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恭喜发财. Congratulations, and be prosperous

Compared to Apollo missions, Mercury and Gemini missions really not on the same par of popularity. Still, it must've feels great for the astronauts participating on those missions.

NASA and Arizona State University have released collection of images from Mercury and Gemini programs on March To The Moon website. They really looks great. It rejuvenates my childhood dreams that in the near future, in my lifetime, spaceflight could be afforded by average people like myself; who knows what the future might hold? :)

Waaait, that doesn't seem legit...

Joke aside, I wonder if the scammers has any common sense at all. People alarm would instantly go off just by looking at the sender name and email address; Why would Western Union rep sending email using Zarouni Foods address?

A good article from mas Vavai, "If you can't do things, only "can't do" just once". Learn so you can do it the next time you had the chance.

ps: not sure if I'm translating it right

Phil Plait a.k.a Bad Astronomer wrote about how years "work" and why astronomers are less enthusiasts about New Year :)

Some excerpt:

Let’s say we used a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time. We’ll see that it took the Earth 31,558,149 seconds (some people like to approximate that as pi x 10 million (31,415,926) seconds, which is an easy way to be pretty close). But how many days is that?

Well, that’s a second complication. A "day" is how long it takes the Earth to rotate once, but we’re back to that measurement problem again. But hey, we used the stars once, let’s do it again! You stand on the Earth, and define a day as the time it takes for a star to go from directly overhead to directly overhead again: a sidereal day. That takes 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds = 86,164 seconds. But wait a second (a sidereal second?) — why isn’t that exactly equal to 24 hours?

I was afraid you’d ask that — but this turns out to be important.

It’s because the 24 hour day is based on the motion of the Sun in the sky, and not the stars. During the course of that almost-but-not-quite 24 hours, the Earth was busily orbiting the Sun, so it moved a little bit of the way around its orbit (about a degree). If you measure the time it takes the Sun to go around the sky once — a solar day — that takes 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds. It’s longer than a sidereal day because the Earth has moved a bit around the Sun during that day, and it takes a few extra minutes for the Earth to spin a little bit more to "catch up" to the Sun’s position in the sky.

See the complete article on Bad Astronomy website :).

Thanks to Ikhlasul Amal for sharing this article.