Good evening, Kibitzers! Today, we’re up to 10 hours, 13 minutes, 25 seconds of daylight, a gain of 2:15 since yesterday. The moon is a waxing gibbous moon, at 74% fullness, heading for a full moon early Sunday morning (YMMV). The next freezing rain/sleet event in my immediate area will be Thursday, and I certainly hope your mileage varies on that.
February 4 is the birthday of Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto (and the Kuiper Belt, although no one knew that at the time). Tombaugh’s family’s farm in Missouri Kansas was struck by a hailstorm that ruined the crops, just as he was hoping to go to college. He responded by instead building an ambitious series of homemade telescopes, through which he definitely did not discover Pluto. Rather, he sent drawings he’d made of his observations of Mars and Jupiter to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and they responded by offering him a job, as he’d hoped.
It was in performing his job that, at age 24, he made his discovery. A planet beyond Neptune had long been suspected, and he was assigned to look for it. This he did by taking pairs of photographs, several nights apart, of areas of interest in the night sky. He used a “blink comparator” to flip quickly between members of the pairs, which makes anything that’s moving relative to the star field pop visually.
Mr. Tombaugh went on to discover numerous asteroids, to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree in astronomy, and to teach. He died in 1997 at the age of 90. NASA placed a portion of his ashes aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 on a mission to fly by Pluto and, later, other Kuiper Belt objects, which I think is very sweet. And so, he had the best seat in the house, because New Horizons took some great pictures!
As always, NASA has web pages that do a good job covering the current state of the mission’s discoveries. From the Pluto overview page:
Pluto—which is smaller than Earth’s Moon—has a heart-shaped glacier that’s the size of Texas and Oklahoma. This fascinating world has blue skies, spinning moons, mountains as high as the Rockies, and it snows—but the snow is red.
“The complexity of the Pluto system — from its geology to its satellite system to its atmosphere— has been beyond our wildest imagination,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Everywhere we turn are new mysteries."
There’s an “in depth” page with a very nice high-resolution 3D model of the dwarf planet (it rotates; you can zoom in and out). And there’s a gallery of images, the nicest ones of such high resolution that I don’t really want to be downloading them onto a Chromebook. There are lower-res versions of some, though:
And there ‘s some good video from NASA too. Each of these is short (under 2 minutes), a couple are silent, and they are all remarkable.
So, how do you all stand on the planet/dwarf planet issue?
⛈️ 🌊 HURRICANE MARIA 🌊 ⛈️
💥 AND 2020 EARTHQUAKES 💥
867 days since Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico
on September 20, 2017.
Puerto Rico and USVI are still struggling to recover.
And now,a swarm of earthquakes is adding to their misery.
PLEASE FOLLOW Denise Oliver Velez and the SOS Puerto Rico group for the latest news about developments in Puerto Rico and the USVI. Denise continues to collect resonant tweets on the subject, and post them in comments daily in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup (APR) and twice weekly in the Black Kos diaries, to make them easy to retweet. If you tweet or FB, please share something about Puerto Rico and USVI regularly.
Find links to help HERE (now including earthquake relief).
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🐨 🔥 AUSTRALIAN FIRES 2019-20 🔥 🐨
Enormous bushfires have burned over 12 million acres in Australia, so far in that continent’s summer (which is far from over). The fires have forced widespread evacuations, and have been large enough to generate their own weather, including fire tornadoes and dry lightning that set more fires. Nearly half a billion (with a B) wild animals are estimated to have died so far.
Find links to help HERE.
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🚒 🔥 CALIFORNIA FIRES 2019 🔥 🚒
This piece from Wonkette is a pretty concise explainer about how climate change, overdevelopment, and greed are fueling the California fires. (Spoiler: failure to rake the forest doesn’t figure into it.) Even your dumbest FB friend can probably get something out of it.
Find links to help HERE.
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⛈️ 🌊 HURRICANE DORIAN 🌊 ⛈️
Denise Oliver Velez posts what news there is on the Bahamas in the APR thread. This Black Kos thread has coverage of the scale of the damage.
Find links to help HERE.
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It’s time to start thinking like this.
🌟 GOTV 🌟
🌟 POSTCARDING: If you are looking for a way to help and can’t do things like canvassing or phoning, consider hand-writing postcards asking people to vote. It’s easy because you’re given specific talking points from the campaign you’re working with, so you don’t have to think up what to say, and no one will be coming back at you with questions. And if you like to color, you can get creative decorating the cards. Note that you are responsible for buying postcards (and stamps if you don’t use pre-stamped ones.) Postcard stamps are 35 cents each; pre-stamped postcards from USPS are 39 cents each; two different pretty designs. If you can spend a little more, the two postcarding sites below sell their designs; or, searching the phrase “postcards to voters” on Amazon will show you many designs.
To get started:
🌟 PERSONALIZED LETTERS: Similarly, you can do more good than you might expect by writing personalized letters (from a template) to Democrats who are unlikely voters, adding a brief personal statement about why you VOTE EVERY TIME. Studies have shown this can boost turnout by enough to make a difference. As with postcards, you get names/addresses for these voters in targeted districts from the website, fill in the letters, address/stamp/fill the envelopes, but then, you hold them and mail them on Oct. 27, a week before election day! Note that, as with the postcards, you are responsible for buying envelopes, paper (no special paper required), and stamps. First class letter stamps are 55 cents each. (A new Gwen Ifill stamp just came out!)
For more info:
🌟 CONFIRM YOU ARE REGISTERED, REPEAT REGULARLY, AND GET YOUR FAMILY AND OTHERS TO DO THE SAME!!! FIGHTING VOTER SUPPRESSION STARTS AT HOME!
- Many folks here have been surprised to find that their or a family member’s registration has mysteriously disappeared, even though it had been active. Don’t wait until too late to catch and correct this bullshit.
- HEADCOUNT.ORG will direct you to your state’s Department of State/Division of Elections (or similar) webpage, which is the horse’s mouth, as it were.
- Or, google something like “am I registered to vote” plus your state, and go to your state government’s page directly.
🌟 If you can do more, do it! These are just things you can do at home at 3 am. Some of us have the wherewithal to do more, and we should! No one is coming to save us. Act accordingly.
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