The
Stars Like Dust
Sky blog
I and my family are very interested in astronomy, my father built his first Newton-system telescope in the sixties, and it is still in use. In the picture below he is seen when the telescope projects on his T-shirt the rays of the Sun coming out from behind the Moon after the total eclipse on the 11th of August, 1999.
Because of the general ignorence about the natural sciences only a few people know for e.g. that a small telescope with 8 times enlargement is enough to observe the 4 big (Galilean) moons of Jupiter, the Red Spot, the ring of Saturn or the polar icecap of Mars. The only thing we have to do is fixing the telescope and putting it in the good direction of course. Galilei knew that, although his equipment was not as good!
The following self made photos show the total Sun eclipse on the 11th of August, 1999.
These photos are about the Venus, when it goes in front of the Sun's surface in June, 2004. For lays it may not be so spectacular but it happens only twice in every 130 years!
A little Science-Fiction
The literature of science-fiction is in a crisis. One of its reasons that sci-fi expects a little interest and knowledge about natural sciences, otherwise most of the works are hard to enjoy. Unfortunately most people think that ”sci-fi” means something like Star Wars or Alien, but - in my opinion - these are rather ”fantastic tales”, to be diplomatic. Another tendency is that the ”fantasy” is getting popular and it is often confused with science-fiction. Though in this genre there are some excellent works, it is still not sci-fi. To tell the truth there are some transitions between these genres, such as Ray Bradbury, so nowadays the ”hard sci-fi” expression has been born to dissolve this confusion. Actually the ”hard sci-fi” means the same that ”sci-fi” meant 30 years ago.
Below I collected the links of my favorite science-fiction writers:
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
isaacasimov.garcia-cuervo.com (Spanish)
David Brin (1950-)
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)
hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/clarke.htmlhttp://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/clarke.html
membres.lycos.fr/sfbase/clarke/ (Spanish)
www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/2310/homepage.htm (Italian)
www.alesoft.net/clarke/ (Spanish)
Michael Crichton (1942-2009)
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)
Joe Haldeman (1943-)
home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/shortbio.html
Frank Herbert (1920-1986)
Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006)
Larry Niven (1938-)
Frederik Pohl (1919-)
Robert Sheckley (1928-2005)
Robert Silverberg (1935-)
Péter Zsoldos (1930-1997)
www.avana.hu/modules.php (Hungarian)
mek.oszk.hu/01700/01704/index.phtml (Hungarian)
Other useful links
www.ciencia-ficcion.com/bienvenida.html (Spanish)
