I'm about 3 mile west of Port Townsend, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula. I live on a high bluff looking out over the Straits of Juan de Fuca and west towards the Pacific Ocean. I'm on the reverse slop of a hill. I have full views to the west and north and southwest but not east. Plus my property (5 plus acres) is heavily wooded with 150 ft plus Douglas Firs, Western Red Cedars, Grand Firs and a few Hemlocks.
I am in Henderson (Commerce City), Adams County CO. It's a half hour drive N-NE from Denver proper. When out in the open, the sky is a near perfect dome. The altitude (5190ft at my place) and the dry air make for crystal clear nights about 300 or so days per year. Meteor showers can be unbelievable here.
I'm at 100 ft elevation. The town is at sea level. With the Cascade Mountains to one side and the Olympic Mountains on the other I'm in a bit of a hole. But still we get some spectacular evenings here. Because of the Olympic Mountains to the west - they tend to break up the storm systems coming off the Pacific Ocean thereby creating what the pilots call "the blue hole". It will be raining in Seattle about 50 miles to the east, but clear skies here. Below is one of several views from my house - this one happens to be from our kitchen window looking north. I'm right on the main shipping lanes from Seattle and Tacoma to the orient. Plus as shown in the photo - the cruise lines heading to Alaska in the summer come right by.
Having cut the cable years ago, I look for streaming infotainment to fill an empty evening. HERE is a site that runs near 24/7 back to back commercial-less episodes of How The Universe Works, The Universe, Through The Wormhole. Having a broadband connection with a high datacap, I've fallen asleep to this channel. Back before my eyesight required corrective lenses I consumed SciFi paperback books. Folks like Elon Musk are working on commercializing space travel with the focus being on colonizing Mars. The next step would be mining the asteroid belt. That's the place where our species will find it's long legs. A favorite piece of hardware, comprehensible in it's simplicity is the Bussard Ramjet. No huge tanks of fuel required!
I look up at Orion almost every day in awe of how far away it is and how huge those stars are in comparison to ours.
We beat the USSR to the moon and everybody said "Great job". And that was it. The "G" found "better" uses for the money. So, no plan to stay up there or anything else. We got a space going truck instead. Now, who knows. Maybe the gazillionaires can so sumpthin'.
A few years ago they reported there's something like 400% more light in the universe than all known light sources can account for. I recall one scientist said it's like walking into a big, brightly-lit sealed room but when you look around there's only a few 40 watt bulbs burning.
Energy and matter used to be all we had to worry about. Now there's Dark Energy & Dark Matter. I once listened to an audiobook about Einstein's work. I understood the theory of relativity for about 15 minutes. String theory is a tangled mess I'm staying away from.
You have to like living with mother nature. At night its just the sound of the wind and waves down below. It gets a bit exciting in November/December - the big storm months here. The wind coming down the Straits often reach 40 to 50 miles per hour. With all the big trees around me - some nights you lay there waiting for the big boom. The bright side - that's where my firewood comes from.
When I built the house I had an arborist survey all the trees and any that were in danger of hitting the house were instantly turned into firewood.
In all seriousness, there is sometimes gross popular misapplication of the "quantum physics." It gets used and mixed in with philosophy and metaphysics because it sounds cool. Physicists really are just trying to understand the vessel of the weak force of gravity, and explain why the "laws" change when talking about particle scale systems. The math takes them some weird places. Don't think of loops, strings or general relativity as the "answer" to anything. The differing theories are the results of competing mass and energy equations. It's just different ways of making the equations balance for systems of varying scales. The same issues pop up in large astronomy systems as well.
Yeah, quite bright! But I thought it was Mars and Venus overlapping each other. At least that is what my app says (Heavens above). None the less it kinda makes me feel small when realizing that those aren't stars but planets of our solar system.
Big article in the NY Post this morning about the discovery of 7 "Earth-like" planets orbiting a dwarf star about 40 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. Three of the planets are in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone", the region around a star where conditions are "just right" for a planet to have water and possibly life. Interesting.
