i am an unrequited astronomer, pretend patient, gentle adventurer, pedal enthusiast, recovering calligrapher, occasional thespian and unfinished poet living in portland, oregon. contacting me via email is usually a good idea.
10:51 PM: ecliptic
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alas, the lunar eclipse was a bust. i was at a workshop and i sat in a parking lot w/ toby for as long as i could during the dinner hour. by the time the moon emerged from a high wall of clouds, it immediately slipped behind a thinner veil of ragged clouds. at no point did i feel i even saw penumbra, much less umbra or totality. (compare this to the eclipse at discovery lake on my last night at csusm or the eclipse we saw on powell butte).
but i did run across this little gem (pun intended) at wired: "when asteroids smash into each other, sometimes they do it with anough force to collpase the boundary between the core & mantle. the result is a pallasite: iron & nickle folded around the semiprecious gemstone peridot, frozen in mid-alchemy."
besides the pure poetry of that sentence, i'm especially charmed by this because the peridot is my birthstone, and though i have always disliked it, this makes me feel much more kindly towards it.