A picture of Mars

Mars is near opposition now, which means that it's fairly close. So I tried taking some pictures, using my 8" Celestron ttelescope and ToUCam 840 Webcam. Here's my first result - not too great, but shows the polar cap:

The Hardwoods with Furniture!

Movers came today and put the furniture back upstairs - it looks great on the new floor. Here are a few shots:

And here is a great movie showing an auroral display:

Aurora

Snow in Houston + New Hardwoods

First item:

We just got our carpet on the third floor, plus on the stairs leading to the third floor, replaced by hardwoods. They look great to me - here are some pictures (click on any picture to see a larger version):

Second item: SNOW IN HOUSTON !!!

This is the earliest it has ever snowed here...

Look carefully for the snow (click to get larger image):

This is Mt. Everest with a starry background (the Astronomy Picture of the Day):

And here is the view from my car showing a police car blocking the road while a crew shovels sand onto the road. (What a joke!)

Finally, Christmas is coming -

Book Searching

“dilogarithms”


Solar Cycle 24

Below I've tried to post math in a style that would work on WordPress - well, it does not work here. I don't know how to do math on BlogSpot!

Look at the document source to see how to strike out text, how to use different colors, and how to link to URLs with snapshot preview and how to link to URLs without snapshot preview.

There is a command which is ignored by pdflatex and which defines where to cut the post in the version displayed on the main page

Merry Christmas

Check out our dance:

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Good luck, America!

We'll need it. We just elected a man with little experience, a shady past, Socialistic ideas, and promises to tax us hard-working people out of existence. He threatens to bankrupt the coal industry.

I believe he thinks himself to be much wiser than he really is.

Have a great four years,

Tom

Testing Math

All I want to do here is to see if I can enter an equation and have it look OK:

∫ dx cos(x) = sin(x) + C

∑_k=1,...n 1/k ≈ log(n) + γ + 1/(2n)

Well, it's not great but it could be worse.

For hints on how to do this (as well as more info on HTML in general) see here and here.


Here's some stuff I copied from another page, to keep around for reference. This obviously needs work - I need to learn some more HTML!!

√(a² + b²)



√(a² + b²)

square root of ( a^2 + b^2 )

---

lim n→∞

an

lim n→∞

an

{ limit n -> infinity } a_n

---

∞ ∑ n = 0

an

∞ ∑ n = 0

an

{ sum from n = 0 to infinity } a_n

---

∆u  =  Δu  =

n ∑ i = 1

∂2u/∂xi2

∆u  =  Δu  =

n ∑ i = 1

∂2u/∂xi2

Laplacian of u = Delta u = { sum from i = 1 to n } d^2u / dx_i^2

---

b ∫ a

f(x) dx

b ∫ a

f(x) dx

{ integral from a to b } f(x) dx

---