Our house guest for this week

 Some friends of ours are enjoying a trip to the West coast this week, and we are keeping their dog for them. Lucy is a cute little miniature poodle. We've never had a dog, always have had cats. This is turning out to be fun and is requring me to get out of bed earlier, which I needed to do anyway! Here are a couple of pictures:

 

Satellite Flys Over

Here's a picture of the track made by a satellite as it flew over Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe a couple of nights ago. It's very dark there and easy to take star field pictures. This was made with a Canon Rebel XSi, 30 second exposure, f/4.0, and then post-processed in The GIMP.

I later identified this satellite as SEASAT 1, using the very nice freeware program "Orbitron." SEASAT was launched in 1978 to do ocean research, and failed about 100 days later.

Physics - Can we test inflationary expansion of the early universe?

Here's an interesting article about a paper in Phys Rev Letters outlining a plan for testing the inflationary scenario. Have a look:


Physics - Can we test inflationary expansion of the early universe?