So, is "privately employed solar scientist" a euphemism for "crackpot scientist"?

It helps that Wilmington has their own Battleship sitting in the Cape Fear River.
Run a pirate flag up that sucker and dare AT&T and Verizon to unplug that network =-)

Pfft! Slashdot isn't Social...

Or better yet, hangman on your iPhone with the cute guy/gal sitting next to you in the jury box.
Better than Facebook anyway!

No - great!!!

I live out in the country in central NC, USA and do quite a bit of star gazing out in my pasture.
Occasionally I will invite coworkers that show an interest in astronomy out to my place to use my telescopes.
I always get a chuckle when they step out into the treeless pasture and see the Milky Way stretching out from horizon to horizon for the first time.
Lots of "Oh Wow" and "I Never Knew".
Most folks that live in the city don't know what they are missing and/or have just forgotten how really magnificent the night sky really is.
Quite the shame....

The BASF facility in RTP has never been terribly large and/or important when compared to their neighbors.
These jobs will be a nice addition to the area and help elevate Biotech even further.
Thanks Limburgerhof!!!

Dah dah dedah dah dedah dah dedadaaaahhhhh!

What has always made Dr Who so endearing to many of its long time fans (myself included) is its cheap effects and campiness.
I just can't see Hollywood leaving that alone - they'll make the effects "better" and the storylines more "compelling"....

Sort of like what they tried to do with that abortion of a movie called "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy." It paled when compared to the comfortable cheeziness of the BBC TV production.

No, Hollywood can't leave a good thing alone.

BTW - Long Live Tom Baker and Rest in Peace Elisabeth Sladen

The first stage only took it to a low Earth parking orbit, where it is now.
The next stage was supposed to lift it to a higher Earth orbit, and the third stage would send it on its way to Mars.
The problem happened after the first stage burnout and prior to the second stage ignition.
Everything in low Earth orbit (like the ISS) encounters the uppermost parts of our atmosphere which induces drag and degrades the orbit.
We get around that on the ISS by having resupply ships give it a periodic boost up to a higher orbit.

This mission was supposed to launch during the previous Earth-Mars window, 26 months ago, and they missed it due to technical issues. So they even had an extra 2 years to make sure this would work and they still couldn't pull it off. Gotta be a lot of Vodka being consumed in Baikonur right now...

BTW - when I read the headline, I thought someone had arrested the craft....
CmdrTaco - we still need you!!!

Many astronomical/physics models _ASSUME_ that the universe has the same fundamental laws across the entire universe. If this holds true, it will throw a lot of models into question, including dark energy and dark matter. Personally, I find it very possible that there will be variations across the universe, based on dependencies we don't know/see/understand. Just because I see snow everywhere I look in Antarctica doesn't mean I should expect to see snow everywhere I look in Africa.

Sure it is fast, but 30 minutes after the program is done, you're hungry again...

Just sayin'
If I counted all of the earbuds sitting in my desk drawer, 30, easily!
If I counted all of the earbuds sitting in my desk drawer that worked, 2, maybe!

Yesterday was the opening of the Mid-Atlantic Star Party near Robbins, NC.
While we were getting gear set up yesterday afternoon someone had a C-11 with a white light filter and a Solarmax 60 riding piggy back.
Both showed a TON of activity on the sun - filaments, sun spots, and some huge prominences. Little did we know we would get a solar show after dark!
About 9:30 PM EDT the transparency was good but seeing was still soft. When we wondered who threw on a big light to the north of the field - all of a sudden everything got bright up there.
Since aurora's are so uncommon this far south, it took us a minute to figure out what was going on.
It gave us a really nice show and rose up fairly high between Cassiopeia and Polaris with another large band pushing up west of Polaris.
We had sheeting red with some green pillars shooting up. There were about 75 of us just standing around the observing field, slack-jawed with the occasional ohhh and ahh =-)
A couple folks got on their cell phones and we had observers all around central NC out and reporting visual confirmation from their locations.
We had a very solid show for about 20 minutes with residual lower level observations coming and going for probably another 20 minutes.
Quite a remarkable start for a star party! =-)