NoXion

The series continues, hopefully this one won't be as long as the previous installment. From here on we will be heading outwards from the Sun, starting with Mercury and continuing from there.


An image of Mercury taken by NASA's MESSENGER probe. Note the prominent rays emanating from the various craters

Rotation and Orbit

Mercury, being the innermost planet, has a faster and...

Most of the information in the following post is gleaned from the book Teach Yourself Planets, with additional information and images from other sources. Hopefully the idea behind this post is to provide an at-a-glance summary of the most pertinent information contained therein.

Local Geography

The Solar System is centred around the Sun, which is a G class star located approximately halfway from the core in the main disk of the Milky Way, which is believed to be a barred...

...My course materials have arrived!

Part of the package's contents include Teach Yourself Planets, which is part of a series, upon which the textbook is based. Skimming through the textbook reveals that it refers to TYP fairly frequently, which seems a cumbersome way of doing it at the very least. My impression was that the textbook would incorporate the relevant sections of TYP, which is what I liked about my previous course, which had everything in one handy textbook. The upshot...

I've been getting them for past few weeks - it always comes up with "private number" and it's always some kind of pre-recorded/machine type thing. You'd think that people would have the stones and/or originality to do the prank calls themselves, perhaps from a payphone or something.

It's sad really, because there have been some really great prank telephone calls in history. Convincing the Queen to record a speech in support of Canadian unity ahead of the 1995 Quebec referendum...

So yesterday I phoned up the Open University and asked them to send me an prospectus/application form for one of their science short courses, which include a section which the Jobcentre can stamp and sign so that somebody else pays for the course and not me. Excellent.

I had previously taken the course S197 How the Universe works, and to my mild surprise I managed to pass! So now that I am more familiar with home study, I felt it appropriate to go for another short course, but to try...