astronomy

Lots of studying in the past 3 days, and plenty more to do.

Tonight I'll finish going through the topics for Astro Techniques and start reviewing the homeworks
Tomorrow I'll finish reviewing the homeworks for Astro Techniques and for Galactic Astro as well
Wednesday I'll go over the homeworks from Astrophysics and from Stellar, and have the evening review of the Astrophysics stuff with anyone interested
Thursday I'll review radio, pick out and memorize the truly relevant equations, and talk to Mark about any extragalactic questions I have remaining.
Friday I'll go through and review all the notes I've taken, study the details of things for Extragalactic, and work on memorizing the radio equations again
Saturday is the first part of the exam
Saturday night I'll briefly review the notes from the other 5 classes and try not to freak out
Sunday is the second part of the exam.

I should get done with enough time to watch the Packer game and get really smashed.

holy crap I have WAY too much material left to cover.

tea!

Outside, the gray and clotted sky gathers itself like the folds of a cloth. The wind moves through the dessicated bushes and the long yellow grasses. The ancient pines before the Astronomy building move gracefully with it, shedding sweet incense.

My mint tea grows golden in its glass, warm and sweet and intense, the color of honey. Before me, the pages of lecture notes to cover fall away, while Ingrid Michaelson tells me that maybe, just maybe, I won't die alone.

Healing, like living, is not a goal. It is a process, a journey. I am living my healing. Some days are better than others. It helps to have people who care around me, to have the work I love before, to have deadlines (Denmark application, due in 2 days!) and scheduled events (Qualifying Exam in 10 days!) giving me focus and guidance. I still lose one day a week at least to grief. But cats and the strange winter wind of the south and hot mint tea are all part of it now.

Wearing plaid makes me feel beautiful.

People in the classroom across the hall are cheering. Note: they are not astronomy students*. That's probably the anarchy class.

Going off to math class, where the prof has decided to surprise us with a 4th exam on harder material that's take-home, instead of the extra credit he promised us. Also he doesn't curve and he's decreasing the worth of the two exams I've already taken that I did quite well on.

When I get home, I'm going to start my new radio homework.


*astronomy students just cry gently** to themselves late at night when their Q parameter doesn't work out and they can't make a program that creates elliptical orbits, or understand why being in a rotating reference frame doesn't change the frequency of an epicycle.

**Except there's no crying in Astronomy. People just die.

Meet Squashy

Meet Squashy the Quatchi! He comes to me courtesy of Resurrection Fern, and he's Canadian (eh?). Ms. Oomen does glorious artistry with thread and rock and plants and cloth. I happened across her blog not too long ago, and I stayed to gaze at the pretty pictures. (Hey, I'm in Astronomy... pretty pictures are part of the trade). Then during the Olympics, Squashy here was sent on a foreign exchange program to cultivate peace between our two lands.

He's landed happily here in the Astronomy Department, providing a little comfort and joy in our darkest hours. Or, when needed, he dons a mask and gives us motivation.


So thanks! The next time I get to go somewhere fun, Squashy will be with me, getting pins and being trained as an observer.

Everything

I got some gorgeous new yarn from Yarnia, mostly with projects in mind.

First I got Lane Borgosesia Cashwool in Wine. This is a laceweight yarn that I really want to use for a lace pattern, like Wing O Moth or the Hex pattern put out in Knitty a few months ago. The red is so bright that it glows.



Next is some nice thick Crystal Palace Iceland brown wool; two balls, which will hopefully help me finish off my log cabin blanket. Though looking at the blanket now, I begin to see that even that might not be enough.


I mean, just look at the size of this thing!




I also picked up 600 yards of what's called Lagoon Space Dyed. It's an acrylic, and I hate acrylic--but this is seriously some of the softest stuff I've ever felt. I want to make it into a wrap so I can just snuggle with it whenever I feel like it. Haven't found the perfect pattern yet though! any recommendations? I only have the 600 yards to work with (but... maybe I'll get some more? .... hmmm...)



I couldn't resist snagging a couple skeins of Aslan Trend's Santa Fe sock yarn. It comes in absolutely gorgeous colors, and I find that it's delightfully springy and stretchy.

Finally I grabbed some fizzy stuff by Fizz so that I could get free shipping. It's not hideous. By the way, if you want cheap novelty yarns, Yarnia is having a major sale on them. How dorky is that? pretty dorky, I suspect.

Did some cooking with my friend K. this weekend. We made Brown Butter Brown Sugar Shorties, but ours turned out a bit different from the original site's--they kind of melted in the oven. However, they were still delicious! so we ate a lot of them.


When I was hanging out with L. a few weeks ago we went to Ikea, since I had never gone before. It was silly and fun and cheaper than I thought it would be. I picked up two nice plates and some jars for storing dried goods (currently filled with flour--I think I need more of them for the sugar and tea and and and and...<3 jars!). Anyway, my favorite part, cheap candles and nice draperies aside, was their little discount section at the end of the store. I picked up a couple of cute little tea cups with saucers for 50 cents! To quote the matrix, whoa! Well, they were really plain, so I dragged L. off to a Michael's and picked up some ceramic paint and now they look like this:

Craftiness aside, I've delved much further into research of late. I'm looking for more ways to stay on top of my field. It always seems so challenging, especially at this early stage--I feel like there is NO way I will ever know enough. Add in the fact that I spend all my free time immersed in homework and programming, and I really can't see how getting to true understanding is even feasible. Ugh. Well, just keep slogging on, right? That's what graduate school is for--learning that you'll never catch up.


If you have a reasonably clear horizon, at this time of year in the west you can spot a really bright Venus shortly after the sun sets. Now if you look three fingers to the right of it and one finger down, you'll notice a tiny little fleck of light. That's Mercury! Mercury is normally really really difficult to see, because it's so close to the sun that it's always hidden in the solar glow. You should take the time to see it now, because you probably won't be able to see it again for half a year or so.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day 2010!

Have you hugged a woman in science and technology today? For example, Jocelyn Bell Burnell?

Let me tell you a little story. When I was a 2nd year undergraduate student up in the cold midwest, I spent a lot of time putting together a little radio telescope. We built it from scratch based on designs and schematics from MIT, and since I didn't have the faintest clue how much of it worked, it took a lot of time. But after a couple years, we finally got this sucker deployed on the roof and started taking real sky data--looking at the sun and comparing it to the sky, just to simply see if we could differentiate. And there, right smack in the midst of my absolutely blank sky data, was a beautiful, beautiful blip. Not just any sort of blip--an enormous blip with little nasty resonances that raised my continuum by several thousand kelvin.

I was totally thrilled at first, positive I had picked up on some obscure point source at alt 30, az 180 (those were observer's coordinates--not even horizon coordinates, much less equatorial or something useful). That lasted for 30 seconds, of course, until my advisor pointed out that it was probably a hefty dose of Radio Frequency Interference or even just a nasty reflection since the Chemistry Building was RIGHT THERE. But for a brief time I thought I might get lucky and follow in the footsteps of Jocelyn Bell.

Well, she didn't get lucky, exactly--she put a lot of work into investigating every aspect of her data (on miles and miles of paper! no digital stuff) produced by the new telescope she'd mostly assembled and deployed herself. And as a result of her work she uncovered a fantastically consistent pulsating signal and thusly discovered pulsars. After such an illustrious career opportunity as a graduate student, she moved on to work in pretty much every wavelength you can work in, win a slew of awards, and be a pretty cool professor.

For me, Jocelyn Bell Burnell is extra inspiring because she had in all regards quite an ordinarily successful career, despite having gotten into things in the 50s and 60s, a notoriously difficult time for female scientists. In fact in terms of professors she's remarkably normal--proof for me that despite having a bumpy beginning, it's possible to go places and do all the exciting science things that are the crux of pursuing such a career.

Shout out to Ada Lovelace, to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, to all the other women in science and technology, both past and present, who have helped to shape my own place in all of this and who continue to carve a place in the future.


Future posts include awesome pics, as soon as I get my camera up and running.

Knit Knit Knit

It's been a busy couple of weeks (surprise :P), but I think I've finally caught up. Of course that's only because we've a few days of break here, but still. I am doing all the housework that I've been putting off, taking care of the car, and looking into a new apartment for next year.

I had a FANTASTIC couple of days up in NYC with The Twin, including a fantastic visit to The Chocolate Room, which is, yes you guessed it, a little cafe devoted entirely to fantastic chocolates.



Doesn't that just make you drool? I should have brought some home with me, but I was so tired I actually passed up my chance. D'oh!


I'm noticing an interesting pattern in my classwork and abilities. I'm becoming at least a little bit more focused, and a bit more of a powerful, individual worker. I tend to learn by interacting with others, but frequently I've been driving through homeworks completely independently. Of course this is currently accompanied by a decline in grades (AGH!), but that's primarily due to not giving myself enough time to get my work done. Still, it's nice to know that I'm beginning to pick up some of the skills I was supposed to have when I got here.


A few other things of interest:

Temporary Hearing Impairment Leads to Lazy Ear. I found this interesting article on Science News. This explains a lot for me--I had tons of ear infections as a kid and I often find that my listening is impaired in strange ways now-a-days. I wonder what I have to do to go about re-training it? A lazy eye is re-trained by using an eye-patch on the good eye. Maybe if I use one earplug at a time? That might be interesting.

This article on soldiers knitting from my old old old hometown newspaper. It's not very informative but the idea is still interesting. Let me know if you have any more.

Earthquakes affect earth's rotation. The earth's rotation changes on a 12 month cycle and even smaller timescales anyway so this isn't that big of a deal, but it is interesting.

Finally a possible explanation of dark matter? Hmm, I like this one a lot.

KWALITY

First-year exam is over. It speaks to how well the blasted thing went that I'm considering going in tomorrow to take the half that only 2nd-years are supposed to take. I don't think it could possibly count against me, and I want to see--what sort of strength I'll need. I clearly have a lot to learn in the next year, but I feel pretty strong about the stuff I did remember, and do. And I am pretty good at the conceptual work in a number of specific areas.

I am currently taking the evening to play around on the internet, bake brownies, read young adult novels, and work on my Log Cabin Blanket.



The Log Cabin Style blanket is very interesting. It's difficult to find step-by-step instructions online. Essentially it's supposed to be easy: knit a rectangle, bind off, pick up stitches on any side, knit another rectangle outwards, bind off, then pick up stitches across both rectangles, knit another rectangle outwards, and bind off; repeat ad-nauseum. I had the damndest time discovering how to pick up stitches, and where I should be picking them up if I were doing this method. Also a little improvisation was required. A couple hints to anyone looking to start log cabin style as a newbie (it's fairly easy, so consider it!):

1) You're starting in the center and you knit outwards. So when you pick up stitches, you have to pick up the whole length of the side. You're going to need big needles if this is a blanket or large project. Just warning!

2) Picking up stitches is a way to cast on attached to a piece of knitting. You can pick up stitches where-ever you like--just pull a loop of yarn through any given hole and onto your needle. KnittingHelp.com has fantastic videos that show you how to do almost anything, including picking up stitches. The only trick for me, and for most people doing log cabin style, is that you have a loose end (of your new color)when you're starting to pick up stitches. Since I didn't know what to do with a loose end, I just tied mine on at a corner and worked from there. It's a little slapdash, but it works!

3) Be careful with your bind-offs for each of your rectangles. Specifically, look up a loose bind off like k2tog or k2togtbl (or the lace bind off), and use that. You might want to use the lace cast on for your initial cast on, too. Otherwise your product gets pinched at the edges.

4) Knowing how many stitches to pick up can be difficult. I think I picked up every OTHER row when I did my first picked up section (the brown in the picture), but since the brown is a *slightly* heavier super-bulky weight than my initial blue super-bulky weight, this makes the end stretch and flare out and be pinched all at once. It's tricky!

With luck later tonight I'll get a chance to try out a granola bar recipe. The trick is getting bars that stay together but aren't as hard as a rock. Wish me luck!


(P.S. I'm signed up for a couple of good astronomy classes and a horrid looking Bayesian Statistics course. I haven't done Statistics before, and this one apparently has a 2-course requisite. I might try and stick it out (honestly, nothing can be worse than 2 semesters of quantum mechanics), but I'm considering switching. My options are a bit limited--I could probably swing switching to either General Relativity (ew!) or a more introductory (for grad school) Statistics course. Boo! The trick is figuring out which of my fellow students are considering switching as well--being able to work with someone on homework is a large selling point.)

(P.P.S. I updated my ravelry page (I'm Cosmoknot on there) with a slew of books in my library/bookshelves and several stored in my queue, since there doesn't appear to be a way to put up a book that *isn't* known to ravelry. These are books I'm interested in, not ones that I have yet. so if anyone knows how to a) make a wishlist, b) get ravelry to read books that aren't in its database but are on, say, amazon, or c) figure out why the books that are on amazon aren't showing up in the database, let me know)

Glory Be

I helped run the doghouse for last Friday's Public Night at our local observatory, the one where I drag all the undergrads for their labs. We were SWARMED with children in the form of a boyscout troop (or is it troupe?), and tons of parents with little ones. I was completely new to this--the first, and only, Public Night I've been to before, it was so cloudy we didn't even bother to open the domes, and I spent the whole two hours listening to stories from the other astronomers. So suddenly I was confronted with hordes of people. I could (barely) operate the two doghouse telescopes, and I hadn't the slightest idea how to find something fun to look at in the sky.

The sky did not behave. Clouds all up in the crown and dome during our half hour of set up. We fended off childrens and parents for a bit as we tried to get something from the fringes of the sky in the west. While we were busy, the sky cleared in the center, so GV did the Pleiades in the 6" and the entertaining. I fumbled with the automated 10" and suddenly my instrumentationalist instinct kicked in and I got it working. Bam, two stars to calibrate, and the next thing I know it's slewing to H and Kai Perseus. But no matter where we looked, the clouds knew. They'd cover things up in a dozen minutes. I switched the 10" back and forth from the Pleiades to H and Kai Perseus and even the Orion Nebula (GORGEOUSLY clear for a few minutes--we could see DUST clouds. from the earth. with our eyes and that telescope. I can scarcely believe it!).

We alternatively pleased and placated the kids. My instrumentationalist instincts kicked in when GV was gone and I had to reset the 6" to the Pleiades and I found them with ease. The kids loved H and Kai Perseus (all those thousands of tiny stars), enjoyed the Greek myths GV told, and were thoroughly fascinated by the wind up mechanism for the 6"'s tracking.

Now I'm back to work, finding that I have, oh, 5 days to study for the biggest exam in my life this far (only beat by the same thing next year that runs for TWO days instead). I am terrified that I don't know enough. Last semester's courses are not instinctual for me, the way instrumentation and radio astronomy are. I needed to work, and I'm shorted a week of the time I planned to do that work in.

On the plus side, when those are done I can pay my bills, arrange my labs, and take a breather.

Luck!

glub glub

glub, glub glub. glub glub.

Telescopes of the Southwest United States Part 2

Other things I've done for the first time now:

Found bones in the wood.

Or wished was the first time, but it isn't:

1am IHOP party!

Hah. Now I am back in town but still sort of drifty and out of it. Trying to catch up--as always. There's work to do, data to reduce, people to see, problems to fix.... sleep to catch up on, I suppose. Family to talk to.

TelObs tonight followed closely by sleep and then homework.

Telescopes of the Southwest United States

Things I did for the first time on my tour of the telescopes of the southwest US:

been above 9500 feet
experienced altitude sickness (just a bit)
saw at least 10 deer at once
went sledding on something that wasn't snow (in this case, white sand)
climbed a sand dune (that was freakin hard!)
gone through border patrol
peed in the woods
run an optical telescope
Judged a telescope operation based on its weird slewing noise
seen the sun set from 9500 feet
seen the milky way AT FIRST GLANCE (even before my eyes adjusted--my GOD it was gorgeous)

Things I wish I could say I did for the first but I've actually done before:
Swung from part of a telescope
Climbed around on a mesh catwalk while it swung around, so I could look down through the mesh at the earth spinning away below my feet (eek! at least this time it wasn't 500 ft up, just a few dozen)
thrown pine cones at someone
lived without the internet (well... sort of)
cursed unknown weather gods.
lived in a cabin on site of an observatory
fallen in love with New Mexico *sigh*
crunched through deep carpets of pine needles

The trip has gone well. We spent a crazy couple of days running between Kitt Peak National Observatory, the giant Mirror Lab, and the location of the Large Binocular Telescope. We finally ended up here at Apache Point Observatory, where we settled down for a luxurious 4 days of frantic observing. We had three gorgeous days with photometric seeing, and tonight, when we need the most data, the weather is crappy and our seeing is 2 arcsec (here's a hint: that's TERRIBLE).

Friday we go to the VLA. I can't wait, radio being my specialty and the VLA being one of the epitomes of powerful radio science these days. Then I can add something else to the second list: cooked without microwave! since they're not allowed at the VLA.

Missing home. Lots of work to do--Li's homework and WSTAR data (hey, I actually worked on that!) and emailing Arecibo about the proposal and more. Oh, and did I mention studying? so I can actually understand what's going on? that would be useful!

What bothers me the most

I think what really bothers me the most about being in my field is the fact that most people are convinced that there isn't a problem.

Even here, where I've found a welcoming environment and classes I enjoy and challenging, interesting research--even here we have at most 3 female faculty and 1 African-American. Even here, there's a lack of parity in admitted graduate students, and at every other level.

These people are SCIENTISTS. Look at the data! And don't try that "Well, [x group of minorities] just don't seem to be interested in the field." Scientist, remember? Ask why! Look for causes and correlations. Try experimental techniques (like putting some of x group on your recruiting posters, or nominating them for awards, or hiring them). Plot results. Repeat experiments. TRY.

Instead I get the "shrug", or the "yeah" and moving on, or, *shudder* worse yet, the "Well, I wish there were more of x group as well." Yeah, some of your best friends are x group too, right?

Homeworks

Yep. They're coming to eat you.

So Much New

New Things:

New City:
That's right, I've moved away from the land of quality cheese and adequate popcorn, to the land of delicious cherries and no popcrn whatsoever. I live in a Small Town now. I realized this when I went for a drive last week and determined that there really isn't much else besides what branches off of the main road. Now the main road is quite long and there is a lot of shopping, and the university is at the end of it... but really, if you go anywhere else (okay, maybe follow one cross street) there's nothing there. In half an hour drive I start seeing signs like "Watch for Fog on Mountain". Mountain? that explains why my car's been groaning for the past 10 minutes. Poor vehicle--it doesn't like inclines, and we're surrounded by them.

On the other hand, the view is great. So many trees that there are rabbitholes everywhere. Beautiful star shaped flowers grow along the edges of the parking lot and pool into some of the spaces, filling the air with a sweet scent in the mornings. At dusk I get the cicada effect--it reminds me of Puerto Rico, the way all the insects call out to the dying light. You can even hear it indoors. And coming down a mountain, the land falls away like a blanket, and you can see forever.

New Field:
That's right, I've converted to Astronomy fully now. Sort of. Actually there is not in fact that much difference between Astronomy and Physics. I mean it! I mean, the topics we cover are clearly astronomically focused, and yet at the same time we're delving into and expanding thermal physics and gas dynamics. I will admit that the approach is different--look at the labs! Last week I spent 4 hours in the doghouse at the university's local observatory, with a huge brilliant moon ruining the seeing and stars like pinpricks and the wind blowing fresh and cold above us, squinting through different eyepieces of a 6" refractor. AWESOME! so much better than shoving little resistors and capacitors into a breadboard and wondering why the hell my signal is still zero. And in November the department is taking the entire lab class out to Kitt Peak to do onsite observing and touring of various telescopes there.
New People:
Well, I miss my friends and family like nothing else. It's crazy to come home alone and just be myself in my big empty, boxed and unsettled apartment. But the people here are very nice. Albeit I've only met the ones in the department, but the level of welcome is almost unbelievable. And when I compare it to the physics department back home--well let's just say there are quite a few differences. I haven't found a new advisor yet, though I'm meeting with a guy next week who does cosmology instrumentation (woo!).
New Experiences:
Besides learning how to deal with the heat and humidity, figuring out how to keep my car from overheating, learning to drive in NYC (where Twin lives) and pay tolls and park (it's all confusing there), I've managed to sprain my ankle when I.... um... dove from this burning building to save 18 kittens and a bird. That's right. Anywho, I have a cast on and have learned how to walk with crutches. It's a big pain in the ass, but I'm getting pretty good at it. Fortunately, I should be able to have the cast off this Friday and then, who knows, a walking boot or something?
I've also signed up for a local Community Shares Agriculture, and I get my first batch of food tonight! I don't know what I'm going to get, but I'll let you know tomorrow and also update you on what I plan to do with it. If I can get some baking soda, vinegar, cooking wine and cooking sherry, I should be equipped to cook almost anything!

Knitting:
I've taken a passionate interest in scarves, and am currently working on three of them. Yes, I realize that's a bit excessive. I'll share more as I get some pictures, but one is a beautiful brown and orange, my first time doing stripes, the second is turquoise blue in the Ocean Current pattern (from that book of patterns inspired by the ocean), and the third is purple in a design I'm inventing.

I'm a real scientist!

I feel a bit like Pinocchio when I say that. But it also feels good. When I was down at Arecibo Observatory finishing up last summer's research, I had a great time. I did finish the new receiver (relatively speaking--it was being installed on the platform last thing I heard), AND I teamed up with some collaborators who are staff scientists to submit an observing proposal! Observing proposals are requests for telescope time--if I'm awarded it, I can use the telescope for my nefarious scientifically-motivated plans. Heh.

I've started a new knitting project, but it's going badly. I'm using circular needles for the first time ever and... well... okay to be fair I'm also trying to make a hat for the first time ever. And I'm not following a design--I'm trying to do something logical. It seems to make sense to me that if you want a nice round winter hat, you just knit and knit and decrease after a while. And continue decreasing. Okay, it might turn out pointy, but still, it should work! right? I guess we'll find out.

Uncovered a neat new band: Sensuous Enemy, which is apparently a dark techno band. Also there's a band called Battles whom I am really starting to like (I heard the song Atlas at a friend's house). They are creepy but neat.

The kittens are doing well. No new pictures of them instead so I give you the following:



Yeah, the kittens are kind of like that. Cute, but dumb. The Twin and I visited the kitten store, which has many small kittens running around. They are very small and snuggly and they love to curl up and purr--but it doesn't last long. Soon they are tearing through the store after a piece of string.

Apartment hunting goes well. I think I know where I will end up in fall--just need to call and arrange. Try as hard as I might, I haven't really been able to use logic in these decisions. I honestly visited a dozen places when I went searching, and while I can logically explain and rank each of them (I have a complicated system based on four criteria: cost, location, like, and pet-friendliness), I still knew almost as soon as I saw the apartment which one I was going to go with. It's not even that it's significantly nicer than the others--my brain just appears to have gone, "want!" and away we go.

LaTeX

Today is the day to learn LaTeX!

Well not much to learn really--I found a site of LaTeX Commands and how to use them and I'm going to follow them and use them when appropriate. Going to type up my work for the Thermal Project and see how that works out.

If you are new to LaTeX you might consider using Jext as your word processor. It includes lots of options for markup and will color the appropriate commands--so you can use it to see if you are doing things right.

Thermal Physics Project

I begin work on my project for thermal physics this week. It's due Friday--I know, I am running late. Sometimes that's the way things work.

Requirements: 3 pages of work/writing/calculations "on a problem." Not very specific!

What I intend to do: Rederive neutron stars in some fashion. Or just degenerate stars. Or maybe just play along with the equilibrium equation of a star and see what happens.

In any given star you've got something pushing out (radiation pressure) and something pulling in (gravitational force/unit area = gravitational pressure). For a star like our sun, these are about equal--the material's trying to fall into the center of the sun due to gravity, but it keeps running into other stuff and, eventually, combining with that other stuff to make new stuff + energy/light, which pushes everything back out.

Now for all stars, eventually you're going to run out of stuff that can combine and make energy. You've started with something light, probably hydrogen or at most helium, and run hydrogen into more hydrogen to make helium, and helium into hydrogen to make, oh, Lithium or something like that. And then you run that into something else and so on until you end up with iron.

Now the problem with iron is that when you run iron atoms together, or iron + a hydrogen, or iron + anything else, it doesn't release energy when they smack together and stick. Instead, it starts to cost energy to smack those things together and make them stick. The star doesn't want to do this, because it's lazy, like all things. It doesn't want to put in the work. Or perhaps more imagine it that it is not human so it can't have human emotions like "motivation" and "inspiration." there's nothing around to make it do that extra work to make those things stick.

What does that mean? Well eventually you're going to have lots of iron, but it's not going to be making new things + energy, so the radiation pressure, the energy that was pushing it out, falls off and disappears. But gravity is definitely still working, and it is still going to try to pull things together.

Now here is where things get fuzzy. I know you get the following: some sort of large boomish sort of event, followed by some sort of condensing of the core. The star repels its envelope, the hot outer gas and material. Whether it does this via going supernova (and blowing up the rest of the star, too), or just by pushing the envelope off and letting the rest of the core fall in on itself (to become a white dwarf or a neutron star or a black hole, depending on its mass), I am not sure. So I don't know precisely how this works. Why would it push that stuff off first? why not just let all of that stuff fall in? Observational evidence says it doesn't (otherwise how could something small like the earth get big nuclei like those for cobalt or iron? we're not hot enough to make them--we must have "rolled up" remnants of blown-off star bits)

UPDATE: well, investigating. We'll see what happens

The Best Astronomy Pictures

If you don't already know about it, you should take a look at Astronomy Picture of the Day, which you can find by google-searching APOD. As you can see, it's quite beautiful. I love to save some of the pictures and use them as my desktop background. One of my favorite type of images are those that use prolonged exposure, like the one from Friday: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090501.html

Adventurous

I think goals and dreams are both important things to have. And I want to learn to push my boundaries, to challenge myself. So heretofore, before I leave for Graduate School, I am going to try something new:

Knitting Goal for Summer 2009: I want to try double-pointed needles to knit in the round. Probably a hat in that lovely paprika color, or maybe some socks.

Cooking Goal for Summer 2009: I want to find and bake one recipe off of TasteSpotting, that most delicious of websites. Maybe with lemon curd. Lemon curd sounds delicious.

Writing Goal for Summer 2009: I want to submit my poetry with intent to publish. R. says it's ready--it would be nice to see it show up somewhere.

Astronomy Goal for Summer 2009: I want to buy and read The Physical Universe by Shu.

and, for fun, Nerdy Goal for Summer 2009: finish either Okami or Final Fantasy X.

There. I feel productive.