Starting Out February 2018

Good morning, and good luck.

Expecting to start the work day having to deal with Presto Card tech issues on the way to the office.

We didn't have to deal with this compromised-chip stuff with paper bus passes.

Something about exoplanet.eu

I didn't notice that you could selectively hide or reveal specific data-columns until tonight, just a few minutes ago.

Also noticed: In 32 days of the current year gone by thus far, we have two more exoplanets confirmed thus far: One orbiting a star from the Tycho catalogue about 1,800 lightyears away (give or take roughly 300 ly), and another orbiting HD 238914 at about 1,900 ly (again, give or take roughly 300 ly).

Small wonder that the International Astronomical Union's been slowly making inroads through public competitions on naming the planets our astronomers across the planet have been logging in. One could wish that this process might move faster, especially given the sense that between GAIA, Kepler, JWST, and whatever else is in the planet-hunting/astrometry pipeline, we're in for a flood of new and useful data in the next few years.

I feel as if there's more intelligent commentary I could make, but I'm not sure which direction to steer towards.