Added 2 new A* pages:Boy, all this silence is getting a little creepy. Hm... Looks like one of them will finally say something about Monday-ish.
A friend sent me a link to this Vimeo today, the result of a dude attaching a movie camera to a weather balloon so it would sit at just the right angle, and letting it go. Pretty neat!
But--since, with yesterday's rant about exoplanets, I seem to be on a YOU AREN'T USING ASTRONOMY WORDS RIGHT trip, which is funny because I'm in no way qualified to go on one, but it's fun...--the title is maybe a bit of deceptive advertising: "Homemade Spacecraft"--the "spacecraft" part, specifically, and it's clarified in the movie where he says stuff like "this thing was in space."
It wasn't, because it--and other weather balloons--only get into the lower stratosphere, about 20 miles up, and the Earth's atmosphere has wayyyy more stuff going on above that before you get clear of it and get into space proper. Heck, even the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are still in the atmosphere, and they're 10 times higher--maybe they should be renamed "Thermosphere Shuttle" and "International Thermosphere Station"?
Well okay, that's a bit silly. Obviously at some point you have to make an arbitrary decision as to where "space" begins; still, calling the stratosphere "space" is a considerable stretch; maybe it does only have 1/1000th the amount of the planet's surface pressure, but that's still considerable in the scheme of things, actually, and heck, there are bacteria up there, and they aren't "space bacteria." The title is so silly, when I read it in the email I received, my first thought was that it was going to be referring to this, which...is also something of a stretch. ;)
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