantom Menace or Empire Strikes Back. I mean, c’mon now…let’s be real here.

With all that said, imaging of what the professional astrogeeks call “extrasolar” systems is hard. I mean, REALLY hard. We can’t truly do it in visible light because, well, stars are kinda bright. There have been some cool successes, however, including one of a planet roughly twice the mass of Jupiter orbiting a brown dwarf (which I’m adding here).  Take a look at this picture before you check out the ones below to…well…get yourself used to what this kind of stuff looks like.

Visible light is a problem, but other wavelengths…other wavelengths are a different story. We still have trouble picking out planets, but very smart people are working very hard to do this. And even the “crappy” pictures are pretty damned cool.

This is more of a photo post than a normal one, but…crap…the pictures are freaking awesome…

1) A bunch of baby pictures of newly forming planetary systems…more specifically, the dust clouds around young stars where planet formation is taking place.  The cleared “lanes” and spaces you can see are where planets have already come together:

2) And some “adult” pictures…well, at least as close as we can come:

3) And, lest you criticize the “bad” pictures above, just remember that we are talking about hundreds of light-years for most of them.  Heck, just getting good pictures in our own damned backyard is tough: below is what Pluto and Charon look like to Hubble, versus what we finally saw when we got a “close-up” from the New Horizons probe.  Not to repeat myself, but this stuff is hard:

Look, Ma, No Supervolcano!

The last couple of days have been beer-focused — delivering and selling, not drinking, you judgmental meanie! Well, not just drinking…

So, in the interests of not putting up a stream-of-consciousness post that I have to come up with on the spur of the moment, I figured I would trot out one of my shortcuts from the summer: the photo post!

I’ve posted quite a few pictures of Yellowstone. A lot of pictures, actually.* Living in the middle of a place that impressive will do that for you…but my regular home ain’t no slouch, either. Life in the Rockies, at least where I live, is a bit different from Yellowstone, however: drier, more open, smaller trees…and a lot less in the way of supervolcanoes.

*Yes, I am in fact too lazy to link to all of them. Just grab the posts tagged Photos and you’ll find ’em.

Keep in mind, these are just random snapshots I took on a few different hikes. I was not actually intending to do a photo post, so I didn’t really plan ahead. Anyway…ahem…a bit of lazy posting at its finest:

 

My Office (pt. 2)

The second half of last Monday’s post: