Pete's friend Betty is smart.
Not only does she have a cat named Vir, and work for the very large array in the US...which has to be one of the coolest jobs around, but she recently explained parallax and how it's used to calculate the distance between Earth and the new "earth-like" planet that was just found, as well as how they work out a lot of galaxy-size distances and calculations inm a way that makes sense to me. I've never quite been able to wrap my mind around it before.
I feel ever so much smarter now.
Last night I tried to impress J with this new found knowledge...but he already knew what parallax was. Turns out, I married a man of infinite knowledge...either that or I just need to read more :)
2 comments:
Small correction: the project I work on is the Very Long Baseline Array. Which is run by the same organization, but it means I sit in an office in Socorro, NM, rather than working at the array, fifty miles out in the desert. :)
By the way, calculating the distance to other galaxies, which are really, really far away is a whole different, and much tricker thing. But I figured I should probably skip that explanation and quit while I was ahead. :)
Thanks for the compliment on my smartness! Though there are some days when I'm pretty sure I'm only faking it. ;)
You need to read more. ;)
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