Afternoon Thunderstorms Roll Across The Prairie. 

In 2004, I was a young comedian in New York City, and I secured an audition at one of the city’s top clubs. Their host would watch a few of us audition before the pros came on, and she’d recommend anyone she liked to become a regular at the club. I was super excited, and spent weeks crafting the set I wanted her to see.

My first joke did okay, but my second was stronger and by the end I was crushing. I finished with a big applause break, and said good night - but the host was nowhere to be found. I called out for her twice and joked that I must have done so well that they gave me more time before she finally came back up. I realized she probably wasn’t watching my set, or she’d have known when I was finished.

Her phony feedback after the show made it worse. “You started strong,” she said. “But you faded at the end.” Why couldn’t she have just told me she got distracted and offered me another audition in the future? Why couldn’t she be an adult about it? I wanted to be sure that she was lying - so despite having done no subway material, I asked her what she thought about my subway material. She told me it was generic. Not only was she lying to me - but now in her lie, I was a bad comic. I was furious - but I politely thanked her for her time, knowing that there was nothing I could do.

Thankfully, other clubs were more responsible with their new talent, and I got the regular stage time I needed to grow. A few years later, I was on the Late Late Show, and things continued to progress.

In 2012, I opened my own comedy club in New York City. During construction, a woman came in to ask if we were hiring a new talent director. I recognized her immediately - but she clearly had no recollection of every meeting me before.

I asked her for her resume, with absolutely no intention of ever reading it - like she’d metaphorically done to me 8 years earlier. And then I politely thanked her for her time, knowing that there was nothing she could do.

TLDR; When you keep your head down and do good work, the universe will get petty revenge for you.

VLT Snaps An Exotic Exoplanet “First”

Astronomers hunt for planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets) using a variety of methods. One successful method is direct imaging; this is particularly effective for planets on wide orbits around young stars, because the light from the planet is not overwhelmed by light from the host star and is thus easier to spot. This image demonstrates this technique. It shows a T-Tauri star named CVSO 30, located approximately 1200 light-years away from Earth in the 25 Orionis group (slightly northwest of Orion’s famous Belt). In 2012, astronomers found that CVSO 30 hosted one exoplanet (CVSO 30b) using a detection method known as transit photometry, where the light from a star observably dips as a planet travels in front of it. Using the data astronomers have imaged what is likely to be a second planet! To produce the image, astronomers exploited the astrometry provided by VLT’s NACO and SINFONI instruments. This new exoplanet, named CVSO 30c, is the small dot to the upper left of the frame (the large blob is the star itself). While the previously-detected planet, CVSO 30b, orbits very close to the star, whirling around CVSO 30 in just under 11 hours at an orbital distance of 0.008 astronomical units, CVSO 30c orbits significantly further out, at a distance of 660 au, taking a staggering 27 000 years to complete a single orbit. (For reference, the planet Mercury orbits the Sun at an average distance of 0.39 au, while Neptune sits at just over 30 au.) If it is confirmed that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be the first star system to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging. Astronomers are still exploring how such an exotic system came to form in such a short timeframe, as the star is only 2.5 million years old; it is possible that the two planets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits.

Credit: ESO/Schmidt et al.

It’s peak Dry Season in South Florida, but Wet Season is right around the corner. The afternoon thunderstorms, or Florida mountains, are forming and will soon be widespread. 

Myakka River State Park, FL

Anon to avoid links. Freshman year college, roommate and I HATED each other, long story, not relevant. But the week before Thanksgiving I started getting sick, ignored it, got a lot sicker very quickly. She’s packing to go home for the holiday and bitching to someone one the phone that I’m faking it, not really sick etc. Meanwhile my fever is skyrocketing and I’m starting to hallucinate. I remember telling her that I needed help, needed water, practically begging. She laughs and says ‘if you die can I have your stuff’, and left. I managed to get to my cellphone and realized that the battery is gone (never did find it, she swears she never touched it, so…) Pretty much spaced out after that.

A guy I’d been dating for all of three weeks came by the room to see why I was ditching classes and avoiding him, heard what turned out to be me knocking a lamp over, and broke down the door. One trip to the ER and a week in his apartment (side note, he had the BEST roommates in the world, two guys and a girl welcomed me without hesitation and really took care of me) and I come back to the room. She’s packed up all of my stuff and shoved it into a corner.

My revenge? she had a huge crush on a guy… guess who? yep one of my new boyfriend’s roommates. I told him, also told him she was working up the nerve to approach him. End of semester we’re at a party and she walked up to him and started talking. He’s acting all in to her (Award winning performance) then stopped and really loud “wait aren’t you Mouse’s roommate” and started telling random people there “dude she totally left Mouse to die in that room”. She’s trying to blow it off, saying we’re such good friends. He just gave her one of those 'scrape it off your shoe’ looks and says “Bullshit. She’s MY friend and I wouldn’t date you if your nipples dripped brew.” He’s a bit loud and by the next semester I think he told everyone on campus the story.

Three years later and I can still remember the look on her face when he said that. Especially once the other drunk partiers started in on her. More So when she realized I was there and listening to it all. I’m now engaged to that 'new boyfriend’ (he kicked down a door for me, how could I not) and his friend is going to be his best man. Roommate? Transferred after freshman year ended. B-bye now.

I went to college in another state from where I grew up. I’d been with my girlfriend for three years at the time so we tried to do the long distance thing. Within a week she was acting weird and then she just suddenly quit talking to me without any goodbye. I was understandably confused, so I called her house to try to talk to her. She wasn’t home, but her dad (who is fucking awesome) told me that she’d been hanging out with my best friend (from here on out referred to as db, for douchebag).

I called DBs roommate that I got along with and asked him to tell me the truth. He said she’d been over every night that week and stayed. I lost my shit. Called them both pissed off, told them to fuck themselves, etc.

Initially I wanted to kick his ass, but by the time I came home for break I’d decided it wasn’t worth it. So I just let it go and moved on. A few years go by, I finish college and move back home.

One day I get a call from db. He’s three hours away from home and his car is broken down. He doesn’t want to pay a towing company to get it home and I’m the only one he knows with a trailer big enough to haul it. He says he knows it’s awkward but he’ll give me $200 if I come get him.

I was fucking ecstatic. Told him I was an hour and a half away from home but I could leave after that if he wanted. He says that’s fine. I get off the phone and go back to watching tv on my couch.

Two hours go by: DB: hey, have you left yet? Me: I’m getting ready now, traffic was bad DB: ok. See you in a few hours

Three more hours: DB: you getting close? Me: my gps screwed up, still about a half hour

Another hour DB: dude where are you at?

Ten minutes DB: hello?

Five minutes DB: answer your phone dude

Five minutes: DB: are you even coming? 

Me: nah, but have fun.

He didn’t respond after that

“Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs). This sharp telescopic image captures one such galaxy group, HCG 91, in beautiful detail. The group’s three colorful spiral galaxies at the center of the field of view are locked in a gravitational tug of war, their interactions producing faint but visible tidal tails over 100,000 light-years long. Their close encounters trigger furious star formation. On a cosmic timescale the result will be a merger into a large single galaxy, a process now understood to be a normal part of the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. HCG 91 lies about 320 million light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. But the impressively deep image also catches evidence of fainter tidal tails and galaxy interactions close to 2 billion light-years distant.”

An EPIC View of Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” 

Carl Sagan wrote those words in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision For The Human Future In Space. His now-famous ode to our home planet (listen to the full passage here, in animated form) is perhaps our most poignant and humble reminder of the exquisite beauty and shared fragility of this planet we call home. 

NASA is now bringing us a daily reminder of that message, thanks to the EPIC camera (a very appropriately named camera, in my opinion) on board NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. You can see some of its handiwork in the image sequence above.

DSCOVR’s official space job is to observe weather on and around the sun, to extend its mechanical finger into the solar wind and measure how strongly that stream of charged particles is gusting toward Earth. It does this job from a special spot in space called the L1 Lagrange point. If you were to draw a line between us and the sun, DSCOVR would be sitting along it, like so (not to scale):

That’s a convenient place to put a spacecraft, especially one whose job it is to stare at the sun. See, DSCOVR is nestled inside a pocket where it’s tugged equally by the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, like a stalemate in an orbital game of tug-o-war. Gravity does all the work, and the spacecraft doesn’t need to maneuver much to stay in position. There’s a few of these gravity-neutral Lagrange points out there, as you can tell in the image above, and we’ve got spacecraft residing at all of them. 

As a side effect of its sun-staring mission, DSCOVR’s backside happens to be looking back at Earth full-time. In a way, I think that makes it a different sort of moon. 

NASA doesn’t like to let any opportunity go un-scienced, of course, so they decided to slap a camera on DSCOVR’s rear, the one named EPIC, and use their stable perch to keep a regular eye on us. Good lookin’ out, NASA.

A little change in perspective can do a planet good. In 1990, from a vantage point beyond Pluto, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward home to take one last look, giving us the image that inspired Carl Sagan’s ode to ol’ Dotty Blue:

This was not an easy shot to take. Voyager’s camera wasn’t the fancy digital type like most of us have in our phones. It was essentially an old-fashioned black and white tube TV in reverse, relying on colored filters held in front of the camera to highlight different wavelengths of light. Voyager stored its image data on magnetic tape, and each of the shots took more than five hours to reach Earth. Sagan and NASA’s planetary science team had to practically move the heavens (since they were unable to move the Earth) in order to take that picture. 

Now consider the effect this picture has had. That’s home. That’s us. Even if you weren’t born in 1990, everyone and everything that made you is in and on that hazy blue speck. I hope you never lose sight of how amazing it is to view our planet from this perspective. 

Luckily, you can get a reminder every day. The DSCOVR satellite is now sending roughly a picture an hour back to Earth, 24/7/365. That’s a near real-time view of our home. Go take a look. It’s pretty epic.

To see a daily look at what a day on Earth looks like, check out EPIC’s daily updates here.

The Galactic Core over Sharkfin Cove, CA.

js

Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger)

Lido Key Beach, FL

A room with a view

Taken near the entrance to Paranal site’s Residencia hotel, ESO’s motivation behind building advanced telescopes in such remote and challenging locations could not be clearer. The spectacular sky, free from light pollution, reveals the secrets usually hidden in areas populated by humans. Strict regulations are in place to maintain these conditions, and the lights on the left are needed to mark the sides of the road (known as the stairway to heaven), because cars are not allowed to use their headlights. Palm fronds are not a typical part of the desert skyline, but this particular one was replanted outside after it grew too large to remain inside la Residencia. Unfortunately, the harsh conditions of the Atacama desert prooved too much, and it did not survive long.

The splash of the Milky Way to the left dwarfs the little blotches of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds to the right.

Credit: H. Sommer/ESO