Fireworks Galaxy

It was back to galaxies for my next target.   I wanted to try to image the Fireworks Galaxy or NGC 6946.   It amazes me how these interstellar bodies were found so long ago.  William Herschel first documented this galaxy in 1798.  Wow!

The target is somewhat difficult for my set-up because you have to image it through some interstellar matter of the Milky Way.  It took approximately 1.4 hours of light gathering to finally get the final picture.  However the work was worth it.  The intermediate spiral galaxy is full of some beautiful color and really does look like a firework bursting in the sky.  This firework is only about one-third the size of our own Milky Way galaxy and is only 18 million light year away!   My brain has a hard time comprehending that distance. It has an even harder time realizing the light my scope is gathering from this galaxy took millions of years to reach the Earth.  We are literally looking back in time and it is beautiful sight to see.

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The Firework galxy take with my Celestron 8 inch SCT

The details of the final picture of the Galaxy

Location of the Fireworks Galaxy in our sky

1783 GMO studies = ZERO Hazards

Are you looking for the facts to help convince you or other's that GMOs are safe?   Check out:

http://www.foodinsight.org/biotechnology-gmo-food-safe-who-infographic?utm_content=23166078&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter#sthash.SHtiPPZq.LMghjZZZ.dpbs


The main allure of the shot article on this website is the info graphic:

There is one thing to point out that is not always obvious with GMOs.  Some people chose not to eat GMOs, but up to 90% of the feed fed to farm animals in the US is derived from biotech crops.   So GMOs are being used extensively whether you know it or not.   The animal also provides scientists another population to study effects of GMOs.  Researchers at UC Davis looked at health trends of animals before and after biotech feed was introduced and found no significant differences in animal health.   With the thousands of animals being fed GMOs we would see effects if there were some.

There also have also been many other studies on GMOs over the years.  The University of Perugia has recently analysed 1783 studies on the safety and environmental effects of GMOs and so far there are ZERO hazards found.

Science is nothing more than the continual pursuit of new knowledge to challenge the current way of thinking.  Science cannot definitively prove that GMOs pose no threat at all.  And that is why people keep doing studies because science could  show the potential of health threats.  Even a couple of legitimate findings could really change the scientific dogmas associated with GMOs.  And science can get things wrong.  That is why in science. findings must be repeatable by multiple scientists. We are our own worst critics.  If s an experiment told you something, well it is not a real result unless I can repeat it and get the same results.   This is what makes science work.  We will eventually get to the truth.     Yet after 1783 studies showing no health effects isn't it time to start believing a little that  it is OK to eat them?  In the next 30-40 years we may not have any choice as the population continues to grow.

Let's teach our kids Science

We love to give tests and use those scores to make all kinds of comparisons.   That is a can of worms for another day.  But the fact is test scores are used globally to compare kids, schools, states, and even countries.  A fairly recent study took school tests and ranked countries on how kids are performing in science and math.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32608772?nl=nytnow&em_pos=large&emc=edit_nn_20150513

Notice the US doesn't even make the top 12 list.  They are ranked 28.  I have two kids in school and they are getting a good education.  However the fact remains that other countries are starting to really compete with the US.  Asia is becoming a power house in science and math scores.  So if you believe test scores are an indicator of sucess, the the US has some room for improvement.  

I bring this up because science can be fun, and I love to try and get kids involved in science.   I stumbled across a resource for teaching kids about a part of science I hold dear to my heart:  Biotechnology.  The PDF has many different lessons from DNA to GMOs and there are some cool hands-on activities like extracting DNA from a strawberry.  These are exercises you can do with your kids and even share this resource with your kid's teachers.  Let's get more science out to our kids while also making it fun.  

Bring Biotechnology to Life PDF (ages 7-10)

Photopsia

I apologize for the lack of blogging lately.  We are in the process of moving and selling and that process has kept me quite busy over the last few weeks. Hopefully by the end of the year we will be all settled in and things will be back to normal.

However I did have a story to share with a little science thrown in.   It all started on a camping trip with the boys.   Everything started like a normal trip. The boys were playing and having a good time.  We cooked supper, roasted marsh mellows and went to bed.  Everything we good until about 5:00 in the morning when the little one woke me up saying he was was seeing things in the tent.  I just thought he was having a bad dream and had him get a little closer to me in the tent.  That worked until about 5:30 when he woke me up again and said he was still seeing things.   I put him in the sleeping bag with me, but again that only worked until about 6 AM when things really went downhill.  He woke me up saying he was seeing red bugs and they were everywhere.  He said they were coming out of my skin and going into his skin.  He started swatting at them and freaking out.  I could not console him.  He stated to scream to get him out of the tent.   We were were camping on a lake, so at this point I picked him up and walked him down to the lake where I tried to console him for a while and after about 45 minutes had calmed him down.  The rest of the day he was fine and playing just like any other day.

I attributed these visions of "red bugs" to a really bad and vivid dream.   But then we came to night time and no sooner had he gone to bed than we heard crying.  He was seeing the bugs again.  And he was definitely seeing something.  He was shaking and would physically try to push them way from him.  The only thing to remotely calm him down was him sitting on the couch with me downstairs in the light.  At this point I was starting to get concerned.   I knew better than google hallucinations but dit it anyway and of course and it says things you don't really want to hear.   The next night ended up being the same.  We could only get him sleep by putting him in the bed with us.  We had him draw what he was seeing and once we did that, the drawings were very much in line with what a floater might look like.  This all started to make a little sense.  Floaters move and it could easily look like a bug coming out of your skin or going into someone.  Over the next couple nights he started to realize that even though he was seeing these things, they were not hurting him and he would at least go to sleep now.

We took him to the doctor to get his eyes checked out and sure enough he was seeing floaters which is called photopsia. There are different reasons to see these, with one of the most common being retinal detachment.  In his case, everything looked fine with his eyes.   But in some people, photopsia is caused from actually seeing the shadow of the blood vessels in your eyes.  They can appear as red, clear, purple floaters.  In some people they can be very bad especially against certain backgrounds and the person will need to stop what they are doing to focus on a different landscape or background.
He says he still sees the floaters but now that he can rationalize what is going on he lives with it wtih no problem.  The doctor says they may eventually go away or he may see the floaters off and on the rest of his life.  In either event, it is a harmless phenomenon, but one that gave us quite a scare.