Tiger Star

My favorite stars are out this time of year. Bright, colorful stars, with evocative names. Procyon. Sirius. Aldebaran. Capella. All of them are around the general area of Orion.

This one, Betelgeuse, is a gorgeous red giant in Orion, in the upper left-hand corner. It forms the top bit of Orion's left arm (Betelgeuse actually means "armpit of the Great One"). This picture, from Astronomy Picture of the Day, shows it not to be an even red, but rather spotted and striped in shades of orange and red and white. It looks a lot like a tiger to me.

Red giants are at the very end of their lives. So Betelgeuse is at the top of the list of stars most likely to explode soon. Soon, in astronomical terms, means it could be next week, could be in a million years.

Trust Your Stuff

Mets won. Yankees lost. All is right with the world.

I just broke the 28K mark on the New Novel. Felt as if I was turning the corner on the first quarter of the thing in terms of plot. So, that's good.

There's a great piece of pitching advice which is also pretty good writing advice: pitch, don't aim. If you try too carefully to throw the ball to the exact spot you want - lower inside corner, say - you'll lose all your natural motion and throw the ball in a straight line, incredibly easy to predict and thus to hit. A better approach is to trust your stuff. You know what you're doing, you've been practicing forever. Let it fly. That's how to throw that curve ball high over the strike zone that suddenly surprises everyone by breaking at the last second and dropping into the zone for strike three.

---

Time-suck of the day. Star formation game. Create massive stars that supernova and create shock waves, to corral stellar material together and form smaller, more stable stars. I made 19!

If you do nothing at work today because of this, blame Bad Astronomy.