Sunspot 1476

Right now on the Sun is a huge sunspot. This one is designated 1476. Using an inexpensive Tasco Telescope with a solar projection attachement I've gotten an image of the sunspot. (Don't ever look at the sun through a telescope, or even a camera without the correct filters. And if you don't know they are the correct ones they aren't.)

For more information you can check out the article at Space.com.

Annular Event

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Not “annual”. Annular. Though we get both words from the Latin, annual means yearly, annular means in the form of a ring. 

Solar eclipses occur when the Moon moves between the Earth and Sun blocking out the Sun for a brief period of time. As a side note, solar eclipses can only occur during a “new” moon. Which makes sense since the side facing us can't be getting any sunlight. 

Script Frenzy 2012

In April I took part in the annual Script Frenzy. That is a challenge to write 100 pages of scripted materials during the month of April.  Well, I did it. 103 pages total in two scripts. One a 10-minute play called NIMBY and the second a screenplay for a B-movie. So I "won" my challenge and can display the fact with the logo below.

Now if I can only find someone to buy the script.

National Poetry Month

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I have written poetry for many years. I have at least one that I wrote back in 1978. A fairly sappy thing called “The Unicorn”. At some point I'm going to have to bring myself to share it with people again. 

Who Gets the Dawn?

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In The Lion in Winter, the king and queen contest the succession to the throne of England. (I had to give a mention to the Tehachapi Community Theatre play that will still have a few shows when you read this.) And they bounce between a shortsighted “who's ahead now” and long term historical thinking. And we too, often think in the short term. Yet when we reach a point when our problems loom large, we wonder how we could have reached this point.

In Like a Lion

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Literature has loved the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. And the people making up the English royal family. There are many stories of Robin Hood with the characters of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted in the background as villain and savior respectively. Ivanhoe too, tells of this same time. Henry II's children have had a lasting impact on stories we read and see growing up here in America. We've had movies, plays and books about Richard and the Crusades. Cartoons about Robin Hood. The name “Prince John” brings up a very definite image.

Anachronistic

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When you treat history like a science, or when you're doing a historical science (like geology), things that are out of place in time are important pieces of data. Things that are out of place in time are known as anachronisms. This would be like finding fossil cows mixed in with a herd of dinosaurs. You just never find those things together at the same time. And you'd never find disco music in the soundtrack of a movie made in the 50s.