Lightning and the Rock Gallery

Something I should probably note: Sometimes my posts are kind of short, grouchy, or generally stressed. Or I feel like I said basically the same things I said the previous day. In those cases, I don't intend to share them to Facebook because I don't think anyone would be particularly interested in a post mostly dominated by gifs of that guy from El Dorado banging his head on the wall.

ICYMI, then, I need to home the 1/3? scale Lunar Module. I'm inclined to do so in place of a dinosaur, since the story of why the moon looks like Swiss Cheese is nearly as interesting as Falling Space Rock Killed All Teh Dinosaurs. We also have some stuff little kids might like in terms of interactivity, according to Christy, and a slew of 3D printed moon craters. A fake lunar landscape could also be a thing, if you're handy with papier maché, thus lofting our little lunar lander to a more visible height. (If they need a volunteer to make a fake moon, that sounds kind of fun, frankly. Paper mache and chicken wire, cover the whole thing with a thin slurry of plaster of paris, spray paint it dark gray, dry brush it in cheap white and light gray acrylic? It'd take me a few days, but I could totally do that. Stick the whole thing on a low table, exact size depending on the scale of the lander, surround it with a plexiglass barrier? Relatively professional looking with a minimum of cost, especially if we can find some old newspapers. Or possibly chicken wire. I wouldn't be surprised.)

Imagine, if you will, something like this. With different signage.
Do I need to model some kind of generic signpost? Um... maybe.
I did model the display the lander is sitting on.

We also have another satellite, but that ain't my problem because it's too big to fit in the room and everybody knows it. Something about giant solar panels and a satellite loosely the size of two minifridges taped together along their biggest faces. They're inclined to save it for now.

Phew.

El Dorado usually says it best.

Steve did want labels, so I'm slapping up these awful red and yellow signs. I don't think I'm going to bother making my own model, because these aren't actually going to be part of the gallery. That seems a wee bit much, and I don't actually know how to model stuff on angles. (That wasn't part of the tutorial series.) It gets the point across. Just imagine the gallery without the obnoxious signs...or, at the very least, with more informative signs that don't block walking paths and conform to ADA standards.

Because these could totally fit if we took out the most boring rocks (like the well samples... <_<)
It wouldn't take *that* much rearranging. Probably. 

Also I learned how to import custom textures, which is why the walls and carpet look a little different than in the first image. Want bright pink carpet? I can do that instead of gold. A nice dark wooden display? Oh yeah. That weird stucco wall texture, you know the one, from every dentist office ever? Done and done. (I'm getting pretty good at this program.)

I have also learned that my job could be weirder. Somebody--presumably as a hobby, hopefully as a hobby--3D scanned a rock.

Why? 

...a good question indeed. Ask us another. 

We have a meteor about this size. I'd like to raise it up to loosely waist level.
It's heavy, though, so it's going to take maybe two people to do that.
Possibly three.
Depends on the people.

Now, if you've visited PARI, you'll also know that we have a metric ton of rocks. 

I don't think I'm exaggerating by weight.

Most of them are dead boring and/or quartz. We have a representative sample of North Carolina rocks--which are mostly quartz. I like quartz, it's pretty, don't get me wrong! But, for crying out loud, it's dead boring to see a rock museum that's 45% amethyst and quartz. Nor am I interested in polished well samples...which we also have on display. Somebody was digging a well, dug up a pretty rock, polished it into a cabochen, and it's on display at PARI for some mystery reason. 

Why? 

I don't know. We don't need that much random rock crap on display when we can focus on the cool stuff--rubies, sapphires, garnets, emeralds, uraninite, and our other really shiny rocks--and devote the rest of the room to meteors and the lunar module. Hence this label for the remainder of the room:

"The Most Interesting Rocks"

Perhaps it's a little passive aggressive. I'll downplay it when I show this off tomorrow, and point out that some rocks are more inherently interesting to the general public than others, and they all need better labels. Because people do like the shinies, they just would like them better if they were shown off to their best advantage.

So that's another gallery more or less arranged, to be shown to Steve and, possibly, Don Cline tomorrow afternoon on the big screen in the meeting room (if the projector and my computer will play nice.) 

Oh dear. And the lightning meter just made the bad sound (a-WOO-ga!). 

14:33, 13/7/16

If you want to see our lightning for yourself, by the by, this picture should update to whatever time in the future you choose to have a look:

The number in the upper left indicates flashes-per-minute and the red box means "Use caution when going outside and don't stand on a ridge like a lightning rod ya genius". If you don't see the red box, and see a yellow box around the image instead, that means "Storm leaving or incoming; be prepared for changes" and no box means we're fine and there isn't any lightning.

The whole thing works by strapping a pair of radio antennae to the top of the ridge at 90º angles to each other, so they can extrapolate where the lightning is. Lightning bolts release low frequency radio waves, which the antennae detect. The brighter the box on the screen, the more recent the flash. 

If the meter turns red like this, we shut down all the telescopes because while we can't prevent them from getting struck, we can prevent the lightning from frying the instruments on them.