Rebuilding journal search again
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Explanation: Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of planet Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon's farside can become familiar, though. In fact this sharp picture, a mosaic from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera, is centered on the lunar farside. Part of a global mosaic of over 15,000 images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011, the highest resolution version shows features at a scale of 100 meters per pixel. Surprisingly, the rough and battered surface of the farside looks very different from the nearside covered with smooth dark lunar maria. A likely explanation is that the farside crust is thicker, making it harder for molten material from the interior to flow to the surface and form dark, smooth maria.
Explanation: Big beautiful barred spiral galaxy Messier 109 is the 109th entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog of bright Nebulae and Star Clusters. You can find it just below the Big Dipper's bowl in the northern constellation Ursa Major. In fact, bright dipper star Phecda, Gamma Ursa Majoris, produces the glare at the upper right corner of this telescopic frame. M109's prominent central bar gives the galaxy the appearance of the Greek letter "theta", θ, a common mathematical symbol representing an angle. M109 spans a very small angle in planet Earth's sky though, about 7 arcminutes or 0.12 degrees. But that small angle corresponds to an enormous 120,000 light-year diameter at the galaxy's estimated 60 million light-year distance. The brightest member of the now recognized Ursa Major galaxy cluster, M109 (aka NGC 3992) is joined by spiky foreground stars. Three small, fuzzy bluish galaxies also on the scene, identified (top to bottom) as UGC 6969, UGC 6940 and UGC 6923, are possibly satellite galaxies of the larger barred spiral galaxy Messier 109.
Photographer: Ray Boren
Summary Author: Ray Boren
Under a big blue sky, the morning sun illuminates a central portion of Wyoming’s majestic Teton Range, which is mirrored via specular reflection in a calm and equally blue bay of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park. In this photograph, taken on May 23, 2025, the park’s namesake Grand Teton peak, topping out at 13,775 feet (4,199 meters) above sea level, is on the far-left side of the image, to the south. Blocky Mount Moran (12,610 feet; 3,840 m) rises prominently just left of center.
The snow still covering the Tetons on this spring day makes it easy to envision the Pleistocene ice-age glaciers that helped carve the mountains’ jagged summits, cirques, and U-shaped drainages. The Park Service explains that the Teton Fault began tilting the range’s primarily granite mountain block upward about 10 million years ago while also dropping the valley of Jackson Hole. Although masked by snow in the photograph, almost a dozen glaciers remain in the park today, some moving and some mere remnants. They, and erosion from water, wind and gravity, continue to shape the dramatic terrain.
Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming Coordinates: 43.7904, -110.6818
Related Links:
Sunset and Specular Reflection at Great Salt Lake
Davey Jackson’s Valley in Winter
The Tetons, from the Idaho Side
Very pleased at how fast my ankle's been healing; it barely hurts at all except when I flex my toes, and I assume that will get better next week. Ice and rest doing their job as advertised! The knee is — I don't want to say getting worse, that's not true, but as the scab gets thicker and more attached to the skin, it feels more uncomfortable to move my knee through flexion/extension, and that is not fun. Botheration.
I have a dark feeling I should get PT after this; I can feel my gait getting fucked up by having both legs injured in different ways. A new adulting experience, and I already do not like it because it will involve insurance. Maybe I'll call the EAP and make them give me a to-do list or something.
While lying in bed and icing my ankle, I have re-read Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and Fledgling; I know we've talked about it before, but wow it gets more and more noticeable how she just doesn't think of queerness as related to desire. The stuff she's interested in about gender and sexuality forces her to acknowledge the existence of same-sex sexual interactions, but nothing about them is ever anyone's first choice or pleasurable except in the ways her worldbuilding allows her to impose on the characters.
I am idly fantasizing about a shopping app that lets me:
Note: steps 2-5 do not involve me making decisions or receiving alerts.
Things to Get Me [referral link] is perfect at #1. Google Shopping kind of does #2 but only kind of. The rest of it, I'm fairly sure it doesn't exist and I understand why, I can easily see where this could go very wrong, but I want it for myself and I'm mad that either I gotta build it (no) or outsource to a human. Further botheration.
Photographer: Rui Santos
Summary Author: Rui Santos
The night sky and planetary alignment featured above was captured from Pinhal de Leiria, Portugal on February 28, 2025. I decided to view the alignment from here because I knew I'd have a clear view of the horizon. Since the planets were stretched out across the sky, I had to do a panorama and try to avoid light pollution (lower left and lower right) from surrounding cities and towns. Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Uranus are included above, but because I wasn't able to arrive as the Sun was setting, Saturn, Neptune and Mercury aren't in the frame.
At bottom center is the Crastinha Lookout Point, one of several watchtowers in the Forest of Leiria. The building to its right is the reconstruction of what used to be the guard's house, dating from 1883. This tower is still in use today.
I tripped coming back from the garden after watering and skinned the hell out my left knee and twisted my right ankle, plus minor scrapes on my palms. Ow.
Hobbled home, rinsed everything off (because of course I had some dirt on me from wrestling the garden hose and whatnot), smeared on antibacterial ointment, iced both joints (not super successfully), taped bandaids to my knee, and ordered delivery of a bento box. Now I need to put on enough clothes to get downstairs to receive said delivery, and get back up the stairs to eat. Ow ow OW.
This was a perfectly pleasant heatwave until then! I got the window unit into my bedroom window yesterday, have been eating popsicles and drinking various flavored waters, and made summer rolls last night. I was going to make peanut noodles. But no. Did I mention OW?
Got a Cake Batter cone (working my way through the non-coffee-flavors at my local ice cream shop) and walked over to the garden; I am very pleased to report that the rhubarb has come up, and so has the parsley and the cosmos and the sweet alyssum! Could there be 100% more of all of these plants, considering how many seeds I put in? Yes. But: I created plants! The basil is going to be so happy over the next week of heatwave. The peas are doing great and I am going nuts over the lack of watermelon, hopefully they will also rejoice in the heat.
And then I stuck a couple of coreopsis in the front garden, which I impulse-bought this morning at the farmer's market, not even a little sorry. Other impulse purchases today included a bag of basil (PESTO) and a container of corn salsa, which I will add to fish-stick tacos.