The Answer: To the Universe - And Beyond

I haven't traveled from home much lately, but my drive to explore must be satisfied. So I decided to spend some time on Galaxy Zoo, which I first found out about from an astrophysicist at CalTech. This is just the most far-out traveling I have ever done, visiting the ever-expanding edges of the known universe.

Galaxy Zoo is an on-line science web site started back in 2007. Astrophysicists were literally drowning in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and later the Hubble space telescope survey. What to do? Why, use the internet to solve the problem and invite volunteers from the general public to classify the deep space objects. According to a member of the team behind the project, Kevin Schawinski, "The human brain is actually much better than a computer at these pattern-recognition tasks."

Sounded like fun to me. I ran through the on-line tutorial, explored and classified some galaxies, then promptly forgot about it for 3 years. But after my last astronomy club meeting, I was reinspired to visit "The Zoo" again. And I can't believe what I found! This image is pretty exciting stuff. All my amateur astronomy friends have never seen anything like it before. It may be the result of galaxies colliding sometime in the far past. I've forwarded the image on to some researchers. We'll see if anything interesting comes of it.

Taxi Cab Touring in Vancouver

 I took my first swing at taxi-cab touring in Vancouver. Here's how it works: As a winter-time business traveler, there are no daylight hours for sight seeing after putting in 10-14 hours at the office. But it was my first visit to Vancouver and I wanted to capture some of the magic and beauty of that great city to share. I had a new Palm Pre Plus cell phone, and it had a camera. A marriage made in heaven, if you ask me. So while the taxi cab was winging its way to the office, I pulled out the cell phone and tried to photograph the beautiful neighborhood we were driving through.

If you've never taken a photography class, you may not be aware of how different your eye perceives the world compared to a camera. It takes a little time and training, learning how to frame a picture, learning how not to jerk the camera around when pressing the touch screen button, and getting the timing down to press the little button in between bumps, jostles and jogs of the moving vehicle.

I was delighted when my photos stopped looking like the first photo, and began to reflect the beauty I was seeing around me, like this Tudor-style home in a suburb of Vancouver. And I'm pleased to be able to share the beauty of this great, big world with all my friends.