To Look at the Stars:
An Excursion in Astronomy
You might say there is a need inside everyone to connect to the rest of the universe. Amateur and professional astronomers alike gaze up into the heavens simply to observe what can be found there. Astronomy in a structured form, academically and professionally is the study and observation of the universe( it's stars, planets, moons, galaxies, etc.) as well as the theories surrounding it's many components. According to a popular television show on the Science Network, Into The Worm Hole, as narrated by Morgan Freeman(2010) astronomy and biology have come together in the pursuit of finding life and water on planets other than our own. With the technological advances in modern times and the sheer vastness of the cosmos, now is a fascinating time to explore the dimensions of the structure and chaos from whence we came.
"On the observational side, by far the most important development has been the measurement of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation by COBE (the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite) and other collaborations. These fluctuations are the fingerprints of creation, the tiny initial irregularities in the otherwise smooth and uniform early universe that later grew into galaxies, stars, and all of the structures we see around us. Their form agrees with the predictions of the proposal that the universe has no boundaries or edges in imaginary time direction. . ." (Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time / The Universe In A Nutshell, 2008)
It was once believed that our universe existed in stagnation. Creation was merely a topic for theologians until 1929, when Edwin Hubble would change the perspective of science forever in observing that galaxies at a vast distance were moving away from us quickly. Thus began the theory that the universe is expanding into infinite space from a time where it's contents were at exactly the same point and essentially, infinite density(History of th Universe, pp. 13-14).
In the years of World War II a need for experimentation to facilitate observational needs spawned a "rapid development of technology" which gave opportunity to the astronomical community through radio waves. Relying on optical telescopes limited the availability of knowledge to early astronomers. Physics joined astronomy in the current ability to observe our universe from unfathomable distances(Giacconi, 2005).
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization announced their plans in January of 2009 to launch The International Year of Astronomy mid-month with several programs to both educate interested parties as well as promote an interest among the masses. This recognition reads loud and clear the importance stressed by a global organization on the education of astronomy for the world(US Federal News, Dateline, 2009).
"The Year coincides with the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first observations with an astronomical telescope. It is an opportunity for people all over the world to rediscover their place in the universe by observing the sky at night and during the day. It is also intended to provide a platform for informing the public about recent discoveries in astronomy, while demonstrating the central role that astronomy can play in science education." (UNESCO Statement Release, Dateline, 2009)
In the course descriptions of the registration portion of the APUS campus for Introduction to Astronomy and Introduction to Astronomy Lab I was informed I would be given the chance to study the history of early astronomy and astronomers as well as an in-depth look of the components of the universe(stars, planets, moons, galaxies, etc). Also included in the curricula are the theories of quantum physics such as black holes and time travel.
Due to the volume of sale of his famed publications, Stephen Hawking is arguably the most recognizable figure in Astronomy of our time. Hawking was even referenced in a dirty joke in the 2008 Judd Apatow film Knocked Up. In the illustrated hard-back edition of the combined works A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell Hawking relays how the advances in science via Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei have shaped our present view on the cosmos, their theories as well as his own and what we have since come to call fact as well as what has yet to be either proven or disproven.
To pursue astronomy could lead to many things. In astrophysics one might use current collected data to further advance the reaches of our observational abilities. In astrobiology one might observe several solar systems in search of biological organisms and/or water. Research and publication is an option, and then there's also teaching. Whatever the outcome, one in pursuit of astronomy has the rare chance to be a part of something much grander than us all.
In conclusion, and perhaps in response to that something deep down desperate to connect to totality, I look forward to what an Introduction to Astronomy and Introduction to Astronomy Lab in December will lay out before me. Will I be captured by the fascinations of the cosmos? As is relative, only time will tell.
I'm still figuring out how to put the references in MLA format.
Constructive cfriticism is welcomed.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Just thought you should know...
I love everyone I know.
I love those I see daily and those I merely hear a word from every so often.
I love those I see regularly and those I hope to see soon.
I love those I hold only cherished memories of and,
those I parted with under less than positive circumstances.
I love my family, friends, not-so-friends, and aquaintances alike.
I hope my existence has in some way benefited you, Goddess allowing that I've changed your life for the better.
I know you've helped put me where I am today no matter how you feel about me right now.
Thank you for simply being you.
Good graces, Goddess speed. (;
I love those I see daily and those I merely hear a word from every so often.
I love those I see regularly and those I hope to see soon.
I love those I hold only cherished memories of and,
those I parted with under less than positive circumstances.
I love my family, friends, not-so-friends, and aquaintances alike.
I hope my existence has in some way benefited you, Goddess allowing that I've changed your life for the better.
I know you've helped put me where I am today no matter how you feel about me right now.
Thank you for simply being you.
Good graces, Goddess speed. (;
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Hear Me Universe!!
I sing this song to myself many times a day.
"The Loves in my life carry me on,
My family and friends inspire this song,
I'm getting where I'm going, I have it all;
A healthy body, I stand strong and tall,
Happiness around me in many a form,
Disposable Income is now the norm.
I'll always lend an eager hand
Luck in all endevours is what I demand
My life will end beautiful and long you'll see
For all of Prosperity Belongs To Me."
It's cheesey I know, but I wrote it after I read Rhonda Byrnes's The Secret. It's an amazing book. It changed my entire perspective on life.
"The Loves in my life carry me on,
My family and friends inspire this song,
I'm getting where I'm going, I have it all;
A healthy body, I stand strong and tall,
Happiness around me in many a form,
Disposable Income is now the norm.
I'll always lend an eager hand
Luck in all endevours is what I demand
My life will end beautiful and long you'll see
For all of Prosperity Belongs To Me."
It's cheesey I know, but I wrote it after I read Rhonda Byrnes's The Secret. It's an amazing book. It changed my entire perspective on life.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Poetry, March 2010
3/8/10
Ageless day
be gone, and the next.
I want not for this hour,
My terminal...
Ageless day, make haste.
Take with you my lingering malady,
Take with you my predilection.
Tolerance gained in trifle;
I now conceive little else,
My soul; adrift.
Adherent, catch and restore me.
I need your stitches, again.
I've lost a lot of gore.
My chassis is delicate,
My wind, shallow.
Resuscitate.
Rescind the (AGONY) bestowed,
My last requisition.
3/10/10
A simple complication
So complex.
Yet the candor in my
mental capacity
A reflex.
You deny my ability,
Criticize my stability,
Weaken my humility,
So, I question your virility.
I conjure the vigor I've got left,
Clutch. Patience.
I endure the usual mistreatment;
Unhappy salutations.
A single duality,
So intense.
Yet I grasp for reality,
The void, the Gravity,
In pretense.
Resentment emphasized,
Resolve realized,
Contentment advertised
Hesitation(it's commercialized).
I invoke my heroine
Courageous. Selfless.
She provokes misery;
"Trapped." "Helpless."
It will be as I make it;
Resplendent.
My afflictions lose reign when I
End it.
3/11/10
An Ode To Patience:
If you had a body,
I'd stab it
Repeatedly.
You infuriate me so;
The way you ebb and flow
When I've no place to go.
Can't keep it all inside,
When dualities collide,
All of control is aside.
Why won't you
Help Me Feel
less like
A Monster.
Ageless day
be gone, and the next.
I want not for this hour,
My terminal...
Ageless day, make haste.
Take with you my lingering malady,
Take with you my predilection.
Tolerance gained in trifle;
I now conceive little else,
My soul; adrift.
Adherent, catch and restore me.
I need your stitches, again.
I've lost a lot of gore.
My chassis is delicate,
My wind, shallow.
Resuscitate.
Rescind the (AGONY) bestowed,
My last requisition.
3/10/10
A simple complication
So complex.
Yet the candor in my
mental capacity
A reflex.
You deny my ability,
Criticize my stability,
Weaken my humility,
So, I question your virility.
I conjure the vigor I've got left,
Clutch. Patience.
I endure the usual mistreatment;
Unhappy salutations.
A single duality,
So intense.
Yet I grasp for reality,
The void, the Gravity,
In pretense.
Resentment emphasized,
Resolve realized,
Contentment advertised
Hesitation(it's commercialized).
I invoke my heroine
Courageous. Selfless.
She provokes misery;
"Trapped." "Helpless."
It will be as I make it;
Resplendent.
My afflictions lose reign when I
End it.
3/11/10
An Ode To Patience:
If you had a body,
I'd stab it
Repeatedly.
You infuriate me so;
The way you ebb and flow
When I've no place to go.
Can't keep it all inside,
When dualities collide,
All of control is aside.
Why won't you
Help Me Feel
less like
A Monster.
The Children, March 2010
Lylith is very musical. She will dance and sing to anything, but when food or rest are in a period of waning, she becomes particular. Like most little girls, she prefers a female voice. She loves to listen to me sing no matter what I'm singing(which is nice as Chris will interrupt and sing over me if he's opposed and Taven just screams), and she's recently developed an interest in clothes. The louder(or the hotter the pink, I should say), the better.
My little Lylie is very good with Aya and her third litter of kittens. She loves dollies(and will say "aww-aww, dolly/kitty/baby/mommy") and is adorable when playing mommy. She tries to feed her dolls, shares her cup with them, hugs, kisses and pats them and plays peek-a-boo(saying, very clearly, "peek-a-boo,") and if she drops them or smacks them she'll say "uh-oh!"
She's very polite and says "please" and "thank you," as does Taven, usually.
Taven also says "uh oh!" with a lot of full sentences. His favorite thing to say is; if he's hurt you or if you're crying or angry, he'll say "Ya all right?" He has learned to hold the cats properly and is very social and out-going with the neighbors' children.
Both kids will pick up a phone and say, "hello!?" They gibber in their own language into phones and to each other, it's adorable.
Taven also enjoys dolls or stuffed animals occasionally. Anything soft and cuddly he'll carry around and say "aww-aww," patting it's back or giving hugs and kisses.
He likes to wrestle a lot and will randomly hit, kick or punch you to prevoke you into throwing him around as Chris does.
My babies is growin' up!!!
My little Lylie is very good with Aya and her third litter of kittens. She loves dollies(and will say "aww-aww, dolly/kitty/baby/mommy") and is adorable when playing mommy. She tries to feed her dolls, shares her cup with them, hugs, kisses and pats them and plays peek-a-boo(saying, very clearly, "peek-a-boo,") and if she drops them or smacks them she'll say "uh-oh!"
She's very polite and says "please" and "thank you," as does Taven, usually.
Taven also says "uh oh!" with a lot of full sentences. His favorite thing to say is; if he's hurt you or if you're crying or angry, he'll say "Ya all right?" He has learned to hold the cats properly and is very social and out-going with the neighbors' children.
Both kids will pick up a phone and say, "hello!?" They gibber in their own language into phones and to each other, it's adorable.
Taven also enjoys dolls or stuffed animals occasionally. Anything soft and cuddly he'll carry around and say "aww-aww," patting it's back or giving hugs and kisses.
He likes to wrestle a lot and will randomly hit, kick or punch you to prevoke you into throwing him around as Chris does.
My babies is growin' up!!!
"Situational"
An epiphany, as it occurred to me, that people tend to try to make all situations equal, so often, without taking individual circumstances into account. I, myself do this often.
When you're raised in a manner that you only see the same set of instances repeated, you tend to assume certain actions are associated with those instances and if you're not attentive to the people involved, and if you don't look at the surrounding factors you are bound to misinterpret the full effect of the situation.
Here is an example;
When I was much younger than I am now, much more selfish, ignorant and hot(though that's not the important part), I had a natural aversion to half of the music that was available to me. I was never interested in top 40, I detested country and rap and "techno," and sought out only hard rock, metal and whatever genre you consider the likes of the bluesey female singers I'd heard of, such as Fionna Apple and Joss Stone.
I was taught to have a particular taste in music and I never questioned it. I think it probably took a long time, as it may with most girls, to get over the idea that everything I did had to make mommy happy.
If something caught my ear and my mom wasn't a fan, at first I didn't buy the CD. Then, the older I got, I requested the CDs anyway, my mother accepted my tastes and was supportive about my interests.
My husband and I bonded, when we first met, over the likeness of our entertainment tastes. We enjoy the same humor, the same music, the same movies and books and televison programs. Because of this we've introduced each other into a lot of things. That's something that has welded our relationship together over the years. More-so, is the things of that nature that we've discovered we enjoy together.
Lately, however, we've had limited exposure to new things with a strict budget firmly in place. My solution has been to look upon the types of things my friends have been listening to. Lately, I've gotten into some of the music that was on the radio as I was growing up. I'm noticing I can relate to or appreciate the sentiment behind the music of TLC, Salt N' Peppa, Snoop Dogg,Dr. Dre, etc and because of that, I've had the urge to listen to 311, a band I've always liked but fell in love with in beauty school when I learned well the secret behind much of the content and could relate. Chris enjoys 311 and Sublime, another classic I've been craving, and he even tolerates Ballyhoo!, who my Tree turned me onto due to their obvious influences from the two most fore-mentioned bands. What he can not tolerate is the old R&B and rap I've been craving.
My neighbor and friend, Jen, is very much into country western and southern-fried-rock. I've been able to pick up on some things over the years that I enjoy from those genres and like sub-genres. For example, Allison Krausse is a very talented Blue-Grass vocalist. A couple of years ago she created an album with Robert Plant, the singer of Led Zeppelin, called Raising Sand. I listened to that CD every day for months right after I had Taven. Some of the things Jen listens to makes me want to leave the space intended for ear-shot of whatever happens to be playing.
I always thought I hated country. What a bunch of whiny, drunk, dumb red-necks! But when you're raised on metal and the likes, and those are the type of people you surround yourself with, you're bound to hear that opinion a time or two, or a dozen, a score, whatever. It's a stereo-type.
One time, most of us in some way have been guilty of saying this; I'm not interested in what this artist has to say because they don't say it in a way that appeals to me, you shouldn't listen to them either because I'm around you and I don't want to hear it.
I've discovered my true aversion to country music is the way some artists play the guitar in some or all of their songs. I do enjoy the sound of the guitar almost as a rule, but that twangy-twang-twang is just so unappealing to my ears that I can almost always guarantee you that I will not be happy about having to hear it. Even on the Raising Sand album I still occasionally cringe, and that album is not worth missing if you like either of the involved vocalists.
Chris is not a fan of country as a rule, either, though he holds dear a few songs or artists that his mother was a fan of. He, also, is a fan of Raising Sand, that's one we discovered together. (=
What is his aversion? I don't know. What I do know is that he becomes terribly annoyed when I want to listen to Faith Hill's "Cry."
He and his friends were close and tight-knit in their developing years and they're all bold, out-spoken and tease each other endlessly. It's very macho, even with some of the girls. Perhaps this is his source of hostility. The buddies wouldn't approve. Perhaps it's geographical. Maybe that twang offends his ears as well.
Perhaps because I'm always dreaming up something fabulous that I want from my life, I've just now started paying attention to these little truths. They fascinate me, truly. I've consistently marveled at these strange revelations as of late.
I take it as a sign that I need to be in school.
Just as my recent fortunateness with my finances has been sign enough for me to start my own business.
We've found an investor and a partner. If you pray, do so for me. I'll be praying that a few good people will finally have good things coming their way with some consistency.
When you're raised in a manner that you only see the same set of instances repeated, you tend to assume certain actions are associated with those instances and if you're not attentive to the people involved, and if you don't look at the surrounding factors you are bound to misinterpret the full effect of the situation.
Here is an example;
When I was much younger than I am now, much more selfish, ignorant and hot(though that's not the important part), I had a natural aversion to half of the music that was available to me. I was never interested in top 40, I detested country and rap and "techno," and sought out only hard rock, metal and whatever genre you consider the likes of the bluesey female singers I'd heard of, such as Fionna Apple and Joss Stone.
I was taught to have a particular taste in music and I never questioned it. I think it probably took a long time, as it may with most girls, to get over the idea that everything I did had to make mommy happy.
If something caught my ear and my mom wasn't a fan, at first I didn't buy the CD. Then, the older I got, I requested the CDs anyway, my mother accepted my tastes and was supportive about my interests.
My husband and I bonded, when we first met, over the likeness of our entertainment tastes. We enjoy the same humor, the same music, the same movies and books and televison programs. Because of this we've introduced each other into a lot of things. That's something that has welded our relationship together over the years. More-so, is the things of that nature that we've discovered we enjoy together.
Lately, however, we've had limited exposure to new things with a strict budget firmly in place. My solution has been to look upon the types of things my friends have been listening to. Lately, I've gotten into some of the music that was on the radio as I was growing up. I'm noticing I can relate to or appreciate the sentiment behind the music of TLC, Salt N' Peppa, Snoop Dogg,Dr. Dre, etc and because of that, I've had the urge to listen to 311, a band I've always liked but fell in love with in beauty school when I learned well the secret behind much of the content and could relate. Chris enjoys 311 and Sublime, another classic I've been craving, and he even tolerates Ballyhoo!, who my Tree turned me onto due to their obvious influences from the two most fore-mentioned bands. What he can not tolerate is the old R&B and rap I've been craving.
My neighbor and friend, Jen, is very much into country western and southern-fried-rock. I've been able to pick up on some things over the years that I enjoy from those genres and like sub-genres. For example, Allison Krausse is a very talented Blue-Grass vocalist. A couple of years ago she created an album with Robert Plant, the singer of Led Zeppelin, called Raising Sand. I listened to that CD every day for months right after I had Taven. Some of the things Jen listens to makes me want to leave the space intended for ear-shot of whatever happens to be playing.
I always thought I hated country. What a bunch of whiny, drunk, dumb red-necks! But when you're raised on metal and the likes, and those are the type of people you surround yourself with, you're bound to hear that opinion a time or two, or a dozen, a score, whatever. It's a stereo-type.
One time, most of us in some way have been guilty of saying this; I'm not interested in what this artist has to say because they don't say it in a way that appeals to me, you shouldn't listen to them either because I'm around you and I don't want to hear it.
I've discovered my true aversion to country music is the way some artists play the guitar in some or all of their songs. I do enjoy the sound of the guitar almost as a rule, but that twangy-twang-twang is just so unappealing to my ears that I can almost always guarantee you that I will not be happy about having to hear it. Even on the Raising Sand album I still occasionally cringe, and that album is not worth missing if you like either of the involved vocalists.
Chris is not a fan of country as a rule, either, though he holds dear a few songs or artists that his mother was a fan of. He, also, is a fan of Raising Sand, that's one we discovered together. (=
What is his aversion? I don't know. What I do know is that he becomes terribly annoyed when I want to listen to Faith Hill's "Cry."
He and his friends were close and tight-knit in their developing years and they're all bold, out-spoken and tease each other endlessly. It's very macho, even with some of the girls. Perhaps this is his source of hostility. The buddies wouldn't approve. Perhaps it's geographical. Maybe that twang offends his ears as well.
Perhaps because I'm always dreaming up something fabulous that I want from my life, I've just now started paying attention to these little truths. They fascinate me, truly. I've consistently marveled at these strange revelations as of late.
I take it as a sign that I need to be in school.
Just as my recent fortunateness with my finances has been sign enough for me to start my own business.
We've found an investor and a partner. If you pray, do so for me. I'll be praying that a few good people will finally have good things coming their way with some consistency.
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