Death Star

We'll there's still hope for us after all, there was an article released last week on Universe Today ,"Planet Survives Its Sun Becoming a Red Giant". Our Sun is about 4.5 billion years old now, in about another at 5 billion years Our Sun will double in brightness and expand in diameter almost to Earth's orbit. Needless to say this will end all life as we know it.

Scientists have discovered another Sun like ours in it's dying stages, but instead of swallowing up one of its planets which was orbiting the same distance from it as we are from the Sun it caused the planet to spiral out to the equivalent distance of Mars. It explained it as saying the Suns centre of gravity changed, probably because of the fact dying stars loose mass, less mass less pull on its planets. Scientists are in new territory here so they're not quite sure what will happen to Earth specifically, but it shows there may be hope. Some scientists say that in just a billion years the Suns brightness will increase by 10% which will in turn super heat our planet because of the green house effect and boil off our oceans and seas and all life will end at that stage, either way we have a billion years to find a new home, that's why we have to go to the Moon and then Mars, we have to get out, colonize other worlds, maybe even billions and billions of miles away, maybe like in the Orion Nebula below.

I had some fellow amateur astronomer friends over on the weekend and they helped me tune up my scope to get longer exposure times so as to get more detailed images of various deep sky targets. So I get everything set up again this time for Sunday morning at 4 am, that's when my Orion Nebula is up and its still dark. So I'm all excited gonna get me some happy images of the famed Orion Nebula. Turned on the scope, turn on the computer, open my observatory dome, did I mention this was at 4 in the morning, start up my camera program, cross my fingers,.... yes the scope was doing well, I would be able to get some good long exposures times, pressed the start button on the computer imaging program, it takes one image and it looks great, but before it could take another my computer crapped on me. The above picture is one image, I usually like to stack about 40 images to bring out the detail and color, I am happy with the results so far, I can kind of see where I'm going to be with the pic when I get my new laptop.

I go out Sunday morning to look for a new laptop, find one I like bring it home. All shiny and new, 17" screen and has that new computer smell, you know the electronic smell all electronic items have when you pull them out of the box, I absolutely love it. The first thing you notice is the Vista operating system. This is the worst of the worst operating systems in the known universe, no, in all the dimensions of all the multiverses on every brane and then some!!!! It blocks this, won't allow that, half my expensive software programs won't work properly, I have to disable all the protection crap to download from some of the sites I go to, at the very least it slows things down immensely. Now I will say to be fair, I haven't read the big manual I got with the computer, you know the one, it tells you how to put the battery in, and then how to plug it in and turn it on, and then there is the 10 pages that tell you how to care for your brand new computer, oh wait I guess I have read it. If anyone has blogged with this and you like it, tell me what I'm doing wrong, as it won't let me download pictures, I had to go to my XP desk computer to do that, and forget links, I went to open a page to get a link to put on my post and the program opened the site over top my post.

I am taking a Power Engineering course till the end of December so my posting will be cut back to Tuesdays and Saturdays. I will post more depending on my time and whether or not something important comes up that I feel you should know, like maybe an Earthbound Mass Extinction Asteroid, want to give you time to get to your bunkers and as long as you have a few years of canned products you should be good to go.



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