If anyone knows any of the folks who were out watching the show near Woodman in these photos, send them this post! Would be cool to get these photos to them :)
I have good news! The Perseid Meteor Show started on July 17th, and it ends in almost two weeks on August 24th. Yesterday was only the peak of the meteor shower. Earth is currently passing halfway through a debris field left by comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The meteors we see are like bugs hitting a windshield--Earth is hurtling through space, and bits of rocks and dust are being vaporized in our thin blue atmosphere as we pass through the debris field.
While the cadence of Perseid meteors will decrease over the next two weeks, it is still exciting to see them. If you find yourself in clear dark skies, stare up for a few minutes and I bet you'll see one or two.
Here are some tools that I use for astronomy-related things:
Also, take a look at the western sky after sunset. For the last few months, you may have noticed a bright dot. This is Venus! It reaches the highest point in the evening sky this Saturday as it begins "lapping us on the inside" as it follows its tighter orbit around the sun. If you look at it through even a very basic telescope, you should be able to see that it's only 50% illuminated, like a half-moon. I challenge you to watch it change over the coming months!
One of the best storms I’ve seen in a while! Some of the bolts kept discharging for what seemed like entire seconds!
Hi there!
I'm in a long-distance relationship dating a woman who lives in TO. I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Things in our relationship continue to be absolutely wonderful, and I'm starting to do some serious research about making a move to be with her.
I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I work as an experimental plasma shock physicist for a company that does materials science research for exoatmospheric spacecraft survivability. I travel to laboratories all over the country doing pulsed power science using some of the coolest facilities in the world, and I really love it! My normal commute to the office is a 15-minute singletrack mountain bike ride where my traffic is deer, coyotes, and the occasional bobcat. It's truly difficult to imagine a better gig. My dream is to be in the human space exploration industry, and I know that the LA area is a hub for all things space, which is a plus.
I have a community of like-minded coworkers (a little oasis of "blue" in a relatively red city) --we've gotten together and joined sports leagues, we host parties together, and groups of us have even gone on big backpacking trips together. After work today, about a dozen of us will play volleyball in a nearby park for our weekly Tuesday hangout. It's pretty great! How friendly are folks in the greater LA area? Is Thousand Oaks even considered the greater LA area? Is this kind of community easy to find or possible to create?
I'm nervous about finding a new job and community in or around TO, and I'd like to hear about your perspectives on the area. Any advice about companies to look into or even advice on bridging the long-distance gap would be really nice to read.
I don't care about moving articles/websites/notes onto my X4, I just want something that manages ebooks and sleep images well.
Bonus points for a preview that renders sleep images properly, simulating how it will look on the device.
More bonus points for the ability to change sleep image brightness/contrast/levels in the app to improve the rendering of images.
Edit: I should state that I'm using the CrossInk fork of CrossPoint Reader. I do like how the official xteink app has cropping, dithering, brightness, contrast, and sharpening options. Hopefully that functionality exists in some local-oriented application!