I’m just doing what I have to do. It takes someone to listen, too, so don’t say it’s because of me. I’m just a match; you’re the firecracker.

Oh– I met Jack some years ago at the first James Randi Amaz!ng Meeting. We got along pretty well. I have more hair than he does! But I don’t want to kick his ass. I just want his job.

First off, I simply love your blogin’s. You’ve shown me so much… so many huge and incredible things. Thank you for being here.

This little posting is wonderfully profound, it sheds clear light on our OWN origins, and our certain fate. You made some very heady concepts most remarkably easy to understand.

I blogged this post to http://www.blah3.com under the title “Where We’re Heading.” on 20 OCT 05. I hope you get some traffic from us, as your site is MOST deserving of as wide an audience as possible. I hope I didn’t gush too much about you in my post.

I sincerely find you one of the best teachers I’ve ever had to pleasure to know. Thanks again for being here… If my Astronomy Prof in College was even halfway as good as you, I’d have never missed a class. Because of you, I can actually work the Main Sequence of Stars in my head… and actually see them, in my mind’s eye, in all of their massiveness, floating in Space. When you show us a new star, I can classify it immediatly as I read the data you provide…

So there’s my little testimony for you… What used to take me hours, laboring with pencil, graph paper and calculator… I now can do at a glance. Bravo Zulu, Phil! You tought an old, salty (Navy) dog new tricks!

You kick Jack Horkheimer’s ass!

Cheers!

-Tony B.

1) Barred spirals are still spirals.

2) That’s why I didn’t say it would look exactly like it.

3) To my knowledge, any spiral with big, well-organized arms is grand design. I’ll have to look into that more deeply. As long as they aren’t Intelligently Designed. Maybe they’re noodly instead.

“At first glance, NGC 1097 looks like a fairly typical spiral galaxy”

Well, a “fairly typical barred spiral galaxy” anyway.

“Our Milky Way would look a lot like that from a few million light years away, too.”

While the Milky Way is a barred spiral, That looks like a SBa to me and I thought the MW is a SBb.

“Sometimes, this kind of galaxy is called a “grand designâ€? spiral, because the spiral pattern is so big and obvious.”

I thought “grand designâ€? spirals were more like M31 and M33 – Big, multi-armed and more circular than elliptical.