The full Moon: beauty in lava flows and impact craters.
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Author Archives: acubedsf
The Moon with Jupiter
Driving home this evening, I was struck by the beautiful sight of the nearly full Moon with Jupiter. With the dynamic range of the human eye, Jupiter looked quite bright while the Moon had some detail. With the more limited dynamic range of the camera, I could not capture the range. The picture of the pair below was taken with two two-stop graduated neutral density filters, and yet Jupiter (to the left) is hard to see and the Moon lacks detail. I was pleased with how my unfiltered pictures of the Moon solo turned out. Enjoy!
Clever Bubble
I am very pleased that Perihelion Science Fiction has published my story “Clever Bubble.” You can find it here:
One of the fun bits of writing this story was designing the game that the aliens play with Will. I wanted to have something like soccer, but with four teams and played in three dimensions. (Actually, I had originally considered having eight teams, but it got too complicated.) Each team has their own goal (the arrows’ mouths) at one corner of a vertical square, and each team has their own ball (Will is the ball for his team). After each time a team scores by getting its ball into another team’s goal, the goals can be re-arranged to make it more difficult for a team to score where they need to. In order to win, a team has to have scored on all the other teams more recently than they have scored on it. So it’s a game of strategy as well as motion. Will, as an intelligent soccer ball, only figures out how to score and not how to keep score. But now you know how to do both!
I hope you enjoyed the story.
December Stats
Words/hour was way up this month; I think that was due to writing a novel instead of short stories. I was doing a good job keeping up my writing streak until Christmas hit. I’m ready to start a new streak with the new year! How about you?
WORDS WRITTEN: 4823
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 12
WORDS/HOUR: 401.9
Welcome 2014!
As is our custom, we rang in the New Year by watching a time travel movie.
This year’s selection: the Dr. Who 50th anniversary episode, the Day of the Doctor.
How did you celebrate the New Year?
Christmas 2013
The Tomtes are celebrating getting a new tree this year.
I hope you have many things to celebrate.
The Tomtes are hoping I find some glogg for them next year.
I hope you have many things to look forward to.
Merry Christmas!
Lunar Fog Halo
As the fog rolled in this morning, it made a neat halo around the Moon. The first picture shows Jupiter above the Moon; the second zooms in to try to capture the dynamic range I experienced in person – I could see both the lunar features and the fog halo.
No ISON
If Comet ISON had survived its solar flyby, today was the first day we were supposed to be able to see it. Although it appears that what survived is either rubble or small, we braved the early morning cold to try to catch a glimpse of what is left. No joy. It was too dim to be seen from Friendswood, Texas.
November Stats
Although I did not participate in NaNoWriMo, I did start a new novel and write two and a half chapters this month. I’m pretty pleased with my stats, where I wrote every day, averaged more than an hour a day, and wrote at a pace that suggests I could write a novel a year.
WORDS WRITTEN: 8489
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 33.1
WORDS/HOUR: 256.5
Saturn hovers over Mercury
As Murphy would have it, we’ve had heavy clouds and rain this week, so we weren’t able to look for Comet ISON. The clouds finally blew away this morning, so we braved the cold morning to see if we could spot the comet through the colors of the sunrise. We didn’t spot the comet, but we did see Saturn hovering above Mercury. It was quite striking, don’t you think?
Space&Aliens 