The Blaisdell Blog

The evening of Monday, March 25, 1996 was crisply cold and clear.   It was quite late. With an early alarm and at least 10 hours of work ahead of me the next day what was I doing driving out of St. Louis toward the dark farm fields of rural Illinois?   The answer, of course, is love.   I love my husband and he loves astronomy.   We were going to see Comet Hyakutake, an interplanetary traveler who had taken everyone by surprise.   What I saw took my breath away.   Comet Hyakutake was brighter than most stars (magnitude zero on a scale where the smaller the number the brighter the object), with a coma larger than the moon.   Its tail covered 80 degrees of arc; you could not see it all without moving your eyes along its length.   Near the zenith, it was so close you could see it move against the star field!   It had a bluish-green color due to its emissions of diatomic carbon.   Celestial beauty does not come any rarer.    T...

June 10 th is the anniversary of the famous trial, Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes.   It put the small town of Dayton, Tennessee on the map and gave us a great play and movie, Inherit the Wind .   Setting that aside, there was plenty of theatrics in the trial itself.               In March of 1925 the state of Tennessee had passed the “Butler” act (no relation as far as I can tell or that my husband will attest to) which outlawed the teaching of evolution.   The only story of creation allowed in the God-fearin’ state of Tennessee was what came out of the King James Bible.   The Tennessee legislature did not make any allowance for the fact that the original text of the Bible was in ancient Greek and Aramaic and may or may not have been faithfully rendered into English.               John Scopes, a substitute science teacher, was recruited by ...

On July 5, 1945 the bikini swimming suit was first unveiled by a French fashion designer.   It was named after the atoll where atomic bombs were tested in the atmosphere in peacetime.   The bomb tests were not a good idea, but the bikini swimsuit was.   That put me in mind of this blog I wrote about buying a swimsuit at an advanced age.   I am a good swimmer.   In the water I am totally relaxed, not fighting my body, moving in sync with the buoyancy.   It offers an amazing feeling of freedom and tranquility.               In 2014 Tom and I visited Australia and New Zealand.   While exploring Australian waterfalls, Tom and I got to one that had a small swimming beach bordering the plunge pool.   I swam across the pond and through the cascade on the far side of the pool, sat on the rocks under the waterfall and then swam back out again.   Tom was taking pictures the whole time....