lasers in the sky

Listen to some Blink-182 to get the sense I had of this concert! Or Daylight :)

I was at a concert at Hollywood Bowl just a few hours ago. A group of us headed out to hear Matt and Kim, My Chemical Romance, and Blink-182. The concert should have been great, but as it was sort of a last minute thing for me, and the people around us weren't too much into dancing, and Matt and Kim were terrible, it was slightly boring (yep...but still fun at times!)

The best part was this amazing laser show for the headliners. These were legit. There were three, which could cycle through all the colors. The white light would separate into green and red and other colors, as would magenta and green, when they hit the trees ringing the top of the compound.

At some point, staring at the mountains behind the stage, another kid and I attempted to calculate the height of the mountains. Using as an arm length of 2.5 ft pointing towards the bottom of the mountains around 1-2 miles away, and a height from that arm to the top of the mountains of about 8 inches, we estimated that it was 0.8 miles straight up, and more. Our plan is to come a couple hours early for the next concert here and climb up!

I looked up into the sky before the show started, around 7pm, and noticed some stars in a y-shape - there aren't too many visible stars in LA, and these were to the northeast, so I think it was Andromeda!  The greatest thing was approx. every hour, I looked up and saw a significant angular displacement and a slight turning to the configuration of stars as they advanced along the elliptic, like explicated in our readings/problems.

Yep, that was the main point of this. :)

However, I discovered a really cool website: http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/tonights_sky/ which explicates notable constellations, stars, galaxies, objects, meteor showers, and planets visible in the sky! WOW.