If your summer vacation takes you to clear dark skies, here's what to bring along to help you indulge your interest in astronomy.

The Basics

• Binoculars. You can pack a pair away easily. A pair of 7x35 optics works well. Or if you can afford it, image stabilized binoculars with 30 mm or larger objectives. Canon makes a great pair of image-stabilized 10x30's… very compact and great for dark skies.

• Star Atlas or Planisphere. If you're going to unfamiliar latitudes, or to a place where the sky is much darker than you're used to, bring along a small star atlas or planisphere to help find your way around.

• Flashlight. Get a small red LED flashlight if possible, to see your way around in the dark while preserving your night vision.

continue....

Last night was an excellent evening to relax by the fire.


The clouds moved out and the sky was perfectly clear. It was a rare, awesome condition for a star party. The atmosphere was so stable that I could even see the flashes from the Rhythm and Booms fireworks, 80 miles away. All I had to do was look at the sky and I could see many of the clusters that I normally have a hard time even finding with binoculars!


Saturn, Regulus, and Mars setting in the West, just barely above the treetops. The light pollution on the horizon is the car dealership, 6 miles away.


A satellite (I don't know which one) streaking along the edge of the Milky Way near Vega.


This star cluster is called the Coat Hanger (CR 399). It's upside down in the East now, but will be right side up later in the year when it's in the West. The stars are trailed because of the zoom/exposure combination. It's hard to tell if they're trailed in the viewfinder, until I download the image to my computer. I'd rather have a little too long of an exposure (trailed) than not long enough (nothing).


The King of the planets - Jupiter! And four or five of his moons. As with all of my pictures, this one was taken solely with my Canon SX100 IS and no telescope or other optical aids, and no post digital manipulation. Straight from the camera, for good or bad!


Views of the Milky Way!

Sharing a “ghost-hunting” expedition with a friend turned out to be a religious experience, said Tim Hackworth of the Richmond-based H&H Paranormal Investigators.

“A buddy of mine is an atheist,” he said. “He went with us one time and he changed his ways. He got really religious really quick. He was screaming ‘Oh God, Oh God, something’s after me.’ He said that something black came through a tombstone and started chasing him. He beat me and Matt back to the car and had locked the doors.”

continue....

Planet hunters say it's just a matter of time before they lasso Earth's twin, which almost surely is hiding somewhere in our star-studded galaxy.

Momentum is building: Astronomers announced they have discovered three super-Earths — worlds more massive than ours but small enough to most likely be rocky — orbiting a single star. And dozens of other worlds suspected of having masses in that same range were found around other stars.

"Being able to find three Earth-mass planets around a single star really makes the point that not only may many stars have one Earth, but they may very well have a couple of Earths," said Alan Boss, a planet formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C.

continue....

A SHAKEN soldier told how he saw THIRTEEN UFOs spinning in the skies above his military barracks.

He filmed them on his mobile phone and reported the close encounter to Army top brass.

The sighting, at Tern Hill barracks near Market Drayton, Shrops, came two hours before helicopter police officers reported an encounter with a huge craft 80 miles away near Cardiff.

And three hours before a couple claimed they were followed by a strange light in the sky along the A5 near Shrewsbury.

Further mind-boggling evidence emerged as dog walker Bonnie Lewis, 29, told how she filmed seven UFOs at Bromsgrove, Worcs.

continue....

Flying Saucer Craft Set to Fly

A new wingless, saucer-shaped aircraft is scheduled to take to the skies. Subrata Roy, a scientist at the University of Florida, calls his aircraft a "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle," or WEAV, and if it flies he says it could usher in a new age of aircraft design. read on....

Most of us are happy to slap two pieces of bread together with a few slices of cheddar and, if we're lucky, a squirt of salad cream to make a good cheese sarnie.

But it seems the process may have just become a bit more complicated than that.

Not content with their usual figures and algebra, scientists have discovered a mathematical formula for creating the perfect cheese sandwich. more....

The constellation Virgo scoots across the southwestern sky tonight. Look for its brightest star, Spica, which shines white with just a hint of blue. The color indicates that its surface is thousands of degrees hotter than the surface of our own star, the Sun.

Goodbye mosquitoes! I wish I could say I'm going to miss you, but...........I'm not.

In the US it's known as bigfoot, in Canada as sasquatch, in Brazil as mapinguary, in Australia as a yowie, in Indonesia as sajarang gigi and, most famously of all, in Nepal as a yeti.

The little known Indian version of this legendary ape-like creature is called mande barung - or forest man - and is reputed to live in the remote West Garo hills of the north-eastern state of Meghalaya. more....

The constellation Hercules passes high overhead this evening. One of its star systems, 14 Herculis, has at least one planet. The star is a lot like the Sun, while the planet is at least five times as massive as Jupiter, the giant of our own solar system.

Russian air force planes dropped a 25-kg (55-lb) sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home while seeding clouds to prevent rain from spoiling a holiday, Russian media said.

"A pack of cement used in creating ... good weather in the capital region ... failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft)," police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.

Ahead of major public holidays the Russian Air Force often dispatches up to 12 cargo planes carrying loads of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture. more....

A tornado was sighted touching down in Orchard. According to Lori Mehmen of Orchard, who captured this image on her digital camera, the twister came near the ground just briefly and then went back up in the clouds. more....

Last Night's Star Party

I was able to find M39, M71, CR399, and H20 star clusters last night. But, there are just so many stars in that part of the Milky Way that it's hard to tell where the clusters start and the "plain old" star fields end! Either way, get out and scan the sky from the area around Deneb all the way past Vega and over into the area of Altair and beyond. You won't be disappointed with the view! Then grab your binoculars and do the same thing. Your mouth will fall open in awe at the incredible amount of stars!

As a side note, a little observation about mosquitoes. Normally, we don't get many here. We're quite a ways from any appreciable amount of water. We make up for them in wood ticks though! But, just since yesterday, the mosquitoes have exploded! Still, they don't have fangs and claws like the mosquitoes we encounter on the other side of the river in Juneau County. Those are huge and terrible! But in the last two days the mosquitoes have suddenly become worse than I can ever remember here.


The Milky Way stars near Deneb.


Left to right: Saturn, Regulus, Mars.

Look a third of the way from Arcturus to Vega for the dim little semicircle of Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, with its modestly bright "jewel star," Gemma. Look two thirds of the way from Arcturus to Vega for the dim Keystone of Hercules.

In Keystone of Hercules is one of the most familiar deep-sky objects for binocular observers: the globular star cluster M13. But do you know where to pick up the equally bright globular M92 nearby? Get M92 once and it'll be there for you forevermore.

Question of the hour: can you pop popcorn with cell phones? A YouTube video closing in on 1 million views purports to show a group of people doing just that. In the video, three phones are aimed at a few kernels of popcorn arranged in the middle of a table; the cell phone numbers are dialed; the phones ring; the corn pops instantly. There is no detectable trickery.

Trickery there must be, however, because, as a simple matter of logic, if your cell phone emits enough electromagnetic energy to pop popcorn, it should also make your head explode. When was the last time that happened to you? more....

A crackly analogue recording made in 1951 is the earliest known example of a digital computer making music, say UK historians.

The recording captures one of the earliest computers to use short term random access memory playing God Save the King, Baa Baa Black Sheep and a short piece of Glenn Miller's In The Mood.

The Ferranti Mark 1 computer was built by UK electrical engineering firm Ferranti in collaboration with Manchester University, UK. It was the world's first commercial computer, and nine were sold between 1951 and 1957.

In 1951 the BBC recorded a musical performance by the machine for a children's radio show and also presented someone there with a private copy on an acetate disk. It is that disk that has now surfaced in the Computer Conservation Society's archives. more....

Over the years I've seen bad modems, monitors, motherboards, power supplies, mice, floppy drives, CD drives, and hard drives, but I've never seen a bad keyboard - until now. I came home from the Castle Rock Family ATV Club Scavenger Hunt Saturday night and my keyboard was acting funky. It kept turning the caps lock on and off, repeating keys all by itself, lighting up the num lock and scroll lock intermittently, then all the keyboard lights would go out and it would be completely dead.

I tried a number of things, checking the plug, unhooking my weather station because that was made way back in the Windows 3.1 days and sometimes makes XP do the hokey poky. No difference. I have a number of old keyboards and hooked one of those up. So far so good, it looks like the keyboard was bad. If it should start to act up again, then I will assume that it's a board going bad in the computer. No big deal then either. If that's the case, this computer is a few years old and probably time for an upgrade anyway! And new computers are cheaper now than they have ever been!

I finally found M13 globular star cluster last night. Look for Vega in the ENE around 10:00 pm. From Vega, go up towards the zenith (straight over head), but not quite, and you'll see the stars that form the square of Hercules. M13 is between the two stars that form the square's side farthest from Vega. I couldn't see it naked eye, but found it with my 7x50 binoculars. I was not impressed, except maybe for the fact that I was seeing something so far away that the light reaching my eyes was already 25,000 years old. Faint hazy-looking little ball. Now that I can find it easily, I'll train a scope on it and see what it looks like then. No picture, as of yet anyway. I tried, but it's so faint that I couldn't see anything in the viewfinder. I had to guess at where to aim the camera and may not have been near it! Lots of stars showed up in the picture, but couldn't see any sign of M13.

My favorite stargazing equipment is my old farmer's eyeballs. I like to just look around and when I see something interesting, I try to capture the scene as close to actuality as possible with my Canon SX100 IS camera. Nothing in the night sky ever looks as cool in the picture as it does with my eyes, so far, even though the camera does capture more stars.

My second most favorite piece of equipment is my old, beat up, el-cheap-o 7x50 binoculars. The night sky is brighter than my 7x35 (even though the 7x35 is lighter and smaller). The 7x50 also gives a brighter view than even the 10x50, plus they are much easier to hold still than the 10x50. The 10x is just a little too much for me to hold steady. The stars all wiggle around quite a bit and I end up not being able to see as much as I can with the lower power.

My third choice for stargazing is my smaller, 80mm scope. I generally only bring it out when I see something that I want to take a closer look than my binoculars will provide. It's a little more to set up and mess with than the binoculars of course, the same as setting up the camera though. It's still a lot less trouble than my 4.5 inch scopes! And certainly a lot easier to point around the sky than the bigger scopes.

My last choice is the bigger scopes. I pretty much never dust them off and get them out these days. Can't even remember the last time. Someday, maybe, possibly, might just buy a bigger, better, EASIER TO USE, scope, but most likely not. If I want to take a real close stunning view of something, that's what my Internet connection is for!

The remains of a woman have been found sitting in front of her TV - 42 years after she was reported missing.

Hedviga Golik, who was born in 1924, had apparently made herself a cup of tea before sitting in her favourite armchair in front of her black and white television.

Croatian police said she was last seen by neighbours in 1966, when she would have been 42 years old.

Her neighbours thought she had moved out of her flat in the capital, Zagreb.

But she was found by police and bailiffs who had broken in to help the authorities establish who owned the flat.

A police spokesman said: "So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.

"When officers went there, they said it was like stepping into a place frozen in time.

"The cup she had been drinking tea from was still on a table next to the chair she had been sitting in and the house was full of things no one had seen for decades. Nothing had been disturbed for decades, even though there were more than a few cobwebs in there."

Neighbours were shocked by the discovery.

Jadranka Markic was nine when Hedviga "vanished".

She said: "I still remember her. She was a quiet woman who kept herself to herself but was polite. We all thought that she had just moved out and gone to live with relatives." more....

Cepheus is a large, faint constellation near the pole star, Polaris. It is named for a mythological king, and it's now in the northeast after sunset. Cepheus looks like a child's stick drawing of a house: a square with a triangular roof.

A couple more short video clips from the Castle Rock Family ATV Club Scavenger Hunt on 6/21/08 (in addition to the short clip posted on the picture page):


I must remember to shut my Hawkeye engine off when filming. It sounds like an air compressor, idling in the background!


And another clip of Josie's Trail. I shot much longer videos (these are just small segments) and of other subjects, but I felt these were the most interesting. With my painfully slow Internet connection I have to really be choosy when uploading video files!

UFO sightings in the town of Stephenville set off a furor of theories, media coverage, even T-shirts. But was there an explanation? more....

As night falls, look in the west for a short diagonal line of three bright objects. From upper left to lower right, they are the planet Saturn, the star Regulus, and the planet Mars. Saturn is the brightest. They will bunch up even tighter over the next few nights.

A couple of the critters spotted today during the Castle Rock Family ATV Club scavenger hunt:


Peek-A-Boo!


Prickly!

It was another great day for an ATV ride! Of course, when isn't it a great day for an ATV ride? Saw some wildlife, hung out with fellow ATVers, told some stories, and took some pictures (imagine that!).

It was a little dusty (no flooding in northern Juneau County), but not bad at all. Just enough clouds popped up in the sky so as not to be the same old boring blue!

Even though I had came up with the clues and route for the Castle Rock Family ATV Club Scavenger Hunt a month ago, only one thing had changed since then. Everything else was still in the same place as when I wrote it up!

A day or two and I'll have a few pictures, and maybe a short video, uploaded to the picture page. The picture to the left of this post will change to indicate when the update has been made. If I have any pictures of special mention, or a story to tell, I post those right here in the scrapbook.

Summer kicks into high gear in the northern hemisphere today because it's the day after the summer solstice and the first full day of the new season. The Sun will begin moving southward after today, and the days will soon begin to grow shorter.

Another heirloom flower, handed down through an unknown # of generations of my family - peony. This one's blossom is double those of other, more modern, peonies that I have.

Last Friday’s brief orbital anxiety about threats from an unidentified object seen out the window of space shuttle Discovery underscore why NASA has always been interested in what can justifiably be called UFOs.

The incident explains a lot about the procedures and practices for dealing with unusual naked eye or camera sightings of the "stuff" outside spaceship windows. more....

ATV riders who gathered for a parade in northern Minnesota fell just short of beating the world record.

An unofficial count had 1,083 ATVs participating in the parade in Silver Bay. That's 55 fewer than the current record held by the Ridge Runners ATV club of Evarts, Kentucky.

The All-Terrain Vehicle Association of Minnesota had hoped to attract 2,500 ATV enthusiasts to Silver Bay to take part in the parade.

But planners and spectators say they're happy with the turnout in Minnesota. They also say the event was good for the sport.

To qualify for Guinness World Records, the parade route had to be at least two miles, be constantly video taped from three different locations, and have two official counters from Silver Bay. more....

Opening NASA’s X Files: The Kecksburg Incident

Witnesses described seeing a fireball in the evening sky, some sort of a controlled landing, followed by a military recovery of a spacecraft-like object. As reported by local radio and newspapers, U.S. military personnel cordoned off the area, investigated the site, and left without ever providing a full report of the incident - other than to dismiss it as a meteor. more....

The gibbous Moon has a bright companion the next couple of nights: the planet Jupiter. They rise in late evening. Tonight, Jupiter is to the left of the Moon as they climb into view. It is the brightest object in the evening sky other than the Moon.

Last night's Moon - 0x, 10x, 40x zoom.


Looking ENE, 10 pm, the three brightest stars: Far left center - Deneb. Top center - Vega. Lower right corner - Altair.


Looking west, 10 pm, the stars of Leo accompanied by Saturn and Mars. Denebola upper left, lower three are Saturn, Regulus, and Mars.

A new crop picture which appeared in South Korea on June 12, 2008 seems to be a close conceptual copy of the "four month lunar calendar" which appeared at East Field near Avebury on July 7, 2007. more....

The Moon is full at 12:30 p.m. CDT today, as it lines up opposite the Sun in our sky. It will still be fully illuminated as it rises around sunset. The full Moon of June is known as the Flower Moon, Strawberry Moon, or Honey Moon.

Reminder - Castle Rock Family ATV Club Membership Meeting will be held on June 21, 2008 at 10am at the Wilderness (Sprague) with a club ride/scavenger hunt to follow. Daena M. is masterminding the scavenger hunt so it will be a challenge, but fun! Snacks/finger food will be provided following the hunt at the Wilderness. See you there!!! Note: The Wilderness is now serving breakfast from 8-11am on Saturday and Sunday.

For the CRFAC Board and Events Committee
Roger Bean

Of all the stargazing tricks, the most famous is using the Big Dipper to find the pole star, Polaris. If you draw a line through the "pointers" -- the two stars at the outer edge of the bowl -- and follow the line "above" the bowl, you'll reach Polaris every time.

I just can't seem to find the M3 star cluster even with my small telescope! It should be right there, somewhere in the middle of the picture. The moonlight was pretty bright, so probably washed it out. I'll look for it again in when the moon is gone.


Then the clouds started moving in.

Wow! Today's astronomy photo is amazing! (see below) All those galaxies with their billions of stars, billions of solar systems, and countless planets. You can be sure that we are not alone in the universe!

Snoopy and her Sponge Bob enjoying my Father's Day present!

New observations from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander provide the most magnified view ever seen of Martian soil, showing particles clumping together even at the smallest visible scale.

In the past two days, two instruments on the lander deck -- a microscope and a bake-and-sniff analyzer -- have begun inspecting soil samples delivered by the scoop on Phoenix's Robotic Arm.

"This is the first time since the Viking missions three decades ago that a sample is being studied inside an instrument on Mars," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Stickiness of the soil at the Phoenix site has presented challenges for delivering samples, but also presents scientific opportunities. "Understanding the soil is a major goal of this mission and the soil is a bit different than we expected," Smith said. "There could be real discoveries to come as we analyze this soil with our various instruments. We have just the right instruments for the job."

Images from Phoenix's Optical Microscope show nearly 1,000 separate soil particles, down to sizes smaller than one-tenth the diameter of a human hair. At least four distinct minerals are seen. more....

One of the most spectacular constellations scoots across the south on June evenings: Scorpius, the scorpion. It's home to the bright orange star Antares. Tonight, the almost-full Moon passes just below Antares, which represents the scorpion's heart.

Sky watchers, be alert for auroras tonight. A solar wind stream is buffeting Earth's magnetic field and causing geomagnetic storms.

Finally last night we got some clear skies again, perfect for stargazing. I was up quite late (or early, depending on which way you look at it). I went down the list of naked eye and binocular objects that accompanies this month's sky map (see below). I found many of them quite easily. One that gave me trouble, and should be one of the easiest to find, is M3. I never really did find it conclusively. Maybe I'm looking right at it and don't know it? If that's the case, then I guess it isn't worth looking at!

Mel 111 is kind of cool. I have looked at it many times and even took pictures of it (might have posted some here, in my scrapbook), but I never knew it had a name. My planetarium program only has the Messier (M) names listed.

Big old bright Jupiter was rising in the east. Looking through the woods, I could glimpse it but couldn't get a picture. Later this month, or early next, it will be above the treetops.

Maybe tonight I'll try some of the things on the telescope list!

The Bochenczaks, like most families who operate resorts on Lake Delton, have a "loss of income" or similar rider provision as part of their insurance policies. So if, for instance, a tornado damages their resort or lightning strikes a condo unit on their property and burns it down, they will be reimbursed for the revenue that is lost due to the fact that people won't be able to stay at their place.

But what if a lake -- your "stock and trade" -- drains and most of your renters start canceling reservations?

Will insurance cover that?

"One of the first people to call after the lake drained was my insurance company to tell me, 'This was a flood, you don't have flood insurance, so we're not going to pay,' " said Walter Bochenczak, who is insured by Wilson Mutual, which has a home office in Sheboygan. "But the lake emptied, there was no flood. We had no flood damage."

Linda Allessi, who owns and operates the Sandrift Resort: The Peach on the Beach, on the west side of Lake Delton, is hearing that same line from Wilson Mutual.

"They told me, 'Well, you didn't insure the lake,' " said Allessi, who had three phone calls to cancel summer reservations during a 15-minute interview. "But we're the Peach on the Beach, that lake is our livelihood. Anybody can stay at a water park if they want to. People come here because it's a great place for a family on the water."

Allessi, who fought back tears, said she hopes to decide soon whether or not to stay open for the few who still want to stay at her resort. She is considering simply closing down for part of the summer or until next year. She plans to take out a loan to pay back the thousands of dollars she is returning to people who put down deposits to stay at the Sandrift.

"I've been paying my insurance for 18 years and never had a claim," said Allessi. "If they'd come through for us, it would make things a little bit easier." more....

Her little hoof prints are only the size of your thumbnail!

The evening sky is alive with creepy crawlers, including snakes, a dragon, and a scorpion. The most ancient is Draco, the dragon, which winds between Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the big and little bears. Almost 5,000 years ago its brightest star, Thuban, served as the pole star.

Chase certainly doesn't look like Toto from "The Wizard of Oz." He's a big rottweiler, not a little cairn terrier. But he certainly does a wonderful impression.

Last Saturday, when a tornado swept through Richton Park, Chase was hanging out the backyard of Sandra Holmes' house. That is, until the tornado picked him up and took him on the ride of his life.

"People started coming up and saying 'we saw your dog in flight,'" said Holmes, Chase's owner.

Neighbor Tatyiana Smith saw it. "The dog was in the air, he was going around like he was pulled out of the ground," Smith said. more....

* AT 708 AM CDT...WISCONSIN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AND THE WISCONSIN
STATE PATROL REPORT THAT EASTBOUND LANES OF INTERSTATE 90/94 IN
JUNEAU COUNTY...WILL REMAIN CLOSED FROM MAUSTON...ALL THE WAY TO
MADISON...DUE TO FLOODING OVER THE INTERSTATE IN CERTAIN AREAS.

Yesterday's rain: 2.10
The last 6 days: 10.60
June so far: 12.25

Local Area Emergency

WIC119-019-011-121-053-063-081-057-001-123-023-103-043-131130-

URGENT - IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED
LOCAL AREA EMERGENCY
WISCONSIN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
RELAYED BY NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE LA CROSSE WI
341 AM CDT FRI JUN 13 2008

THE WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION REPORTS THE FOLLOWING
MAJOR CLOSURES OF THE INTERSTATE SYSTEM.

INTERSTATE 90 AND INTESTATE 94 EASTBOUND AT WISCONSIN STATE HIGHWAY
82 IN JUNEAU COUNTY.

INTERSTATE 39 SOUTHBOUND AT WISCONSIN STATE HIGHWAY 82 IN MARQUETTE
COUNTY.

INTERSTATE 39 NORTHBOUND AT INTERSTATE 39...90...94 AND WISCONSIN
STATE HIGHWAY 78 IN COLUMBIA COUNTY.

INTERSTATE 94 WESTBOUND FROM THE CRAWFISH RIVER TO JOHNSON CREEK.

IN ADDITION...ALL ENTRANCE RAMPS TO EASTBOUND INTERSTATE 90...94 ARE
CLOSED FROM WISCONSIN STATE HIGHWAY 82 TO WISCONSIN STATE HIGHWAY
33...AS WELL AS ALL ENTRANCE RAMPS TO SOUTHBOUND INTERSTATE 39 FROM
WISCONSIN STATE HIGHWAY 82 TO WISCONSIN STATE HIGHWAY 33.

MOTORISTS ARE ADVISED TO STAY CLEAR OF THE STATED AREAS AS
OFFICIALS CONTINUE TO MONITOR THE SITUATION.

Mystery #1—the corona: If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000 C. Intuition says the temperature should drop as you back away; instead, it rises. The sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, registers more than a million degrees Celsius, hundreds of times hotter than the star below. This high temperature remains a mystery more than 60 years after it was first measured.

Mystery #2—the solar wind: The sun spews a hot, million mph wind of charged particles throughout the solar system. Planets, comets, asteroids—they all feel it. Curiously, there is no organized wind close to the sun's surface, yet out among the planets there blows a veritable gale. Somewhere in between, some unknown agent gives the solar wind its great velocity. The question is, what? more....

One weekend in September 2002, Kim's sister brought her three sons — ages 3, 5 and 8 — to stay with them for a few days. Before her nephews left to return home, Kim says the 5-year-old asked her, "Are the cops going to come take that dead body out of Chase's closet?"

"It was sort of a random question," she says. "I didn't know where that came from."

The following Tuesday, Kim, an assistant principal at China Grove Elementary School, says she and the children heard a "thump, thump, thump, boom, boom, glass-breaking noise."

Casiann says she was on the third floor and ran downstairs, meeting KatiEarl running up from the first floor. They found what they believe was the cause of that noise in KatiEarl's second-floor bedroom: a picture of a ballerina, the glass broken, lying in the middle of the floor with ballet trophies sitting up around it in a circle.

KatiEarl's soccer trophies, however, were on the other side of the room, she says, most of them turned on their sides. more....

Cygnus, the swan, soars gracefully across the sky tonight. Its brightest stars form a shape like a lower-case letter "T," with the brilliant blue-white star Deneb at its top.

Even though we got over 8 inches of rain here, there wasn't any flooding. Not even any puddles. We've had drought conditions for so many years that our dry sand just sucked it all up.

I had been told that Easton got 12 inches of rain, which I suppose is possible since it's really not that much more than we got. But the same person also said that the Easton Pond was full, even though it had been drained months ago and there are no boards in the spillway. Impossible. I decided that I better go check on my house there. While there, I looked at the creek and pond myself. Turns out the story about the pond being full with no boards in the dam is a lie. Total bullshit. The creek was totally normal looking, barely even muddy. And it was very obvious that it had never really even been out of it's banks.

Just one more story made up by some of the people in Adams County to make it seem like they have it harder or are poorer than anybody else, even if it means lying to everybody about it. I pretty much don't believe anything I'm told anymore. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Incredible video of Lake Delton disaster: http://www.c3ktogo.com/news-video/?mgid=16759

photos of Lake Delton disaster http://www.wrjc.com/NEWS%20STORIES/newspage02.htm

more photos of Lake Delton disaster http://www.wrjc.com/NEWS%20STORIES/newspage05.htm

Post number 1000! That's a lot of "scraps" in my scrapbook!

Here's another zoom example. In this photo, between the two tallest trees and just above the treetops, is a small patch of blue sky. Next to that patch is some sort of bird flying. A falcon maybe?


Zoomed in on the bird.


Snoopy likes to sniff toads, but they make her sneeze a lot!


It's just weeds, but they're still kind of pretty.


We've sure been getting some cool sunsets lately!

Taken by Sandra Mansi at Lake Champlain (Vermont, USA) in July 1977, the Mansi photo has always been really popular because (unlike so many alleged lake monster photos) it's not too blurry or ambiguous but clearly shows something that looks very much like a large, long-necked grey aquatic animal. Rising from the water, it seems to be curving its neck over its rounded back, as if looking behind itself. Most people imagine that the object in the photo resembles a long-necked plesiosaur, or maybe a sauropod, so it's been taken to heart by those who contend that such Mesozoic animals are still around today. more....

Rain-Swollen Lake Delton Floods, Destroying Homes, Highway
Popular Tourist Location Washes Into Wisconsin River
more....

Vega is the brightest member of the Summer Triangle, which is in view all night. Vega is well up in the east-northeast at nightfall, and climbs high overhead during the wee hours of the morning. It forms the western point of the triangle.


My picture of the Summer Triangle, taken on Sunday, June 01, 2008, 9:39 PM (note the one star is actually a double).

A bizarre surveillance video is making the rounds on the Internet showing an office worker who suddenly gets violent and begins trashing not only his desk but the entire office, much to the shock of several coworkers. A healthy debate rages online as to the authenticity of the tape which has been widely circulated with the title "Office Worker Goes Absolutely Insane." incredible....!

Over the weekend, we got a grand total of 8.30 inches of rain (Saturday 3.30, and Sunday 5.00 inches). Took a little ride around the area yesterday afternoon but didn't see any flooding. The sand we have here soaks it up pretty fast.

There was no fire, but the ground was hot enough in a Colorado Springs park to burn through an eight year old boy’s shoes and cause at least second degree burns on his feet. The boy went the hospital. His Crocs style shoes that were left behind have big holes with burned edges. more....

The whereabouts of more than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements.

The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again.

Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature. more....

The Moon is high in the southwest at nightfall. It will be at first quarter early tomorrow, so sunlight illuminates half of the hemisphere that faces our way. Look to the right and lower right of the Moon for the planet Saturn, the star Regulus, and the planet Mars.

A few pictures from last night:

JR and Brittany were over last night for pot roast night. They brought a funny movie with them to watch. The storms started moving back in after the pot roast was gone, so we watched them for awhile. Then, it really started to look ugly, with one section of the storm having definite rotation. It was time to leave, since we have no place to seek shelter from a tornado. We went down the road a ways, away from the center of the rotation, and waited a few minutes for it to pass. Then came back home and watched Bob the weatherman on channel 27. He was tracking a possible large tornado heading for Reedsburg, which fortunately never touched down. In the excitement, I forgot all about the funny movie that JR brought over, so we never did watch it!

As of 6:00 this morning we had 3.30 inches of rain, since yesterday morning. Looks like another 2 inches since then, over the last two hours!

Army: Sun, Not Man, Is Causing Climate Change

The Army is weighing in on the global warming debate, claiming that climate change is not man-made. Instead, Dr. Bruce West, with the Army Research Office, argues that "changes in the earth’s average surface temperature are directly linked to ... the short-term statistical fluctuations in the Sun’s irradiance and the longer-term solar cycles." more....

Romania may be known as the land of Dracula, heaped with bloodthirsty vampires and other creatures shaped by Hollywood imagination, but it is also a land where nature has had an interesting activity.

Far less known to the world than Dracula, stand an impressive number of stones which quite literally grow by themselves. This may be a great subject for the next Stephen King novel: living stones attacking a group of American scientists, who were trying to investigate the roots of Dracula’s legend. The stones are real and known to mortals as Trovants. more....

The planet Saturn is not far to the upper left of the crescent Moon at nightfall. It looks like a bright golden star. The true star Regulus, in Leo, the lion, is closer to the Moon, almost directly above it.

UPDATE: Looks like they figured it out ahead of schedule! My home page is now working again. Excellent!

UPDATE: It was passed on to a supervisor and he couldn't figure it out either. On Monday they will pass it on to an administrator. The web tech I talked to last night left a note that she called me and left a message, but I never got it. Apparently my phone number comes up to somebody else's account in the ISP's files, so maybe that person got my message???? I've had the same ISP account for 12 years, and the same phone number for even longer than that - beats me.

Late yesterday afternoon my home page (main picture page) stopped working. It's something to do with my ISP's server that it's hosted on. I put in a call to my ISP tech support last night. I've had problems with my dialup in the past, but this is the first time in 12 years that I can remember having trouble with the home page. I'll call again this morning after I'm done milking the cows and see if they've figured anything out yet.

In the meantime, this page is still up and running. It's hosted for free by Blogger on a different server than my home page.

Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs.

The study is based on dosing mice with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. Some scientists are already taking resveratrol in capsule form, but others believe it is far too early to take the drug, especially using wine as its source, until there is better data on its safety and effectiveness. more....

New Alien Video Shines (Photoshopped) Light on UFO Hoaxers:
The latest alleged close encounter is of a new kind: Paranormal researchers, NASA geeks and even skeptical magicians all agree that the invasion of extraterrestrial evidence has gone over the edge with digital manipulation. Why that's not good for skeptics or believers—and why you've been watching a fake of a fake for a week. more....

The planet Mars is in good view tonight. Look for it quite near the Moon. They are in the west at nightfall, with Mars just a little to the Moon's right or upper right.

The City of Syracuse, Kansas would like to introduce you to the Syracuse Sand Dunes Park, a 1,300 acre ATV, rail, off-road vehicle park in southwest Kansas. If you are traveling through Kansas on vacation or planning a short weekend, please email me or check out our websites for more information.

Though we are a new park, we have been well received in our Forums so far. We would like the opportunity to serve you.

Sincerely:

Mike Keating, Director
Syracuse Sand Dunes Park
P.O. Box 148
Syracuse, Kansas 67878
620-384-2480
www.syracusesanddunes.com
www.syracusesandpark.com

A few new pictures:


This one is from the other day. These guys sure are hard to get a picture of, but I finally got a fair one.


I have very few mosquitoes here, most likely because there isn't much water nearby. But what I lack in mosquitoes I make up for in woodticks. They're as thick here this year as other people's mosquitoes are!


I have never seen a woodchuck climb a tree. Didn't even know they could. From a distance I thought this was a fisher, then a wolverine, but no. When I got close I realized it was a stupid old woodchuck.


And of course he has a big woodtick in his ear.


My mom always called these Blue Flags. As did her mom. They're an iris, but not like the big cultivated kind you normally see. They're more like the wild ones growing on the edge of ponds and such. Mom gave us some from her place when we bought our place and now they grow all over. They have been handed down through many generations, along with a lot of other flowers mom gave us over the years.


And of course, an airplane picture from today.