A friend of mine…ya you Ron…gave me a bit of inspiration for this post. I decided to do an image search on the word squirrel to see what would show up. Man…I didn’t realize they were so popular. None of the images in this gallery were created by me. Someone else with a high quality image editor or a well trained squirrel put them together, and I don’t remember where they come from. Just search, and I’m sure you’ll find them.
As I look up into the sky at night, there’s one constellation that grabs my attention….Orion. I’ve never cared much for the constellations, especially when they’re associated with horoscopes, but over the past few years, I’ve really developed an interest in science fiction and astronomy.
In 95 I took one of the bigest steps of my life….picked up and moved my entire family out of state to attend college. This was a pretty tough time, and I can remember laying in bed at night, looking out the window at the stars. I would gain a bit of comfort knowing that that Orion looked the same in North Dakota as it did in my home state of Illinois.
Here’s a few interesting facts about the constellation: Orion refers to the name of a hunter in Greek mythology. It’s stars are close to the celestial equator, and therefore visible to most everyone on the planet. There are two notable stars….the first is Betelgeuse a red supergiant is found in the upper left corner. The second is Rigel a blue super giant. Check out the image below.
I hadn’t really thought about it, but some stars are very different. Our sun Sol, located in the upper left of the image is just a tiny dot compared to Betelgeuse and Rigel. If Betelgeuse were at the center of our solar system, its ouside layers would reach between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars would dissappear into the star….wow that’s big.
Rigel is the brightest star in Orion, and the 6th brightest in the night sky. However, Betelgeuse is a semiregular variable star star and can sometimes be brighter than Rigel.
I’ve been toying with the idea of installing linux on one of my older PC’s……well tonight’s the night. I installed Ubuntu on a machine with about 320MB of ram, a processor running at 1.2 Ghz, and 20GB hard drive. So far so good.
Ubuntu seems to be more popular than most other distro’s at this point in time….distrowatch has it listed at the top. I wanted something with quite a bit of support for my first go at it. Many of the distro’s come with a live CD these days that allow you to boot the OS from the CD rom drive without making changes to the HD, and this allows you to test out your hardware before installing.
More on Linux later….as I learn the ropes.
