Bad Astronomy

Summer interlude

Note: This weekend, the Deep Impact probe will slam into comet 9/P Tempel 1. I will have a blog up about it probably on Saturday, after I get back from doing a BBC interview about it! I’ll have more about that as well. Until then, enjoy this summer interlude.

Summer is finally here in Northern California, which means the fog and rain have (mostly) gone. The Sun is shining, plants are blooming, and bees are in a fervor of pollen-collection.

I took this shot a few minutes ago while on hold by an incompetent hotel employee. Somehow, being ignored wasn’t so bad since I got to watch these two little guys (gals, actually) clamber around the glorious sunflowers growing behind my office.

My camera has a fantastic macro mode, so I was able to get pretty good resolution:

Even that image (click on it!) is not full-res, but I could not get enough of the image to be cool and still keep it under 400kb, and my bandwidth is somewhat of an issue. Anyway, the full-res image is phenomenal, and I’m using it as my PC desktop background now. Makes me think of iced tea, reading trashy novels, and summer constellations.

Yay!