This last one was taken around midnight.

Light and Shadow at the Trona Pinnacles .(Click to see the whole lot.)

My friend Rajan Parrikar’s recent photo shoot in the Mojave Desert. He calls it Light and Shadow at the Trona Pinnacles.. “During a recent visit to Death Valley in California’s Mojave Desert, I overnighted in the desert town of Ridgecrest to shoot at the nearby Trona Pinnacles. This atmospheric locale has served as a setting for several well-known sci-fi movies and commercials. The basin with its Trona Pinnacles, the adjacent Searles Lake salt pan serviced by an unlikely railroad, and flanked by the Slate Range to the east and the Argus Mountains to the west, evokes an ambience that is at once enchanting, eerie, and alien.”

That brought to mind my visits to Death Valley. One winter night we had camped in the Valley. Whenever I hear the 10,000 Maniacs song “The Painted Desert,” the line “The stars were so many there, they seemed to overlap,” always reminds me of that still, moonless, cold night. Once I passed through the Mojave Desert on my way to the Grand Canyon in the summer. It was so hot that you can die within a couple of hours if you don’t have shelter.

I am hoping to go back there on my Great American Road Trip 2010. (A couple of spots still open for that one!)

“I wanted to be there by May at the latest time
isn’t that the plan we had or have you changed your mind?
I haven’t read a word from you since Pheonix or Tucson
April is over, will you tell me how long
before I can be there?”

Head to head over the Bay: Sean Tucker flies his Oracle Challenger biplane inverted over Marine Corps Major Nathan Miller, flying F/A-18 Blue Angel #5 over San Francisco Bay in preparation for Fleet Week’s weekend shows by the Navy’s Blue Angels. [Source.]

Note what’s on the laptop screen

Here are the pictures. The text associated with them is from Nov 2006 article by Michael Hanlon of the Daily Mail.

The Sombrero Galaxy – 28 million light years from Earth – was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.


The Ant Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas whose technical name is Mz3, resembles an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes… The nebula lies within our galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth.

Nebula NGC 2392, called “Eskimo” because it looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood. The hood is, in fact, a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star. Eskimo is 5,000 light years from Earth.

The Cat’s Eye Nebula.

The Hourglass Nebula, 8,000 light years away, has a “pinched-in-the-middle” look because the winds that shape it are weaker at the centre.

The Cone Nebula. The part pictured here is 2.5 light years in length (the equivalent of 23 million return trips to the Moon).

The Perfect Storm, a small region in the Swan Nebula, 5,500 light years away, described as ‘a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and small amounts of oxygen, sulphur and other elements’.

Starry Night, so named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh painting. It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky Way.

The glowering eyes from 114 million light years away are the swirling cores of two merging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC 2163 in the distant Canis Major constellation.

The Trifid Nebula. A ’stellar nursery’, 9,000 light years from here, it is where new stars are being born.

There are 34 pictures in all there. I chose to include a small version of a picture of Durga idols being made because today is Maha-Ashtami — the 8th day of Durga Puja. In two days, it will be Vijaya Dashmi — the day on which we celebrate the victory of Mother Durga over evil.

Related Post: The Big Picture collection of pictures of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). This historical event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network. See http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam for further details.

[Via Cosmic Variance.]

Watch a documentary on the LHC on the History Channel.

After 40 years of planning and construction, the biggest science experiment in history is ready to be tested. The “Large Hadron Collider” is an experiment created by the greatest minds in physics. It cost $10 billion and its resulting data has the potential to explain why we and the Universe exist. Their idea is to smash protons towards one another at the speed of light, trying to mimic what happened in the milliseconds after The Big Bang. Viewers will go on an amazing journey involving the struggles to plan and build the LHC, how it was constructed and what are its mechanics. Explore the future of what’s possible through the geniuses of today. [The History Channel]

For some absolutely stunning pictures (27 of them), go to boston.com’s The Big Picture.

To get a quick tutorial on how a particle accelerator works, play the LHC game. (Click on English, then click on the green arrow, the click on 1, 2, 3, etc.)

Link to the Picasa album.

(Click on the picture to go to the Picasa album with larger images.)

I got a master’s degree in computer science from Rutgers University. Visiting Rutgers was a trip down memory lane. Mega dozes doses of nostalgia.

Mouse-over the picture to see the controls. Clicking on the second icon from the left at the bottom shows the picture captions. Note especially the Art Institute of Chicago building where Swami Vivekanand gave his famous talk in 1893. What looks like a huge drop of mercury is The Cloud Gate:

Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a “gate” to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.

{Seen in Mexico City, Oct 5th ,2006}

Testing 1 2 3. Photo posting from flickr testing.