Remarkable tattoo

THIS photograph was posted to an Internet forum recently. It’s got to be the coolest tattoo I’ve ever seen (or do I mean it’s the only cool tattoo I’ve ever seen)? I just hope the joke doesn’t wear thin after a few decades.

Adelaide Fringe Festival 2008

Today I booked tickets for various performances at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and Womadelaide. Most of my choices involve folk/world music by artists that are new to me, but sound great. For each performance on my list, I’ve invited a relative or friend to come with me.

More Starshots: The location of Heaven

Using Starstrider (the software I mentioned in my previous post), I have found a G-class star with a really nice view. I’m choosing to believe (at least in jest) that it is the location of Heaven. The star in question is about four hundred light years from Earth, and is known to astronomers by such inspiring names as HIP 20740 and HD 28113. Here are links to its web pages on Simbad and Wikisky.

What do I like about this star (apart from the fact that it’s a yellow G-class like the sun)? Well, for one thing, the Pleiades are about 100 light years away and perfectly aligned with the gap in the Milky Way which contains the stars Deneb and Sadr. Exactly 180 degrees across the sky, the stars Betelgeuse and Rigel guard opposite sides of another gap in the Milky Way. I happen to think these alignments look cool, and would probably give rise to interesting mythologies (the only snag is that you generally wouldn’t be able to see both from a single location on a planet).

Our place in the sky

Have you ever wondered what significance our Sun might have in alien astrology? This post contains pictures of imaginary constellations from the night skies of hypothetical planets orbiting real stars. All stars in these constellations are real, and in each case one of them is always our very own Sun.

I created the images using the shareware program Starstrider. It’s an excellent program in theory (and mostly in practise, too) but I’ve always felt it’s a little too buggy for the $50 US asking price. However, I’ve now decided to buy it, for two reasons. One, the exchange rate right now is such that it probably really is worth the price. Two, I expect that the next release of the program (which might fix some bugs) will not be compatible with my computer.

First of all, the the view from Alpha Centauri shows our Sun to be the very tip of an animalesque constellation’s snout. Compared to Delta Persei, which is quite a different orifice of the same beast, we may consider ourselves fortunate.