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I’m at Dragon*Con having fun and being skeptical, so today you get to see my cat in mood lighting.
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About Bad Astronomy
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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September 5th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Window open or closed?
If the BA’s dog is named Canis Minor then is the BA’s cat named Leo minor or Lynx?
See Kaler’s stars websites : http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/lmi-t.html & http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/lyn-t.html respectively.
My owner, the black tortoiseshell cat known as Zosma (after Delta Leonis) sends its purring regards to what appears to be a similar fortunate black cat.
September 5th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Looks like one on LOLCats today! http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/09/05/funny-pictures-kitty-theater-presents/
BTW, did you see the big “Boooo” that Google should get today?
September 5th, 2009 at 8:40 am
so today you get to see my cat in mood lighting
Or absence thereof? If there are any lights on there BA they are turned down *really* dim!
September 5th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Contemplative kitteh…
September 5th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Reminds me of my cat at the moment. She’s probably sitting in the window at my apartment while I’m visiting my girlfriend 3 hours away this weekend.
September 5th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Now I know I’m a hard-core fanboi – fangeezer? – of Phil Plait. Not only a man of science and reason but, a cat lover… my day is now complete. HoChiMeow, my tuxedo cat has also put his stamp of approval on this obviously very cool site.
I am now going over to Fark.com to partake in some more Caturday worship.
September 5th, 2009 at 9:58 am
check out arrowhead kitty on FARK.com’s caturday. Kitty is OK, for the most part.
September 5th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Amazing. My young daughter’s cat has the same pose in the window, “playing mountain lion” according to her, looking down on lesser creatures according to me.
September 5th, 2009 at 10:03 am
As I recall she’s named (Schrö)Dinger.
September 5th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I’m looking at this picture and my cat “Rugby” has just jumped up and settled down right in front of the screen and is starring at it. Improbable? Not when psyCATology is considered. Meow, meow.
September 5th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Is that silhoutte a small cat inside the window seen fairly close or a large cat (puma even) outside the window seen far off?
(Okay there’s the chimmley & roof for some sort of scale but then .. how big are *they* really?)
Schrodinger’s cat? Nice.
Is it really a black cat or a white cat in shadow? Or is it half black, half white in quantum flux and will only settle on an out-of-shadow colour once an observer collapses the wave-function?
September 5th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Off topic but this could be important – Betelguex looks *very* bright right now. 3.41 am South Australian time.
Its cloudy-ish but fairly high in sky – looks like its nearly or equally as bright as Sirius and is very vividly red. Can anyone confirm or check this please?
Conditions here are not ideal with strong moonlight & clouds.
Its probably nothing, of course, but still … if something is happening I’d love ppl tobe checking ASAP! Its got me excited.
I know its possibly, probably even a false alarm & that Betelguese is a variable star, perhaps just having an unusally bright maxima but still ..
Just clouded over o/s but Betelguese is just punching through the clouds -very bright and red making a distinct first & negative mag triangle with Sirius & Rigel. I would estimate its much brighter than Rigel and approaching Sirius in apparent mag. I could be wrong but .. please check this out anyway if you can…
Just clouded over o/s but Betelguese is just punching through theclouds -very bright and red making a distinct first & negative mag triangle with Sirius & Rigel. I would estimate its muhc brightertahn Rigel and approaching Sirius. Conditions not ideal (moonlight & clouds) but if something is happening y’all may want to check this out.
September 5th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Spaz, Sid, Kaos, Jedi, and Jack, my ‘kids’ since I don’t have any of the human variety, all raise a friendly paw in greetings on the first Caturday during the intertoobs 41st year of existence.
Speaking of which, I’m kinda surprised we didn’t see a “Happy Birthday to the Intertoobs” post here.
My Facebook post: On September 2nd 1969, in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, two computers passed test data through a 15-foot gray cable. Stanford Research Institute joined the fledgling ARPANET network a month later; UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah joined by years end, and the internet was born. ~cribbed from Wired (I think)
September 5th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
That one is interested in something on the window sill. An ant, or other insect… you don’t have cockroaches, do you?
My cat’s name is “Phong”, like the character on “Reboot”. He’s an orange tabby… and one cranky old crud.
September 6th, 2009 at 12:43 am
#2, Larian,
I think it’s got something to do with a new OS they are planning to launch. The Tweet Google sent out translates, “All Your O Are Belong To Us”… Remember that one?! LOL
So it could be translated another way, “All your OS belong to us.” But, I’m just speculating. I actually did not see it, and only learned about it a short time ago. I love a good mystery though!
(He’s talking about Googles Doodle that featured a UFO abducting the second ‘O’)
September 6th, 2009 at 2:11 am
Since I prefer Canis Minor, I’ll exact revenge by saying Jupiter has been promoted from planet to star:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8239188.stm
The part of the story about something going “boom!” in the sky is very interesting, but the story’s ruined a bit by the repetitive references to Jupiter as the brightest star in the sky …
September 6th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Very off-topic, but since this blog is popular with the freakish* minority that thinks that things like evidence, facts, and logic actually matter, I thought they’d enjoy the shout-out in today’s (Sunday) Doonesbury comic.
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090906
* If you don’t think you’re freakish, just think of the looks you get when you try to explain to “normal” people why homeopathic remedies are at best placebos, and that the Earth is demonstrably a) round and b) more than 6000 years old and that there is no way to “reach a compromise” with people who claim otherwise.
September 6th, 2009 at 8:25 am
I don’t think the cat was really sitting on the window sill. He photoshopped the picture to make it look like the cat is there. The cat never actually landed on the sill.
September 6th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Looks the cat on the front of Master and Margarita
September 6th, 2009 at 9:14 am
My kitteh, Copernicus, didn’t get the memo about the Copernican revolution. He still thinks the universe revolves around him…
http://shaneonthego.blogspot.com
September 6th, 2009 at 9:18 am
My kitteh, Copernicus, didn’t get the memo about the Copernican revolution. He still thinks the universe revolves around him…
Copernicus
September 6th, 2009 at 9:19 am
My kitteh, Copernicus, didn’t get the memo about the Copernican revolution. He still thinks the universe revolves around him…
Click my name for Copernicus.
Damn spambot keeps swallowing my posts. Take 3.
September 6th, 2009 at 11:10 am
@15
And look how tall the cat is: the same size as the chimney! No house cat is that big. Obviously a hoax!
September 6th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Along the same vein as Kim started… Today’s ‘Doonesbury’ strip (Sunday 9/6) is relevant and worth reading.
Here’s a current link to it: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/
(You may have to click on ‘previous’ come Monday.)
September 6th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Sorry folks but this picture is faked, totally faked!
Nothing like this could ever happen in the real world, not ever. Cat’s dont stand in windows (mine doesn’t) okay maybe it does.
Phil just got some card and cut a cat shape out, painted it black then placed it upon ‘a’ window frame – that’s of course, if it is<- actually a window frame because it might be a real optical illusion. The roof, oh dear, the roof, well, that background is a super emposed photograph with a hidden face in it. The chimney is made of cake.
Yes, it’s just been confirmed by NASA just now from their Twitter page, that the chimney is definately made of cake, and because it’s been verified loads of times on Twitter, it’s just a bit of cake (the whole of this paragraph).
Claire (Gets coat quickly. Very quickly)
September 7th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Well I believe it is indeed a cat. Only cats (and some French women) have such an innate sense of style, such an intrinsic sense of pose and background. Seulement le chat…
September 7th, 2009 at 6:28 am
That isn’t a cat! The shadows are all wrong. As well, it’s common knowledge that Phil lives in outer space, and that cat appears to be sitting, which requires GRAVITY! Also, you can see a cooling duct from the NASA stage in the upper left-hand corner of the “window”. This is the greatest cover-up of the week so far! When the aliens arrive to earth from Planet X, a brown dwarf, a killer solar flare, or Mars (any one works) with Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the chucacabra, and Casper the (un)Friendly Ghost, all you weaklings who believe the lies of Phil Plait will be left to perish! PERISH! THERE IS NO CAT!!! NASA IS EVIL!!!
Sorry, but I’ve seen so many rants like this it’s hard to pass up an opportunity to make fun of them. I would do the whole thing in caps, but then nobody would read it.
September 20th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Please note. The word ‘cake’ rhymes with ‘fake’.
That’s very important.
Claire