I have a piece of the Moon! (by sarah)

Erm I think that I forgot to mention that even though I have not yet paid my top up fee and therefore do not have libary access etc... I have been given a small sliver of moon rock to blast with lasers 🙂

I have been staring at the moon lots since they gave it to me two weeks ago and am also petrofied I'll screw something up!

I got to take the carbon coat off of it and so have a quick peek under a reflected light microscope. It does seem to be an interesting sample - its from a lunar meteorite that fell to earth which is interesting in itself.

After my disappointment over the mini projects I was so startled to get this sample I have been sort of shell shock reading - I know very little about lunar geology so I am having to do some heavy reading. Fortunatly I seem to be able to apply stuff I learnt whilst doing the Carbonado essay and the moon formation essay last term.

I really feel I need to get to grips with this as it is such a blindingly fantastic sample (they have the meteorite as well) that I have jumped ship and will be doing this meteorite as my main project as well - this masters has just dragged on too long now and I don't want anything logistically complicated.

However I do still want to do the astrobiology - impact lithology stuff but when I was looking at it before I found huge issues in talking to microbiologist and isotope chemists who didn't understand one and other and having to translate stuff to each of them that I barely understood myself.

I was recommended to get my hands on some undergraduate texts for the micro-organism thing and the chem I'm picking up from the papers I'm reading and hopefully from the machines I'm going to be using. My origonal project was drawn up with the idea of it being a PhD anyway so this I think is the best course of action.

Happy New Year 2009 (by sarah)

This year sees lots of exciting things - its the International Year of Astronomy and so I have set up a specific Astronomy blog - the spellings all need sorting and alot of the stuff on there is from things I've written up on here.

I know its another blog but other wise I have too much to go on here and its nice to have a specific theme and things. Plus I now have a specific career goal which is to be a popular science writer - I want to bring science to the front, so kids find it interesting, explain it to the lay person etc...

I want to rekindle the flame that the victorians lit - a flame that is in the danger of blowing out leaving our culture with just recipies for current technology but no inovation or advancement.

I wanted to do alot of Astronomy stuff last year but with everything that happened it just got swept aside 🙁

Other goals for this year are to carry on with the Prince's Trust and MRes both of which are giving me valuable skills. Get Web-Empire fully up and running but more on that later 🙂 Enter the Young Science Writer of the Year compatition and just generally get our lives back on track.

Jeany will also be starting school in September! She'll be the youngest in her year - I feel this will be a good thing.

I hope you all have good New Years and lets hope this one will be better than the last!

A Missed Eclipse (by sarah)

Last night was supposed to be a full lunar eclipse and as this is my Year of Astronomy I thought I'd watch it even though it was at totality at about 3 am. Well we stayed up and annoyingly half an hour before the shadow was due to first touch the moon there was a moon shining bright if a bit hazily in the sky so we where hoping. I even took some practice shots of the moon with a not very good camera.

Through the veiw finder

Through the telescope

Just with the camera and its the only one that I can say is actually worth looking at :/ Though it is still tiny.

It was a shame that we didnt get too see it but we did notice the light levels dipping perceptively and I got quiet alot of the hook rug I'm currently making done. Dad phoned at about 3:30 to say that he hadn't been able to see it in Essex either - did anyone in the UK actually get to see the eclipse?

Oh well never mind - I was going to makes scetches and stuff too but alas and alack!

UFO (by sarah)

On the 9th of Febuary 2008 at approximatly 6:30 pm I spotted a strange fast and smooth moving star heading from approximatly west to east does anybody know what this was?

I was wondering if it was some satallite or the International Space Station etc... It looked very much like when we saw the space shuttle catching up with it last year.