Astronomer

Our irises have just begun to bloom.

A cardinal with a beetle (a junebug?) in its beak.

Happy birthday, Double-D! I blame you for confirming my status as an Idiot!

Taken yesterday behind my office moments before heavy rain, lightning, and thunder.

Happy birthday, Weed. I hope that your snow is almost melted!

Nice and neat. Good work on the cabling.

Here's my DD rack:

So, first on what's happening at CERN. They are colliding particles at extreme energies, but they're not coming from other dimensions. The energy of the collisions breaks down atoms into their fundamental particles, which very sensitive detectors measure. So far, the Standard Model of particle physics is holding up quite well. At this point, no little black holes are being formed, and if they did, they'd evaporate instantly, thanks to Hawking Radiation. Looking at the other points, if all the space was removed from all the atoms on earth, what would be left would be a sphere about the size of a large basketball stadium, and it would have as much mass as Earth currently has. Atoms, and therefore you and me and everything on earth, are mostly very empty space. If one of your atoms was suddenly inflated to the size of a golf ball, it's electrons would be about a mile-and-a-half away. What would happen if all the matter in the Sun were to suddenly condense so there was no space left between its atoms? We'd be left with a neutron star (more on that in a minute) about the size of Long Island NY. And Earth and all of the other planets would continue to orbit as they do now, because the mass, and hence its gravity, has not changed, even though it's gone from being over 800,000 miles across to just a few miles across. Neutron stars are very cool and strange. Their mass before they condense was not big enough to allow the star to collapse into a black hole when it finished it's life of fusing heavier and heavier elements together until it began to create iron, but it was great enough that all of the space between its atoms disappeared as its intense gravity crushed it down to the smallest size possible, essentially creating a gigantic neutron the size of a city but with the same mass as its former self. If a sugar cube size of matter from a neutron star were placed on the ground, it would weigh roughly the same as Mount Everest and it would sink rapidly to the center of the earth.

4 more shots of the hawk that I was very lucky to have photographed 3 weeks ago:

Our 6 year-old, Kippen.

Catzilla (aka Bengal) stalking a fly on the other side of the screen.

Excellent choices for our newest admins!

Taken from my neighbour's front Garden today:

Congrats on the successful "hunt", @@Labob! Hah! I had to play "Where's Waldo" to catch the goose!

Nice shot, @@BoomSlang! What camera/lens?

Good luck! I hope you can get some good shots and post them here,

My office is currently on the very edge of the city, with farmland to one side. Dandelions dominate! My dozen or so won't be missed. I'll see if I can get a good shot of the sea of yellow before we move downtown in July.

Thanks @@Leadfinger. I thought the same when I looked at the shot for the first time. I've spent hours p[lucking the little bastards out of my lawn...

As I was walking around the back yard this morning, this scene caught my eye with a nice combination of near and distant, accentuated by the mist and a splash of yellow to draw the eye.

Interesting effect, BigD0g.