blogs

I spent three days at the NSTA STEM Expo in St. Louis last week and over the next few days, I'm going to try to do a few posts related to the sessions I attended and things I learned (and cool freebies I learned about on the web).This is the second year I've attended, and while most of the sessions were not, unsurprisingly, about astronomy, they were all relevant to science and science education which is an underlying theme for my interest in astronomy.

It's that time again. Actually, Globe At Night is running multiple campaigns, the first is going on right now, but there are others later in the year including later this month. Have a look. If you've never done this before, it's a great way of participating in a citizen science project, learning a little about astronomy, and a bit more about the impact of human activities on the environment.

Well, our post-Sandy migration is nominally complete at this point. Pictures and all.

Okay, we've finally managed to get the web site transferred, but pictures aren't yet working. Yeah, I know, what's the point of a photo web site without pictures. Sorry, I'm working on it.

This morning I managed to drag myself out for a pre-dawn walk/jog and enjoyed the view of a thin waning crescent moon east (below) a brilliant Venus. Higher up was Jupiter. The jog was nice, and the view was a nice extra bonus.

A couple of dozen folks showed up in Shore Road Park hoping to get a peek at Venus transiting the Sun today, but the weather did not cooperate. After setting up shortly after 5pm, I had to cover the equipment due to some light rain which passed through. Eventually the Sun peeked through a thin spot in the clouds long enough for me to get the (filtered) binoculars pointed at it and several people were able to get a brief look before the Sun disappeared back behind the clouds. Alas, that was it for the day. Around 7:20pm, I packed up.

Blech. Had to do some manual database maintenance. Gave up on default multi-site configuration as too painful, and turned off all caching. Things seem to be working, but we'll see.

I've been rather frustrated with my web site lately as I've been getting random Drupal failures telling me it can't find "settings.php." Utter nonsense; the file is there, permissions are correct, and it usually finds it just fine.So, if you've been confronted with a rather odd home page or link when navigating my site, I apologize. I think I may have worked around it, but seeing how it pops up randomly, it's hard today. It's gone right now, but we'll see about tomorrow....