[ astronomy internets photography ]

A Relocation in the Life

On September 25th of last year, I started a project: I was to take and share one picture a day over the span of a year. It’s still going strong, and I’ll report back when it’s finished in just over a month, but matters require a quick update.

I was hosting “A Year in the Life” on Flickr, because, well, all the cool kids were doing it, and I’m nothing if not suggestible. As it turns out though, a free Flickr account comes with an itty-bitty living space of 200 photos max.

“Such is the price of immortality: arbitrary limits”

Turns out 200 isn’t a big enough number to hold 365 days of photos, and so I’m moving my non-for-profit business elsewhere—to Google’s Picasa, to be exact, where free accounts can be comfortable in their sexuality, and have a somewhat more flexible 1GB limit.

The link is here.

I’m currently in the process of migrating the photos, so not everything will be there immediately, but it should be so in the next week or two. So say we all.

Planets are awesome

As an interesting bit of trivia, Mercury and Venus are the only planets in the Solar System on which “A Year in the Life” could be fully hosted on a free Flickr account—their years consist of a total of about 0.5 and 1.92 local days, respectively. Venus is an interesting case: it orbits the Sun in 224 Earth-days, but it completes a full rotation on itself (a sidereal day) in 243 Earth-days—its day is longer than its year! However, whereas all other planets (viewed from above the Sun’s North Pole) rotate on themselves in a counter-clockwise direction, Venus rotates clockwise, or in retrograde. It’s because of this retrograde rotation that—to an observer on Venus—the Venusian year would last a total of 1.92 Venusian days.