I can see Earth's curve from here! --and the dark seas of Titan

There were two space-related news stories I loved this week. One was the story of the M.I.T. students who sent a point-and-click digital camera into space and got photos of the curvature of the earth, for total cost of just under $150 dollars, and the other was the story of the proposal to explore the oceanic surface of Titan by ship. Not sailing ship, of course (though who doesn't have that image at first?), seeing as the temperature on Titan is almost three hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but some kind of Major-Tom-esque tin can, floating on it.

The liquid on Titan is methane, not water, but the news story talked about how liquid methane behaves like water, raining down from the sky, forming rivers, filling up the seas.

Titan's much farther away from the sun than Earth is, so it must be rather dark there, though. If you could get out of the capsule (if you could stand on the deck of the weatherized sailing ship), would the light from the distant sun be enough to let you see the waves? Would they shine by the light of the stars, or by Saturn?

And today's poisonous plant is...

white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda)

It's in the woods where I walk, and I tried twice to photograph it, so startling with its white berries on their purple-red stalks, but my pictures came out blurry. But here is what Google offers:





The plant is also called doll's eyes, for the berries' creepy resemblance to the same. Eyes--poisonous eyes--growing on a red stalk. Yes, the berries are the poisonous part. Wikipedia says, The berries contain cardiogenic toxins which can have an immediate sedative affect on human cardiac muscle tissue ... Ingestion of the berries can lead to cardiac arrest and death.

So don't eat them. Have an autumn raspberry instead.