Just Missed

I've enjoyed a nice weekend. Buoyed by the return of Fall Weather, and relieved that Hurricane Rick defied the models and shrank to a Tropical Storm, turned right and became a Non-Event for Southern Baja. In the mountains, temperatures are trending warmer and the sun is shining! Boreal has thrown a wrench into my Schadenfreude Machine however, by leaving a three day old image on their mountain webcam...a snowy, foggy scene with moisture on the lens. The remote sensors don't lie though...the thermometer at 7300ft shows only two tiny dips into freezing temps over the nine days since the Big Storm came through!

BajaBabe phoned last night to enquire about the Orionid Meteor Showers while I was immersed in a Science Channel Show on NASA's New Horizons Mission that's launched it's probe towards Pluto. This one is really cool...light, fast, and it carries a Dust Particle Counter designed and built by college students, the first flight-ready detector by college students to fly. Pluto is so small and so far from the Sun, that it's atmosphere freezes and falls to the surface of Pluto during Pluto's Winter! New Horizons launched in January 2006, and will arrive at Pluto in July 2015

The Orionids are pretty good this year, the moon is just a crescent so seeing is good as Earth flies through the debris left behind by Halley's Comet. If you're in Dark Skies, you'll be able to view 30 meteorites per hour over the next couple of nights...tonight at 2AM PDT is the forecast peak of this years shower. The "shooting stars" appear to radiate from the Constellation Orion, hence their name: Orionids.

I spent some time over my weekend researching a Handheld Device like an iPhone that works on my cellphone network...I'm really stoked to get a device that I can view weather satellite and radar images with in RealTime, while up on my Mountain in my Cat. While I was surfing thru the Geek-Gadget Web World I stumbled upon a Skiing Robot! This one's from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia. I was disappointed in the video...the robot skis fine...but missing in action...the Corduroy!