An EPIC View Of Earth

Afternoon Thunderstorms roll across the prairie. 

Paynes Prairie Preserve 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.

Years ago, I worked at a large chain grocery store in the Southeast US, you can probably guess which one. I had a manager that just did not like me. For example my car broke down on my way to work on my birthday, and when I finally made it there she chewed me out in front of the store for coworkers and customers alike to spectate. 

She often pushed me to quit school and work full time because she was so certain I would fail, and she needed the shifts covered. Well Saturday before Easter(a busy day for them) I was back in my old city, now gainfully employed and quite happy. I stopped in that store to pick up a few things. It was so busy that she was relegated to bagging groceries. Perfect. I made my way to her line with a huge grin on my face. She recognized me. Perfect.

This particular chain makes baggers ask guests if they would like help taking their groceries to the car. She must have forgotten, so I specifically asked her for help. She would have been reprimanded for refusing, and thus obliged. She’s an old woman, the uniforms are conservative, the parking lot is huge, we are in South Florida and the employees can’t accept tips. I relished in walking her to my new car, a car that would have been far out of my reach on a grocery clerk’s salary. As she finished loading my groceries, she said “Come back and see us again!” and I said “Yeah, I guess you’ll still be here.”

Left a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

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.

White Ibis (Eudocimus albus) at Sunset

Lido Key Beach, FL

A nebulous sky

The incredibly dark and transparent sky of Paranal, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, is the perfect place to see the bright emission of various nebulae. The white dome of the Residencia occupies the bottom of the image. La Residencia hosts those working at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The hotel represents an oasis in the dry and harsh conditions of the Chilean Atacama desert.

Credit: ESO/M. Claro

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.

Mercury’s transit at Garching

The ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek captured this image on 9 May 2016, the Mercury’s transit day. The little black dot visible in the lower part of the orange Sun disc is indeed the planet while orbiting between the Earth and the Sun. This stunning picture was taken in the surroundings of ESO’s Headquarters, located at Garching, near Munich, in Germany.

Credit: ESO/P. Horálek

Imgur GIF

Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet.

Amazing. Hubble’s Deep Field image in relation to the rest of the night sky.

“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.”