Rabbit roadblock. Five-thousand runaway jack rabbits closed the main highway between the capitals of Hungary and Austria for several hours Monday morning. The truck carrying the rabbits turned over when it was struck by another vehicle.

Dying star. Using the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory and the Keck-2 Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers have taken some amazingly beautiful pictures of a dying star at the center of the Red Square nebula. The Red Square is one of the most perfectly symmetrical objects ever observed by scientists.

My Dad is an avid astronomer. In fact I grew up with a planetarium and observatory in the back yard complete with high power telescope. Dad still has the observatory and telescope, but had to give up the planetarium when he and Mom moved a number of years ago. I have great memories of looking up through Dad’s telescope as a child at the craters of the moon or the rings of Saturn or far away star clusters in the sky. My only regret is that I did not spend more time using this incredible resource in my own back yard.

So I was excited to see this neat online site called Wikisky. This is like a Google Earth for outer space. It looks like an updated version of an old software program I used to have for the kids but has now been made available online. You can pan across the night sky, zoom in on different objects, or view the stars above a given location at a certain time. You can turn on constellation overlays or hover over a particular star to get information such as name, distance, magnitude and constellation. You can even switch from normal browsing mode to SDSS mode (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) to see actual photographs of the sky while you browse.

If you have any interest in astronomy I encourage you to check this site out. Parents, this is a great site for your kids, too.

HT: Lifehacker

Space race. This woman plans to run the Boston Marathon in space. Rocketing along at a speed of 17,500 mph on the international space station, astronaut Sunita Williams should complete the course in a record-breaking 5.4 seconds. But she will track her time and distance on a treadmill just to keep it fair.

Rudy, John, Mitt . . . and Fred? Former Tennessee senator and actor Fred Thompson looks like he is getting closer to considering a run for the Presidency on the Republican side. If you want to know more about the “Law and Order” actor’s political views, you can check out the transcript of Chris Wallace’s interview with Thompson from March 11, 2007. Whether you agree with his positions or not, you have to admit that he is a straight shooter.

Related posts:

• Still Leaning Towards Fred
• Mike Huckabee’s Sunday Sermon at Prestonwood
• The Cluster Approach to the GOP Nomination
• The MPR Select a Candidate Quiz
• Memo to Evangelical Leaders on Romney
• Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll
• Ravi Zacharias on Electing the Next President
• Should Christians Call Mormonism a Cult?

(This is from a series of posts on the Iron Sharpens Iron Men’s Conference in Hartford, CT on March 24, 2007. To view the whole series, click here.)

Here is a brief summary of Hugh Ross’ afternoon seminar called “Creation as Science.”

Hugh spoke about the testable creation model that he and the people at Reasons To Believe have been working on developing. He explained the Anthropic Principle – how everything in the universe tends toward man, toward making life possible on earth and sustaining it. He described the fine-tuning of the universe and how human life on earth can only exist within finely-tuned parameters. Forty years ago astronomers could only identify a few of these characteristics, but by the year 2001 they had identified more than 150 finely-tuned characteristics necessary for life. These findings reduce the odds that any given planet in the universe would possess the necessary conditions to support intelligent physical life to less than one in 10¹⁷³.

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