Ice in fairyland

Ames, IA (Jan 18, 2010)

The last couple of weeks have been all in a rush. I am teaching a 300 level course of general astrophysics. It is fun, as the subject matter allows me to talk about a lot of interesting phenomena. I like to surprise the students in showing how reality sometimes can be quite weird and have them think out of the box. But of course doing that requires a lot of preparation, as it is very easy to fall back in the routine of writing a lot of formulae on my transparencies, and have them just learn to solve mechanically the exercises that they will need to solve for the exams. That would be boring, though, and I hate boring stuff. So three times a week I have to figure out how to make things interesting, and that’s a lot of work.

Two weeks ago I was in D.C. for the American Astronomical Society meeting. With 3,400 astronomers, it was the largest astronomical meeting ever, at least on Earth (I am sure that somewhere in the Galaxy there has been some alien meeting even bigger). Still it was quite big for us earthlings. I especially enjoyed the banquet in the Air and Space museum. Not everyday you can have dinner in front of the real Apollo 11 command module (that thing actually went around the Moon, wow). Heartfelt thanks to whom gave me the ticket! One thing that I learned at the meting is that on Mars, during Summer, the temperature can get as high as -30C, which is enough for very salty water to be liquid (hence the droplets of water that have been observed on the legs of the Mars Phoenix lander, or the dark stains that appeared on mountain slopes because of ephemeral water springs. This is very exciting, but also made me realize something I didn’t know: two weeks ago in Ames Iowa, with a wind-chill of -34C, was colder than Mars!!!! This week has been warmer, with temperatures just below freezing. Today we woke up in the fog, with frosted threes conjuring a fairy-tale landscape, as these photo shows.