Spring Ahead this Weekend with Warm Weather! And what are those spots!?
Don’t forget about the time change this weekend! You will be setting your clocks FORWARD one hour when you go to bed on Saturday. (so you might want to consider going to bed an hour earlier than normal to compensate 🙂 )
I always find the leap forward to be the harder of the transitions. How about you?
Spring Warmth amplifies.
Check it out!
Saturday shows temperatures up to 64ºF/17ºC Sunday shows temperatures up to 68ºF/20ºC!
Will we get there? I’ll give us a 50/50 chance. But if we do it will obviously be flirting with record temperatures.
Monday and Tuesday look pretty warm too but the warm sunny weather is going to shift mid-week to warm and wet weather late Tuesday through Thursday before we hopefully dry out again next Weekend.
Over the 72 hours from Tuesday to Thursday afternoon we should get around 16mm of rain. It does not look cold enough at higher elevations to help the snow pack.
Dawn reaches Ceres!
In awesome space news, NASA’s DAWN spacecraft was captured by the dwarf planet Ceres this morning!
Ceres is a large rock around 500km in radius or around 1/3 the size of the Moon.
Dawn is awesome because it uses ion propulsion. 
Which is a technology that only produces the thrust “equal to the weight of a sheet of paper”, but can do so so efficiently that it can ‘burn’ for a very long time and so reach very high speeds.
Ceres is awesome because it’s a big and very old rock in space that was likely one of the runner-ups in the race to create planets at the ‘dawn’ of our solar system! Not enough other rocks joined its party I guess!
There is also this picture of Ceres taken by Dawn as it approached.
What the heck are those bright spots!!??
No really, that’s not a joke, they really are there. There are a few hypothesis running around…. but no doubt there are a great many planetary scientists itching to figure it out for sure! I’m betting on them being patches of CO2 ice exposed to the surface by the impact that created the crater, but who knows! Ceres will eventually lower its orbit to less than 500km above the surface so it should be able to get a pretty great look at everything.
Enjoy the warm weekend everyone. Happy Star gazing.
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