garden and Internet random

[eub]

The rosemary got bitten pretty hard by December's cold spell. Ninety percent of its leaves are browned and falling off. The decorative alliums are coming up, though, as well as the sativa. And the squills, always. I pruned some of the roses, a bit early I suppose but think of it as an experiment.

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It's like Cafepress but for 3-D printing out of plastic. With, for example, Bathsheba Grossman models.

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Fun with fisheye lenses. I particularly like this

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Is the pic everything revolving around the north star? I don't really know what Concordia is - a living station on Antarctica? Even when I don't really know what's going on in your posts they are often interesting.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's one of those "circular star tracks" pictures but in a funny projection.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Well, technically, everything is revolving around the south celestial pole. You can't see the north star in Antarctica (or Australia, where I live).

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Right. Of course I know where Antarctica is, I was just testing you. :)

I think I have just proved the "Americans really have no idea about geography", and Eli has politely chosen not to correct me (thank you, Eli).

Is there a 'very easy to identify and everyone knows what it is' kind of constellation in the southern hemisphere, like how we go on about the dippers (which I still have trouble with) and Orion (the only one I can reliably get?

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Orion is often quite easy to see here, too, and "opposite" it is Scorpius which I think is pretty distinctive, although I may be biased by my birthday. So I think you can always find either Orion or Scorpius, depending on the time of year.

South of Scorpius is the Southern Cross, which is supposed to be easy to find (particularly when you live in a country with it on the flag...). However, there's another star configuration (I think it actually overlaps official constellations) called the "false cross" and it does take a bit of practice/experience to know which is which. The real southern cross has two "pointers" (which I think of as the tail of the kite), which are alpha and beta Centauri. If you find the cross and pointers, you can do this intersecting lines trick to find the South celestial pole (the North Star sits pretty much on top of the North celestial pole).

Actually, the best, WOW! part of our skies, once you get away from city lighting, is the Milky Way. It is often right overhead as a big fat band of amazingness. I've noticed that Northern hemisphere tourists who go to the outback can't stop talking about it.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

"It is often right overhead as a big fat band of amazingness"

Hah! I tried to look up some stuff on the web, what the Milky Way looks like from the Southern Hemisphere. Mostly it looked like the static-junk I see in dark conditions ALL THE TIME, maybe instead of 'persistent migraine aura' I can say I can see the Milky Way itself :).

[eub.livejournal.com]

As a kid reading about stars, I was disappointed that I couldn't see α Centauri from where I was. It didn't seem right; the closest star should be visible to all.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

And to make it worse, we have the closest external galaxies (large and small magellanic clouds) down near the south celestial pole too. And then there was supernova 1997A (mind you, I think that's because it was in one of those). I went to this fun talk by a visiting American astronomer who'd come down under so he could see it for himself and he was very embarrassed to discover he had no clue how to navigate the southern skies.

He also had a great time talking about how 9 neutrinos were detected from 1997A, and within a few months, there were more papers about those neutrinos than actual neutrinos. He felt a lot better being in light astronomy, because the papers were never going to exceed the number of photons detected.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Nah, I just didn't think about which pole was which either.