Astronomy

My lady is a HUGE RAGING NERD with astronomy. We've gone stargazing several times and I've seen some pretty cool things through her telescope (like Jupiter's tiny moons!). The Moon up close through a telescope is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen.

She even named her telescope Sally, after Sally Ride.

Needless to say, my interest in astronomy has peaked quite a bit in the last few months.

 Saturn also happens to be my favorite planet for several reasons.

Human perception is silly like that ^^. What looks small, far away, slow moving, and dim in the outer sky is pretty much the opposite when it comes much closer. Nothing else really changes. It is said that the human naked eye can see up to about 2.5 million light-years away, but you can't really make out what you're seeing without a good telescope and being able to distinguish between stars, galaxies, planets, or other things.

I do find it sort of funny that in the first video that he stated that during a black out in Los Angeles, a number of residents called the police reporting glowing mysterious clouds hovering above the city... And people are just commenting that they want a black out to stargaze.

The author of those videos make a lot of them about science in general; chemistry, astronomy, physics, etc, which I find it all interesting. Not sure what it is, even though I'd think it would sound like a normal school lecture. It's funny how much I can learn from watching a few videos about it compared to what was taught in schools for about 9 months. I'll just post a few videos in a post a few videos, but I don't want to bog a single post with them.
[video=youtube;2lR7s1Y6Zig]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lR7s1Y6Zig[/video]

[video=youtube;rltpH6ck2Kc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rltpH6ck2Kc[/video]

It's interesting when you think about it, there's a lot more beyond our solar system so there are a lot of undiscovered possibilities. There are hundreds to thousands of planets being discovered by satellites and whatnot. Some of them are classified as Earth-like planets. One in particular people might know already is called Kepler-22b. They dub this planet to be in the middle of a 'habitable zone', in addition to having temperatures and orbiting a sun-like star very similar to our own. The orbit around the star is 290 days, which is pretty close. The only thing is they don't know what the planet's composition. Apparently, there are many other small and big planets discovered that fit into the habitable zone category. This image was taken from NASA's site: