Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Astral and other etiquettes

NASA runs a website of daily astronomy pictures, and I caught up on recent images today. Yesterday's was pretty phenomenal, but if you go back further there's also a shot of a car that's been smushed by a meteor, with some handy advice on what to do if you're lucky enough to come across things that have fallen out of the sky.

Geez, the things Martha Stewart doesn't tell you about...

In other news, the codebreakers popped in to meet mom. Mr C wanted to take his rubbish downstairs before he got settled, and asked if he'd take ours. Well I said "no no don't be silly", but mom eagerly pushed me into the kitchen to get the bagged rubbish. So when I gave the eighty-something year old man a single small bag, mom chirped up with "the kitchen bin needs emptying too" and pushed me back in to prepare a second bag for him.

It could only have been worse if he'd suffered a heart attack on the way.

Needless to say, I quickly opened a bottle of vinho verde for us all and ensured everyone was well rested before they made any further movements!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting meteor advice. I wonder occasionally what I would do if I saw one come down - "Stand back everybody, it's alright, I'm an astrophysicist!"

One strange thing: "do not pick it up-parts of it are likely to be either very hot or very cold."

Very cold..? How can it be very cold? It just plunged the atmosphere in a firey ball. In my experience that makes things very toasty indeed.

Orlaith said...

Yeah I wondered about that too!

I remembered a few of those 'end of the world' films where they talk about a deadly ball of rock and ice plummeting towards the earth, so maybe some ice can survive the journey.

Although the fact that I'd refer to a Hollywood treatment to solve something read on NASA's site is worrying...