REVIEW: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, by Chris Hadfield

On September 27, 2015September 26, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

This p 511UE0Uq4KL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_ robably doesn’t need to be a terribly long review, as if you’ve been around for a while you can probably easily guess what I think of Chris Hadfield. If not, be aware that I believe him to be among the awesomest of humans, so there was really no chance at all that I wasn’t going to enjoy the hell out of his book. You should read this. That’s the tl;dr version.

The slightly longer version: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth is part self-help/motivation book, part autobiography, and part reference manual for all things NASA. Reading it should have depressed me a bit, as the main effect of the book was to convince me that nearly every detail in Skylights is wrong, even the ones I deliberately got wrong for story purposes, but oddly it didn’t. I live for focused astronomical nerdery, and while Hadfield never goes too crazy on the detail it’s very clear that the actual life of a working astronaut is roughly 10000 times as complicated as I thought it was and I have thought about it a lot more than most people have. The specifically science-focused part of the book certainly doesn’t overwhelm the rest of it– this is a less sciencey book than, say, The Martian was, even though The Martian was a novel and this is not, so you’d think it had more room to get into details. I talked about it a lot in class this week, and had a few of my girls ask me if they could read it. It’s probably a bit too high-level for even a bright fifth-grader, but I suspect an eighth-grader who enjoyed reading would be able to handle it easily.

And this book needs to be in the hands of young people, beyond a doubt. One of the things Cmdr. Hadfield hammers on repeatedly is how he needed to stay focused on his dream to become an astronaut from a very early age. Dreams are like that, sometimes; you can cheat yourself out of them before you even know it if you’re not focused and careful. (I remember thinking once as a very little kid that I was already behind in life, because Michael Jackson was famous at nine and I was ten and couldn’t even sing. I suspect what I actually did in that case was dodge a bullet, but you get the idea.) I don’t know that he wrote it with young people in mind, but I’d try hard to get this into the hands of math- and science-inclined high school students in particular.

Highly, highly recommended, guys. This one will end up on my top 10 list at the end of the year for sure, and I suspect it’ll be very close to the top.

Right now

On August 12, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

3:43 am and I’m looking at my phone instead of the sky because ow, my neck.

C’mon, Perseids. Represent.

Okay now I’m mad

On July 2, 2015July 2, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy10 Comments

I need y’all to understand something: I have been ordering from Amazon for years. I am a Prime member. I get my damn money’s worth out of that Prime membership. And the recent unpleasantness with my telescope was the first time I have ever had any serious difficulty with them screwing anything up beyond maybe a book cover getting a little spindled in a box.

You may recall that I was excited enough about my first outing with the telescope that I ordered, on the spot and from my front yard, a 2″ moon filter so that I could look at the moon through my larger eyepiece.

That order showed up today.

See if you can see the problem.Some of you probably do. Others, maybe not. Lemme help.

That’s not a goddamn 2″ eyepiece. It’s a 1.25″ eyepiece with the sticker for a 2″ eyepiece on it. In other words, it’s the exact goddamn filter I already have.

Now we’re fighting.

Tellamascopery!

On July 1, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek7 Comments

Unsurprisingly, an iPhone 6 turns out to not be the greatest of photography tools for the amateur astronomer; the white dot precisely in the middle of the image is Venus, and if you click on the picture you can just barely make out Jupiter immediately above it. You can also get an idea of some of the challenges I might face getting a good telescope view of that conjunction from my driveway.

I spent most of last night looking at the moon. As it turns out, lining up a 10-millimeter-wide eyepiece with a speck in the sky four hundred and fifty million miles away is kind of complicated, and I was never able to get a satisfactory view of the conjunction with my smaller, higher-magnification eyepieces. I did manage a few minutes of getting both planets in view at the same time with my 2″ eyepiece, which was really cool– it resolved Venus enough that I could see it was only halfway lit, like the moon. (Would Venus ever look full? I don’t actually think it will.) No chance of cloud bands on Jupiter; I’m just not good enough at aiming the telescope yet.

But the moon. Oh, man, the moon.

Things I learned from finally getting to use my telescope in the driveway last night, in no particular order:

I need to go back to contact lenses.
I also need an eyepatch. This is not a joke. I need both hands free to fiddle with the telescope and the focusing knobs and it’ll just be easier to put a patch on the other eye.
I need a camera bag or something to keep track of all these lenses and caps.
The moon moves fast, or rather the combination of the moon’s movement and Earth’s rotation makes the moon look like it moves fast. If you catch the edge of the moon in either of the eyepieces I have you can actually watch it slide out of your field of view. It’s way worse with the higher-mag eyepiece, obviously.
Related: the moon filter is no joke. The moon was full or close enough to not matter last night, and it was too bright to look at for more than a second or so through my un-filtered eyepiece– bad enough that I actually ordered a 2″ moon filter from Amazon from my driveway while fiddling with it. The problem is that the moon filter blocks out everything but the moon, so my move had to be to find the moon in the larger eyepiece and then switch to the smaller and move around slowly and carefully and get it back in view.
I need to get good at collimating the scope, quickly and efficiently. I’m either doing something wrong (probably) or the scope falls out of true quickly, because it was misaligned by the end of the night. It didn’t seem to affect the moon views all that much– that was still really, really cool, but the laser collimator showed it to be way “off” before I put it away at the end of the night.
Mosquitoes can all die in a fire. That said, there were bats out and about last night, which I don’t see very often around here, and that was kind of cool.
A cloud passing in front of the moon while you’re looking at the moon through a telescope is really cool, or at least it’s really cool once you realize what’s going on and stop wondering what the hell happened to your focus level.

I’ve got to get better at finding smaller objects quickly in the scope. Once I’m comfortable being able to catch a planet at night, I’ll start thinking about taking the thing out to Potato Creek sometime out of range of the city lights. I’ve actually got a pretty good field of view from my driveway, despite the trouble with the trees. I can’t wait to see what I can spot once I get good with this thing.

The best part is that he’s learning

On June 30, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

(Context for the title. You should all watch Archer.)

So I’m starting to enjoy fiddling with Scrivener.

I spent a chunk of last night sleepily going through the (rather impressively detailed) tutorial that they include with the program, and got through about half of it. It does an impressive job of using the program to teach the end-user how to run itself, and by the time I was halfway through the thing I was fully in the okay it’s time to start writing now and figure the rest out later stage of working. And, well, as you can see I’m actually accomplishing things. Mostly. Sorta.

So far I’ve been on summer vacation for eight hours and nineteen minutes if I start the count from when I got up this morning. During that time I’ve received fifteen emails and four phone calls– one from my assistant principal, and her summer vacation started a week ago. Each and every one was about stuff that I really shouldn’t have been needed for. But whatever, at least no one has asked me to come back in. Yet.

It’s cloudy outside. It’s been cloudy outside for a week or two now, and that telescope that I acquired at the cost of high personal drama hasn’t been outside the damn house yet. Tonight will be the peak of the Jupiter-Venus conjunction, and if I can’t see it at least with naked eye because of the clouds I’m going to be pissed. It cannot possibly stay cloudy all summer long, but I have a feeling that it’s going to try. The forecast is showing a clear window between 9:00 and 10:00. That ought to be enough, as sunset’s at 9:23, but keep your fingers crossed for me. I’ll take pictures if I’m able to get set up at all.

Booyah!

On June 25, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

And now, it shall rain for forty days and forty nights.

Three facts. Maybe four, depending on how you count.

On June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

I ordered my birthday present yesterday.

Today I went to a Fathers’ Day thing at my kid’s day care and then came home and took a nap.

Other than that I got nothin’. How’re you?

In which I’ve been keeping secrets

On April 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Periodically I do an experiment with book prices somewhere and don’t overly publicize it just to see what happens. As it happens, Skylights has been on sale at Amazon for 40% off for close to a week now, and sometime late tonight before I go to bed I’ll roll it back to its regular $4.95 price.