Comet!

Hello to all my new ‘visitors’!!! I wasn’t expecting you or I would have vacuumed, but you’re very welcome. I guess since people are already signing up, I should tell my existing Kickstarter backers to come over here, now. The site seems to have launched itself! It’s nowhere near finished yet, though. I tend to work in an evolutionary manner (who would have guessed?), so I tend to do a little bit of everything and then go back and revise it, rather than finish one bit and then move on to the next. This is true for my programming, too, so things will often look half-finished, as if I don’t know what I’m doing, because that’s just the way I work. So, be gentle with me as I add more stuff and experiment with how to explain things!

I have nothing particularly interesting to say right now, but I’m really looking forward to blogging again. On the (non-public) Kickstarter site I mostly focused on documenting progress and ideas with the game, but years ago, back when I had spare time, I used to really enjoy blogging about more general things – just stuff I’d noticed that I found interesting. It was usually connected with complexity, biology, self-organization and suchlike, but I had thousands of followers who didn’t seem to mind what I talked about, so I was just as likely to talk about geology, the weather, or in this case astronomy. I’d like to get back to doing that here.

I haven’t decided how to categorize my posts, yet, but currently I’m going with physicality (stuff about the project, the software, etc.), virtuality (stuff about the virtual world inside the game, such as its biology and geography), and phantasy (stories, philosophy of mind, random blog posts). I’ll try to remember to categorize the non-game-related stuff under phantasy, and then you can ignore it as you wish.

Anyway, on Saturday I tried to photograph the ‘comet of the century’ (snappily named C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), but the pollution down here in Phoenix obscured it completely. What I need, I decided, is a convenient parking lot, about 9,000 feet above sea level, and preferably one that will be well stocked with astronomers, so that I know which direction to look.

And happily I knew just the place! So, on Sunday I drove back to where I used to live, in delightful Flagstaff, Arizona, and went up to the Snowbowl ski area (yes, Arizona has ski areas!). Sure enough, the place was teeming with astronomers.

The main reason for this, incidentally, is that there are lots of really serious telescopes in the area, taking advantage of the ultra-clear air. Also, Pluto was discovered from Flagstaff, and the Apollo astronauts did a lot of training there, partly because there’s a stonking great hole in the ground nearby (Meteor Crater) and also the landscape looks quite similar to the moon, because of all the volcanic activity.

I did forget that it would be cold up there, so I went in a tee-shirt and shorts! But I thought it was going to be a bust anyway, because when the sun set, there was a massive cloud bank, exactly where the comet was supposed to be. Just as we were all starting to think about going home, the cloud moved off, stage right, and wow! There it was! So I thought I’d share it with you.

If you haven’t seen it but would like to, you have a few days in which to do so. You’ll need a clear view to the western horizon, shortly after sunset. As the sun goes down, you’ll notice Venus off to its left. On Sunday, the comet was at the same level as Venus, but about as far again to the right of the Sun. Up there at 9,000ft (2,700m), you couldn’t miss it, but it will be harder to see at sea level. Each day it moves up a bit, relative to Venus, and will get fainter as it speeds at a hundred thousand miles per hour away from earth. Good luck!!!