Meteor Showers Hurt

Apparently there is a meteor shower going on tonight. I think meteor showers are very interesting things. Some people envision this:

...brilliant streams of light sparkling in the  night sky - glittering wishes, hopeful, but sad and quickly gone.

Then NASA shows us pictures like this: 

...an underwhelming streak of light about to disappear in the overwhelming beauty of our planet.

I have a slightly different image: an image of giant rocks soaring through millions of light years of space, only to accidentally bump into a planet and begin plummeting to their doom, ablaze; miles of atmosphere, of cold, and hot and fire... and then they drop on my head with a perpetual clatter as I try to slather shampoo into my hair. And of course they melt the plastic on the bottom of my tub and I don't get my deposit back when I move out of my apartment. 

You know what I think about meteor showers? They hurt. And they ruined my shower.

31 Days of Planets: Ceres

Day 29

I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL 2015!!! That's the year the Dawn probe reaches Ceres! Can you imagine the math it must take to calculate a path to get to a planet? Incredible. It's like aiming for a moving target and taking it fifty years to get there. Actually, NASA launched Dawn in 2007, so that's only eight years, but still! Magnificent. And it stopped at Vespa on the way - a bit of a detour. But still! Magnificent. I'd both love and hate to see the equation.

Now Ceres is a dwarf planet - the only one inside the inner solar system, in fact. It is also the largest asteroid. It was named after the goddess of growing plants, the harvest, and motherly love.

I know the picture is blurry, but just imagine. In two years, we'll have magnificent pictures of this beautiful dwarf planet - close up!

In conclusion, "let's go see the asteroids, let's go see the star-ar-ars! Cowboys, heroes, cops and robbers! Glamour and strife! Bigger than life!"

Pictures from Wikipedia.