caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Happy Friday everyone. I hope everybody is doing well. Post any photos, memes, or music you like.

Last Saturday I drove up to Mount Palomar and toured Palomar Observatory. The observatory sits at about 5600ft elevation and has 4 telescopes, 18-inch, 48-inch, 60-inch and 200-inch. All but the 18-inch are still in use today. It's amazing how large a 200-inch telescope is. It makes my 6-inch Celestron telescope look like a child's toy.
The weather was beautiful, the drive in the mountains was enjoyable and the tour was informative. All in all a very good day.

Here's a few links that can explain things better than I can.
https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/history.html
https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/telescopes.html

The seal was safely released back into its familiar environment.

Gotterdammerung -- It's Not Just For Germans Any More

From another message board at the start of the end of the world:
=============

Definition of Götterdämmerung
: a collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder
==============

Pizza? At Pompeii?

Archaeologists at Pompeii have uncovered a wall painting which seems to show a pizza, or something like a pizza; a pizza precursor, pre-pizza, or maybe a pizza-oid type of entity. The pizza, foccaccia or bread in the image doesn't have tomato sauce on it, of course. Tomatoes are a new world fruit/vegetable and weren't brought Europe until the 15 or 1600s at the earliest and the first evidence of their being used in cooking in Italy wasn't until the late 1600s. But still... It's bread, with a topping of maybe fruit and/or vegetables, and/or pesto, and spices and it sure looks like pizza!

Pizza at Pompeii, from the BBC article linked below

I'm not sure how residential real estate market turns out, but the commercial real estate market is doomed. It was in trouble before Covid, but since then it's become a crisis.