If your skies were clear and you happened to look southeast Monday evening soon after sunset, here’s what you might have seen:
The bright crescent is the Moon, the brighter “star” is Venus and the dimmer dot is Jupiter, here in a rare visible close conjunction (a church in my neighborhood is in the foreground). In reality, the two planets were somewhat more similar in appearance than this image suggests, but Jupiter must have been just barely bright enough to trigger the iPhone’s CCD. I remember reading an article about backyard digital astrophotography in a science magazine 20-plus years ago; now I have a device in my pocket that can pull it off, albeit only with the most brilliant objects in the sky. Another detail — when you blow the image up, you can kind of make out the fact that Venus is showing a crescent phase, just as the Moon is. Astronomy is way cool.
– cpd
December 3rd, 2008
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Cross-posted on techPresident and K Street Cafe
Now that the details are slooowly creeping out and we have a clearer idea of the Obama election team’s online numbers, what conclusions can we draw for the future? Right off the bat, Jose Antonio Vargas’s recent piece in the Post suggests something critical: online communications campaigns should consider offering supporters tiers of potential engagement.
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December 2nd, 2008
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This just in from a friend in Georgia, who’s a little disheartened about how today’s senatorial runoff election seems to be going:
On the plus side, I did get three personal calls — one from Bill Clinton, one from Michelle Obama, and one from the President-Elect himself — urging me to vote for Jim Martin. There must be something wrong with our phone, though, because they all just kept on talking to me even though I tried to interrupt them multiple times. Each time, we got cut off as soon as they finished their pitch. I guess they had a lot of other people to call…
Nice! Though I doubt they were as good-looking as the robocalls around here…
– cpd
December 2nd, 2008
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