APOD: South Pole Star Trails (2012 Aug 02)

[Anthony Barreiro]

Thanks ta152h0 (how do you pronounce that?) and Neufer, this is very interesting. The various assertions and dismissals of this theory make me think that (1) human beings are very good at finding correlations and patterns; (2) it's hard to know what people who lived long ago and didn't leave any written documents may or may not have been thinking; and (3) it's a common mistake of lazy or disputatious thinking to conclude that because a hypothesis has not been proven it has therefore been disproven. One possibility not mentioned in the wikipedia article: perhaps an older late paleolithic culture built smaller monuments at these locations, and the later fourth dynasty Egyptians built the surviving pyramids and Sphinx on the same sites. One can speculate endlessly. I'll meditate wearing my pyramid hat this evening and let you all know what I discover.

Detail Observed from 10 Feet away with Curiosity's ChemCam
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

<<This image displays the type of detail discernible with the telescopic camera of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Curiosity rover. The instrument uses a telescope for spectroscopic analysis of chemical elements in targets such as rocks or soil. The same telescope serves the instrument's camera, called the remote microimager. For this image, the remote microimager photographed a dollar bill from 10 feet (3 meters) away.

ChemCam was conceived, designed and built by a U.S.-French team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N. M.; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (the French government space agency); and the Centre d'Étude Spatiale des Rayonnements at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France. Researchers will use the tools on the rover to study whether the landing region has had environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and favorable for preserving clues about whether life existed.>>

Thanks Neufer. Having watched the JPL live feed of the landing of Curiosity on Mars and seen the first pictures in a packed planetarium last night, I do believe that Providence has favored our endeavors, and that we may be entering a new age, perhaps marked from A.D. MCMLVII. Now if we could just start working toward "E Pluribus Unum" on a global scale ... .