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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Back to Work!

Oct. 23, 2006 | 12:21 PDT | 19:21 UTC

Weblog Archive

Well, here I am. I've been flying a tight orbit around my house for the last twelve weeks, and I'm very glad I took the time; motherhood is hard! Baby Anahita is still a full-time job, but as of about three weeks ago she finally started sleeping long enough at night that I began to want -- actually, I'll be honest here, I began to be desperate for -- something to do with my brain. Fortunately, The Planetary Society is a uniquely generous employer, and they are permitting me (as they have done for many other employees in the past) to continue to care for the baby full-time while returning to work. So, all the time that I'll be composing my little entries for this weblog, I'll be accompanied by Anahita.

I'm very grateful for the efforts of the guest bloggers over the last twelve weeks, who donated their time to explore issues they found important while also covering some of the important events that have happened: the solar system semantic debate that gives us eight planets, the arrival of Opportunity at Victoria, and Cassini's smashing portrait of Saturn eclipsing the Sun, among other things. Most of the guests seemed to enjoy themselves, and I hope to see them as well as new contributors appear again in this space from time to time. Many of the guests told me, though, that blogging turned out to be much harder than they expected. Blogs may be off-the-cuff in style but that doesn't mean you can get away with being sloppy with the facts, and trying to get the facts right does take work! Thank you to Neil, Andre, Andrew, Jim, Lou, Rosaly, John, Mark, Dave, Doug, Brad, and Bill for taking the time and effort out of your busy lives to share your thoughts.

Click to enlarge >

Ariane 5 launch
Credit: Arianespace

I will need to spend a little time getting up to speed on the events of the past twelve weeks. I have been reading the news but I haven't been living it, and I definitely need to spend more time poring over the latest photos from Opportunity, Cassini, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I will mention one space event that was of great importance to our household during my maternity leave -- important even to my economist husband. On October 12, an Ariane 5 rocket successfully lifted off with the DirecTV 9S satellite aboard. We just switched to DirecTV from cable, mostly so that my husband can watch every single football game every weekend, but also in order that I can continue getting NASA TV at home, because our local cable carrier had decided to drop it. (My husband enjoyed telling the Time Warner employee that we were canceling our cable service and switching to DirecTV because they dropped NASA TV. The hapless Time Warner employee had no response prepared for that complaint -- I don't expect she hears it very often.) The new satellite will give DirecTV more high-definition bandwidth. Maybe one day NASA TV will enter the 21st century and broadcast in high def!

I'll ask you to indulge a new mother for a moment to let me show you what happens when a planetary scientist is driven to act on her nesting instinct. About two weeks before Anahita arrived, I was suddenly struck with the urge to create this blanket.

Click to enlarge >

Anahita on her Saturn blanket

I'd sewn a similar one a few years ago for my friend Geoff Collins (astronomy professor at Wheaton) -- he received a Jupiter-themed blanket from me for the arrival of his second kid. I still had all these nifty atmospheric looking flannel fabrics and decided it was time to sew Saturn. Saturn was harder than Jupiter though, with all those rings, and with all the rather similar-looking moons (similar, at least, at the resolution of patchwork quilting); I decided I had to play with phase angles to make the moons more interesting.

Putting this project together resulted in quite a battle between my left and right brains, which was fun. It was my left brain that insisted that all the moons had to be to scale with each other, and the rings to scale with each other and Saturn. Saturn's also properly oblate, and I tried to show the scale of Titan's atmosphere correctly. But my right brain got to have fun with the colors and the patterns I worked into the quilting. It's hard to see in this picture, but I even worked the fountains coming out of Enceladus' south pole to create a faint E ring into the quilting. I did cop out and show Saturn near equinox; the present-day ring shadows would have been too hard!