Go.

Read.

Now.

http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=16

http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/tableofdiscoveries/

Unlike Michael Okuda and many others around the world, I was still too young to remember anything I might have seen that day, somewhere in upper Alberta, two or three time zones away from all the excitement. What I do remember is reading through the Collier's Encyclopedia entry on Space Exploration in the years that followed.

The edition my parents had bought was published at a point where the Apollo program had not yet run the course laid out for it by the Nixon administration in spite of the hopes of many across the world. In fact, the end of it had not yet been written officially when Collier's went to press. The projected mission schedule's forecast still maintained that Apollo flights would number into the 20's before they stopped in favour of the preferred form of space shuttle then expected to succeed Apollo.

I remember the fascination - obsession? - that began with the photography and technical illustrations in that book. It was fed by the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program that ended up being the true last gasp of the first space age. By Space: 1999, by Star Wars, the original Galactica, and eventually Star Trek itself to keep me going until the first of the shuttle launches.

We've been through a lot of flights, good and bad, since then.

And now on this anniversary, we have another first: two Canadians together with eleven others from four nations: the United States, Russia, Belgium, and Japan. One of those is the 500th human to go Up There Into the Black.

From Yuri Gagarin to Christopher Cassidy: only 500 so far.

There should have been much more than this by now. We ought to have done much more than this.

That we've managed this much despite our best and worst instincts is still a miracle when you look at it carefully.

To everyone involved, whether you recognize that involvement for what it is or not: thank you.

Thank you.

A perhaps overly scary scenario pointed out to me by warren_ellis.

Fair game for an Ottawa SF Society meeting topic, yes?

Okay, something's started bugging me since "No Exit" aired last week...

( Read more... )

Whirlwind of sorts.

Finished putting my latest APAzine for Legends together. It's being printed as I type this, although there's some weird and interesting font glitches occurring in the hardcopy. Random characters that should be bold printing as italic, unexpected font substitutions, and whatnot. Not quite sure why this is happening, but at least the actual text is still there, as are the photos and the map. Must've happened when I saved from Pages to PDF.

Rain's coming down here at the moment. Not too heavy, but just enough to make you go for the umbrella. Gentle film noir rain, if there's such a thing.

OSFS meeting tomorrow at the Dalhousie Community Centre on Somerset West and Empress. Details at ottawa_sf for anyone interested, and the topic is extrasolar planets. Given the current count is a little over 300 such objects...ought to be fun for anyone who shows up!

Short story's past 5,500 and closing fast on 6,000. Here's hoping it's coherent when it's done...

Back to you.

Some random notes...

• J Torres has a new series starting up this week. You might want to give it a look-see, I think.
• Some of my NYC-region friends may see themselves as recipients of a nasty note from the Earth Institute at Columbia University this week regarding earthquake risks. I'm also worried about some of my acquaintances in South Carolina, judging by a map attached to the article.
• Someone in the near west end of Ottawa is Very Wrong in their Opinion of children, if this CBC article is anything to go by.

Something David Brin pointed out recently(among a great many other news items): here's the Wired article. The recent discussion of competition between fuel needs for vehicles and those of humans and other animals on CBC Radio's The Current had triggered a fair bit of ongoing concern for me. Could this work as a solution to that problem?

If there's ever a Maple Leaf flag planted on Mars, part of the work that will have made it happen will be that of Diane Michelangeli.

I must admit to not hearing or reading much of her work during her lifetime, and now that life has ended all too soon. According to the CBC reports, it was brain tumours that finally got her. At 45.

45.

As with Mike Wieringo in comic books in recent days, that too is too damned soon.

Ladies, gentlemen and respected others: we have been robbed.

Again.

Dr. Michelangeli, I'm sorry I never got to meet you. It would have been cool.

I was going to do some self-promotional blogging again shortly.

( More ranting after the cut... )

james_nicoll found something else of interest to me today: a predictive mashup mapping tool to predict where the water will end up once the glaciers in, say, Greenland/Kalaaliit Nunaat, start going bye-bye.

Here's the link. The default setting's apparently 7 metres, but you can fiddle within a range of zero to fourteen metres' rise in sea level.

I note for the Ottawans reading this that we don't seem to be affected in any detectable fashion by such complications in the biosphere, even at the maximum. I'd imagine that our infrastructure, real estate markets and whatnot will be affected in some form or other...?

...not five minutes ago.

We just had a smallish quake here.

gumprich called it in calling the recent floor-crossing in Parliament what it was, I think. A certain amount of consistency of position is certainly a good thing to practice, especially when it's a key part of the platform you campaigned to get into office on. It's certainly an important thing, although there are days when I admit to being hard-pressed to practice consistency in my own life. Not providing any examples at the moment, though, for reasons of promises made to others near and far.

Also, as Chris does, I have to give credit for that consistency where I do find it. I don't agree with the two gentlemen under discussion there very often, so when I do find myself in accord, I have to admit to it.

This is starting to read very much akin to a "me too" posting.

I'm still vexed by the NASA decision on the Terrestrial Planet Finder project. Cancelling it at this juncture -- if cancellation it is in fact -- makes no sense to me from either a budgetary, scientific or PR viewpoint. Someone's going to get that "first confirmed Earth-type planet discovered outside of Sol system" feather for their metaphorical cap, and since NASA's been on the forefront of this sort of thing since before I was born, why not let them off the budgetary leash a little more. Just in case?

Inconsistency is certain a hobgoblin to this mind of mine.

And that's just where the real worlds are concerned. Some of you already know how I am about some of the fictional worlds...

...and I could use some help in figuring out some possible implications and whatnot. So could james_nicoll, I suspect, for reasons I'll explain momentarily.

In my last posting on a favourite book mapping out our home galaxy, I noted the announcement of a discovery of a giant "plume" extending out of the galactic plane as posted to spaceref.com in this press release. The original announcement site, at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory's web service, is here.

Then I stumble onto three posts on related matters here and here at James' LJ, and another one at one of his acquaintances here.

So, now I'm trying to figure out how some or all of this fits together...and what questions I should be asking next.

There's a book in my library that I'm not planning on selling off even if doing so is the only thing that stands between me and skid row: Nigel Henbest and Heather Couper's Guide to the Galaxy(hereinafter referred to as "GttG" for brevity's sake). Written and published just over ten years ago, GttG deals with the Milky Way Galaxy, its' immediate neighbourhood, its' internal structure, and the many assorted "landmarks" that lie scattered throughout.

It serves to this day as a reference guide for SF writers ranging from Rob Sawyer to Christopher L. Bennett, and it's Just That Good in explaining its topic to laypeople like me who barely got through their physical sciences classes. And then there are the maps. Run a Google Images search for "Milky Way Galaxy" and you'll likely stumble across a scan or five from the maps in that book in fairly short order.

What I'd really love to know is why a book that good isn't getting reprinted and -- more importantly to me -- revised on a regular schedule. The people to ask, apparently, are those running the original publishers, Cambridge University Press.

In the 10+ years since its initial publication, we've had plenty of new developments in our knowledge in this book's subject area, including(but not limited to):

• Discoveries of over 100 extrasolar planets whose home-stars range in distance from 15 to 15,000 lightyears away from Sol.
• The distance of stars within 300 lightyears of Sol nailed down with increasing precision by the likes of the ESA HIPPARCOS satellite.
• The structure of our galaxy grown increasingly detailed, including a more precise distance to the nearest edge of the Perseus Arm, the discovery of a barred-spiral core in our Galaxy, and the increased reach in distance of several spiral arms beyond what we knew then.
• And then there's things like this giant "bubble" rising 10,000 lightyears "above" Galactic Equatorial that just got announced today. And we're seeing it from 23,000 lightyears away.

All of that's just scratching the surface. I know there's more that I've forgotten that ought to be mentioned here.

To quote Gretzky again: "It's time." We need a new GttG. Let it be soon, please?