After 304 days in space, Scott Kelly said one of the things he most missed was…weather.
The year lept forward on February 29. I found the rules for determining leap years. Every fourth, of course. Except when the year is divisible by 100: then, not. Except when the year is divisible by 400: then, yes. (So, as it turns out, I’ve never been around for a year divisible by 4 that wasn’t a leap year.) Leap!
A week from now, the clock springs forward, too. Boing! Somebody’s always messing with what time it is. All to make time run faster and jump higher. Lucky for us, we have a couple automated clocks (phones) to carry around for guidance as we reset all the dumb clocks (coffee maker—important!)
Indeed, spring has lept forward (March 1 being the meteorological start of spring). Near record high temperatures—in the 60s—in Santa Fe, even though the Ski Basin still boasts six feet of snow. Yes, and it’s warm enough for arsonists to have fun lighting fires in the Bosque near Albuquerque. No rest for the wicked. But the average last frost isn’t until around May 15, so we’re not whipping out the short-sleeve shirts just yet.
We sometimes gaze into Santa Fe’s clear night sky to see the ISS glide across the stars. NASA is a top tax ROI. The Hubble telescope has seen a galaxy dating from about 400 million years after the Big Bang (near when the lights came on). To put this in perspective, plants have been on Earth longer: 500 million years. I was taken aback. Imagine that. 400 million years from when time began. One giant leap.
Scott Kelly speculated that if world leaders could spend awhile together in the ISS, staring at the whole delicate Earth, they might get a hint of how pointless all their petty territorial conflicts seem.
Kelly said, …you also notice how fragile the atmosphere looks and it makes you more of an environmentalist after seeing that. We need to take care of the air we breathe and the water we drink. We do have an impact on that and the ability to change it if we make the decision to.
Weather on a large scale.
Earth Hour arrives on March 19th: 8:30–9:30PM, local time wherever you are, lights off for an hour. Now that would be a sight to behold from space. Sprinkles of darkness (or at least some fading) appearing in citified areas, one zone at a time, chasing the sunlight, worldwide.
March 19th. 8:30–9:30PM. Join us: lights out. One hour of nurturing a 500 million year investment. Gaze into the stars.