a trip with the moon

i was having a walk in a park near the campus last weekend (can you picture me walking in the park...anyway, nothing is open here on sunday). so there i was walking in the park and i saw, in the middle of a small clearing, a large metallic semi-sphere, around 5-8m in diameter. some kids were trying to climb it, while others were kicking it as hard as they could (did i mention i hated kids). so i approached it to see what it was and next to it i spotted a wooden stand with a piece of paper on it. it said 'the sun' and listed some facts about our beloved star. then i got it! it was a model of our solar system!! it didn't take me long to spot mercury (a small sphere on a pole) around 50m away. lovely, as i walked down the path between the trees i would pass each planet one by one. neat idea. and every planet had a small fact sheet next to it with astronomical data (tilt of the axis, rotation and revolution periods, moons, etc.), a short history of the planet's discovery and a few words about the roman/greek gods after whom they were named. lucky for me the relative distances were not the real ones, or i was bound to walk some 20km to get to pluto and even farther to reach the oort cloud (yes, even the oort cloud was there).

in the picture you can see me hugging jupiter (the great red spot is clearly visible) although my favorite has always been sailor mars (omfg, i can't believe i wrote that!) -anyhow, i've grown up now and i only watch deeply philosophical anime, like ninja scroll.

did you know that jupiter has a very large and turbulent magnetosphere. it was discovered that streams of high-energy atomic particles are ejected from the jovian magnetosphere and travel as far as the orbit of the earth. also electric currents were detected flowing between jupiter and some of its moons, particularly io (guess you can call that the largest lightning in the solar system - though they probably aren't as spectacular as portrayed in 'hoshi no koe')