Well, I just got to talk to Peter S. Beagle. Now I am BUZZED.

[dianeduane]

It'll all be here.

(BTW, is it just me, or are we having a solar flare / CME? It sure looks like one.)

Comments

[ashlupa.livejournal.com]

Looks like a CME on one side and a flare on the other. Maybe a followup to last week's storm?

[dduane.livejournal.com]

It could be. However, this one seems to be coming from a different coronal hole (the one from last week seemed to be much further down the face of the Sun).

I could be wrong, of course, as there's nothing new posted at SpaceWeather.com or the SOHO site. But it's also a little strange that the half-hourly C3 pictures from the LASCO instrument seem to have stopped: last one was at 17:42. Not that I know anything about their scheduling... and normally an X-class event gives a lot more warning.

In short, "Duh."

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

Definitely looks like a classic CME, although not headed in our direction directly. It shows up even better on the C2 (http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-c2.html). The "flare" on the other side appears to be associated with the sunspot on the limb, or the disrupted area northeast of it (visible on the MDI Continuum (http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-mdi_igr.html) images). My guess is that it's a nascent sunspot family.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

You might be right. The underlying area looks kind of blank, though.

Anyway, the outblund stuff doesn't look like it'd hit us dead on -- it's off to one side, a little.

[caiteydid.livejournal.com]

Okay, now my curiosity is killing me. How is it you know what all these things are in the picture?

:P I totally have college learning I should be doing, but I'd rather learn other things! Like how to look at pictures of the sun and know what they mean. Oops.

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

Mainly it's just a matter of comparing all the camera views and looking for similar structures and making an educated guess--and I'm just a piker, a rank amateur. SOHO (http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/) is one of my favorite space sites, along with APoD (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html), SETI@Home (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/) and Stardust@Home (http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/). My educational background is in political science... but my heart is in the stars. :)

[caiteydid.livejournal.com]

Oh, I remember SETI! My old chemistry teacher in midschool used to run it on his computer, which was cool because we could all see it. I have to confess that many days I paid more attention to the Seti running on his computer than I did to his class.

I'm majoring in Bio in college, and trying to learn astronomy things on the side in my own time. It's fun... and I'm lucky, my dad has a pretty decent telescope, just the computer in it is broken and old, so I'd have to manually operate it I guess. Pfff, I can handle that. :P Well, maybe. I've no idea how hard that'd be. I'll try anyway, I'm sure.

Thanks for all those links!

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

Manually sighting isn't too bad, as long as you learn the main signposts in the sky. That's how I pilot my 4.5" reflector--and sometimes, I just point it somewhere "empty", because there really isn't anywhere empty up there.

And manually finding a faint fuzzy like the Ring Nebula (http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m057.html) is somehow more rewarding than letting a computer find it for you. :)

[caiteydid.livejournal.com]

That's kind of what I told my dad. He still thinks he's going to just get rid of the telescope if he can't get the computer fixed. I was like, "Uh, please don't. Give it to me!" so we'll see how that all pans out.

I really want my own telescope... but it wouldn't be so practical at college, which is sad, since down here in the city lights I can't see hardly anything at all.

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

I regularly observe from the middle of a major Midwestern city. Sure, the fainter ones are hard to pull out, but there's always the main planets, the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades (my personal favorite target), the Andromeda Galaxy, β Cygni (commonly Albiero, the beak of Cygnus, one of the most stunning double stars you'll ever see). A fair portion of the Messier catalog is visible without heading for the outskirts or for the sticks. Don't let a city scare you off from observing! I often like to set up in the front yard and give free views of Saturn or Jupiter to passers-by. During Mars' last close approach, I was able to resolve the polar ice cap, even in my relatively small scope, in the city. It takes a little patience, and a willingness to tolerate less-than-optimal seeing.

[come-love-sleep.livejournal.com]

That was a lot of fun to listen to! Thanks for giving out the heads-up. I've loved Mr. Beagle's voice since I was a child, when I found a copy of the Last Unicorn on tape at the teeny local library.
(Your voice was surprisingly familiar, somehow.)

But yeah. That whole thing was like sitting in a corner in a ConSuite, listening and eating MnM's. Wonderful fun.

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

It turned out even better than I thought it would. I was delighted for the chance to slip out of my Interviewer-Man costume into my secret identity as The-Fly-On-The-Wall during the discussions.

The whole thing should be available within about an hour or so. (If the version you get is incomplete, wait a while and download again; it seems to make the show available prematurely, while it's still being uploaded onto their servers from processing.) I'll be chopping it up into one-hour chunks and re-uploading it as separate episodes later this afternoon for more convenient listening.

[crissachappell.livejournal.com]

His work is so smart and philosophical. Lucky you!

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

I just want to take the opportunity to shout "That's my spacecraft, that is!"

(I worked on Soho, and consequently feel very proprietorial towards it.)

[anamin.livejournal.com]

I envy you so badly right now.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Cool. We had dinner with Peter Beagle and Connor Cochran when they came to Capricon (http://www.capricon.org/capricon27/) last year. And they're returning to Chicago, next month.

[deire.livejournal.com]

How cool! He's Guest of Honor at a convention this fall with which I'm helping.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

I should heap curses on your head, not only for cluing me in to listen to the talk in the first place, but for all of you being so interesting that I could. not. stop. listening long after I needed to go back to bed. One of the best interviews I've heard in a long time.

Can that really be true, about Audible taking 80+ percent of the income? (said in tone of utter disbelief that any author not already independently wealthy would sit still for that split)

[a-muse-d.livejournal.com]

that solar flare would explain why i felt out of whack today. damn radiation.