Sunday, August 24, 2008

Presidential Campaign Issues

How are we supposed to figure out who to vote for since both candidates claim to be against the war? It was a lot more fun when we could argue about abortion and gun control.

-- Dalton Hammond

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Olympic Ceremony Was Faked

I almost always never watch the stupid TV...maybe a half dozen golf tournaments per year and that's it.

So when all my friends and the rest of the entire world went ga-ga over the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics I figured maybe I missed something and decided to Google around and try to find a video replay.

Then I learned that much of the ballyhooed ceremony was faked. Fake fireworks, even fake singing by the little Chinese girl who was a last-minute substitute and lip-synced her performance.

They had the entire world fooled for a while...except me. -- Dalton Hammond

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Pluto is becoming a Plutoid

In what I think is a major public relations coup a committee of The International Astronomical Union has decided to call these newly-discovered Pluto-sized asteroids "Plutoids".

You'll recall that a couple of years ago the same union of astronomers voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet and call it a Trans-Neptunian Dwarf Planet, as reported in my blog entry at

http://daltonhammond.blogspot.com/2006/09/is-pluto-planet.html

By naming all these other critters Plutoids the committee has raised little Pluto's esteem by naming a whole new asteroid classification after the former planet.

I'm so glad.

-- Dalton Hammond

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Callisto Transits Jupiter

Sometimes you have to be at the right place in the Universe at the right time.

Early on the morning of August 4th, 2008 despite a thick summer haze I captured this fuzzy image of the great gas planet Jupiter just as the Jovian moon Callisto was crossing in front of the planet. The moon appears as a black dot at the upper right edge and the shadow of Callisto can be seen on the face of the planet just above the image of Callisto. The haze-bloated dot to the left of Jupiter is the moon Io and the moon Ganymede appears to the right of the planet. -- Dalton Hammond