What sits on your shoulder and squawks, "PIECES OF SEVEN! PIECES OF SEVEN!"
A parroty error.


And a true story : One year I took my now ex-girlfriend out into the countryside to watch the Leonid meteor shower through the sunroof of my car. The meteors weren't up to much so instead I pointed Jupiter out to her, straight ahead and about halfway up the sky. She said, "I'm too short, I can't see it. Can you move the car forward a bit?"


clop

Apparently.
Note: I was not insulting your area as it exists today in any way, shape or form. But in the 50s, it could indeed be described as "the middle of nowhere".

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

No offence taken. I was saying that the middle of nowhere is the best place to to have things that go "boom," such as Redstone Arsenal (Huntsville in the 50's) or New Mexico. However, if it wasn't for NASA, Alabama would still be the middle of nowhere.

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Aim high (but don't blow yourself up)!- Homer Hickam

In Soviet Russia, UFO report you!- Phil Plait

Carl Sagan may have seen a pale blue dot, but I see a sapphire.- Doug Phillips, Discovering Alabama.

Clear skies Maksutov.

On another site, somebody posted a picture of a person watching a SpaceShipOne flight, wearing a shirt that said "Go, Burt, Go!"

Underneath the photo, the person wrote "And Ernie, too."

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

An alien lands in Washington D.C. and goes up to a lady on the street. "Excuse me, madam, but can you tell me how to get to the White House?"

"You have to run for it, just like everybody else."

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Saw a cartoon depicting several constellations. Orion is rising, looking at Taurus, and his thought balloon says "Sigh! Same old bull every night!"

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Later . . .

hey.....
i like them, like them both, Kai and DonM....thanks for sharing.
Cute

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clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.

"I can understand, sort of, how they can determine the distance to the star, its color, its temperature . . . but how do they learn their names?"

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Later . . .

That was hilarious!

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"Sir I have a plan. Mein Führer, I can walk!"

I was showing Mars through a telescope to an astronomy 101 student. She said she wanted to see the big canyon (Mariner Valley).....

The printed version of Cosmos has a lot of great anecdotes there wasn't room for in the TV series. One of them goes something like this.

*Observatory telephone rings*

Caller: "I need to talk to an astronomer right away!"

Sagan: "Go ahead."

Caller: "I just saw this weird thing in the sky and it was all hazy and you could only see it out of the corner of your eye."

Sagan: "That was Comet (something). It's really bright tonight."

Caller: "Oh. What's a comet?"

Sagan: "It's like a giant snowball in space."

Caller: "A space snowball? You're making that up! Let me talk to a real astronomer!"

Ah, the joys of footnotes.

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

One of the apocryphal "silly tourist" stories that circulates up here is about a couple who asked their tour guide when we turned the Northern Lights on and how much we charged to see them.

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Brett
Peters Creek, Alaska
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Next time a student asks me about seeing aurorae, I should tell them to do this as part of the answer.

Some years ago (obviously), the Funky Winkerbean comic strip depicted Carl Sagan giving a talk at the local high school. As I remember it . . .

When he takes questions, the first kid asks, "Dr. Sagan: On Cosmos, when you were zipping all around the Universe and back to the dawn of time . . . was that real, or was that special effects?"

Penultimate panel shows the kid waiting for the answer, paying careful attention.

Sagan looks our way and says "No doubt about it -- I'm going to have to start asking for higher lecture fees."

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Later . . .

That reminds me of my favorite (non-astronomy related) scene from Jurassic Park 3:

Dr. Grant: Any questions?

(Everybody in the audience raises their hand.)

Dr. Grant: Any questions not about Jurassic Park?

(Almost everybody puts their hand down.)

If I ever do a lecture and there are a lot of people with questions, I'm going to say "Any questions not about Jurassic Park?" just for the heck of it.

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

LOL! Some really funny jokes right here! Keep them coming, guys!

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"Science is physics and astronomy." -Me
"There is absolutely no law in physics that prevents time travel." -Dr. Michio Kaku

Top 5 Rejected NASA Outreach Ideas:

5) Paint pictures of Pokemon all over the shuttles.
4) Have the astronauts wear body glitter and fake fangs for interviews so people mistake them for vampires.
3) Merge with NASCAR.
2) Write badly spelled fan fiction "shipping" the various joint missions.
1) Treat the Administrator like a faceless spymaster and have him make speeches in shadowy profile.

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

How many astronomers does it take to change a light bulb? 3.

One to change the bulb then moan about the light pollution it causes.
One to berate the younger generation for not being able to star hop to the socket.
One to feel nostalgic for the good ole days of the Cold War when the government would pay for the bulb.

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Yonder is Dubhe seen on Earth tonight as it was in the days of Grover Cleveland's presidency whereas this way is Deneb seen as it was in the lifetime of Muhammed . If one somehow travelled to Deneb at very close to c then whenever you looked back you'd measure Earth as closer to you than the distance you would simultaneously measure between Earth and Dubhe.

My room mate in college showed me a picture of Steven Hawking with a caption that read "Your mother is so fat her escape velocity exceeds 3*10^8 m/s," to which I responded "Yeah, well your mother is so fat her bra size is Roche Lobe."

Three rising young stars walked into a bar, and one says to the other two, "Woah! Is that a bulge I see feeding that black hole?"

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Probably the funniest astro-story I ever heard was related to us by the director of our observatory, Artie Hatzes. And it concerned Mick Jagger (THE Mick Jagger) paying a surprise visit to McDonald Observatory, Texas. It involved a lot of " "Mick Jagger is coming up." "Haha, yeah, right, I can pull my own leg... ZOMG THAT'S MICK JAGGER!!!"

Though for perfect comic effect, one should have made a video tape of this and put it on Youtube, as it involved a lot of ridiculous facial expressions and guffaws.

Another cool McDonald Observatory story is the guy who got laid off or something and put a bunch of bullet holes into the 2.7m telescope's main mirror - it didn't shatter, just reduced reflectivity a bit. Many years later, that was the one thing George W. Bush was really interested in seeing.

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David Alexander Kann
PhD student
Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg

Ignite our minds and let's burn brighter
These are the wonders at your feet
- Dark Tranquillity, The Wonders At Your Feet

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

... The young physicist replied, " I am a cosmetologist of sorts, because I study the make-up of the universe."

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Ha, ha!

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

If you want comics, try this.

Attached Images

cafe.jpg (84.7 KB, 15 views)

Very cute.

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

M109, the Milky Way and NGC 253 walk into a pub. Barman says "we're not serving you, you're barred!"

[the aforementioned galaxies are thought to have central bar-shapes. Oh, never mind...]

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Yonder is Dubhe seen on Earth tonight as it was in the days of Grover Cleveland's presidency whereas this way is Deneb seen as it was in the lifetime of Muhammed . If one somehow travelled to Deneb at very close to c then whenever you looked back you'd measure Earth as closer to you than the distance you would simultaneously measure between Earth and Dubhe.

I get it.

A bad guy finds a genie's lamp and gets one wish. He shouts "I wish every human on Earth would do my bidding for the rest of my life!"

He was king of the world for two days until a space shuttle with a very angry crew landed on top of him.

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

A lab chief, a postdoc, and a grad student were walking along a beach and they picked up an old lamp that was lying there. A genie popped out and said, "Normally, I give three wishes, but since you all freed me together, you're going to have to settle for one each."

The grad student said, "I want to be in a ski chalet in Switzerland, skiing and drinking with a bevy of ski bunnies." *poof* The genie transported him immediately to the site.

The postdoc thought for a moment and said, "I want to be on a beach in Rio, with a stable of cabana boys to ply me with drinks and tend to my every need. *poof* She was immediately whisked to said location.

The genie turned to the lab chief and asked for his wish. He said, "I want those two back in the lab after lunchtime!"

Nick

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--
Nick Theodorakis