The WAL

One of my recent discoveries on the internet is a site called GalaxyZoo.  The Universe is a big place - far bigger than we can actually see at this point - and there are a lot of galaxies in it.  A lot of galaxies.  As it says on the front page:  “Welcome to GalaxyZoo , the project which harnesses the power of the internet - and your brain - to classify a million galaxies.”  Far more than a million, actually.

The way it basically works is you look at an image of a galaxy and classify it a Spiral Galaxy (clockwise, anti-clockwise, or edge on/unclear), an Elliptical galaxy, Star/Don’t Know, or Mergers.  Most images take a second or so to figure out, some you have to look at a little more closely.  It’s a quick and easy way to contribute to research on Galaxy formation and evolution.  And it’s kind of fun.  You can sometimes run through fity galaxies in a couple of minutes.  Some of the pictures have never been seen by human eyes before and while most of them aren’t all that clear, the ones that are can be truly spectacular.

Dragon Summer Progress

The Universe has a sense of humour. Look at the duck-billed platypus or mercury (the metal), for example. For further proof, look at Neptune – the outermost planet of our solar system, not the ancient Roman god (although that would make this funny in a different way).

Neptune is a strange planet in a lot of ways. It’s got a very high core temperature considering its distance from the sun, and a rather chilly surface temperature. Really interesting storms all the time. It has seasons and a heavy axial tilt so we can observe those. At the moment, the south pole on Neptune is about ten degrees warmer on average than the rest of the planet and this is enough of a shift to change the methane in the atmosphere there from ice crystals to a gas.

Yes, that’s right, Neptune has a strong emission of gas coming from its south pole. For this and other interesting facts and stories about Neptune and its history (and a lot of other stuff you’ll find in space), I direct you to the Astronomy Cast, one of my favourite podcasts. I haven’t listened to the episode on Pluto and the outer solar system yet. Don’t spoil it for me.

The universe so has a sense of humour, and it’s not always very sophisticated. Damned funny, though. Oh, and word count for November: 30,316. And I finished nine stories, granted that six of them were stories waiting for me to come back to them. Still, wow. December probably won’t be nearly as high as I’m planning a lot of editing and rewrites of stuff I’ve finished a first (or in some cases second) draft on. Total previously incomplete work (that I want to complete) comes in at 35,000 words compared to 62,000 a month and a half ago and mroe than 90,000 when I started using the keyboard for real, again. I’m working on a fun little story right now tentatively titled “Klaatu Barada Nikto, Baby”. This one is completely new and I’m about 2,500 words into it with no idea how long it’s going to wind up being but I doubt it will hit 10k.