Sunday, October 12, 2008

Traveling The Solar System, Twice In One Day

So here I am, back home and suffering from the usual post-vacation letdown, intensified by the loud, obnoxious cricket that just started chirping somewhere in my apartment. But a cricket cannot kill me whereas a moose in Maine came close to doing just that, so overall I’d say that where personal safety is concerned, the wildlife of suburban Connecticut are far superior to that of the rural North.

The day after the Night of the Moose, my Traveling Companion and I made an 80-mile round trip to tour the Maine Solar System Model, a scale model of the Sun and nine planets (Pluto still counts) that stretches out for 40 miles along U.S. Route 1. It’s definitely worth checking out if you have a couple if hours to kill and are in the neighborhood anyway; otherwise, you can check out the photo essay written and compiled by my traveling companion himself. (I make a cameo appearance in one of the photos, as The Hand Holding The Dollar Bill Next To The Scale Models Of Pluto And Charon.)

10 Comments:

Blogger Windypundit said...

OF COURSE PLUTO COUNTS! DAMNED EURO-TRASH PLUTO_HATERS!

10:46 PM  
Blogger WJW said...

If you wouldn't want to beam down there, is it really a planet?

3:06 PM  
Blogger Jennifer Abel said...

I'd say so. Earth is a planet, though God knows I'm not here by choice.

3:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jennifer,
Your blog entry needs a sound track. Just click my name.

12:06 PM  
Blogger Anne O'Neimaus said...

Your significant other is not only reasonably good-looking, but he seems quite familiar with the appropriate geeky referents (classic sci-fi and comics) to be both intelligent and insightful... I wish the best to you both.

By the way - are the axes of the various planetary models supposed to be (relatively) accurate? Despite my own geekiness, I was not aware that we had a planet with an axis essentially parallel to the plane of the ecliptic...

Too bad they didn't have a spherical nuclear power-plant handy to use as the sun...it would have been just too appropriate!

8:10 PM  
Blogger Jennifer Abel said...

Anne, Uranus falls over on its axis, so that at various points in its orbit, one pole or another points almost directly at the sun.

8:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Your significant other is not only reasonably good-looking

Anne seems to be feeling remarkably girly today.

Anne, Uranus falls over on its axis, so that at various points in its orbit, one pole or another points almost directly at the sun.

And we'll spare everyone the jokes about Uranus pointing at the sun and needing sunscreen and all that.

11:38 AM  
Blogger Jennifer Abel said...

Mmmm. You should've seen him when we first met, and he had long bad-boy hair as opposed to a respectable haircut ... mmmmm.

12:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

and he had long bad-boy hair as opposed to a respectable haircut

And did you shear off his locks, Delilah? ;-)

5:50 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mmmm. You should've seen him when we first met, and he had long bad-boy hair as opposed to a respectable haircut ... mmmmm.

Most of the time it doesn't bother me that I pretty much have lost all my hair. Other times...::sigh::

3:27 AM  

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