None of the one nun's sons had a ton of fun with a stun gun hunting water moccasin...

I am currently reading Martin Rees book "Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others". He makes mention of an interesting illustration of the span of our Sun's main sequence age. If you started a cross country walk on a beach New York (Sun turns on) with the destination being a beach in L.A. (Sun goes red giant), taking just one step every 2000 years, in comparisome with the current age of The Sun, your hike would have you placed somewhere in Kansas right now. The sun being just a bit under middle age...4.5 billion out of a 10 billion year main sequence. Rees' book so far is quite enjoyable, sort of in the vein of Hawkin's "Brief History of Time", as cosmos theory for the common person. What I like about Rees is that he chooses to leave all supernatural references out, yet still however reluctantly includes mention of unproven hypotheticials for information purposes. Difficult not to mention both books together, since Hawkins and Rees are colleagues with similar educational background...yet each ended up having a different approach.

Scientists have discovered that Neptune has a huge temperature differential. Being that it is furthest planet from the Sun, it only recieves 1000th of the sunlight that the Earth basks in. Neptune is a gas giant and composed primarily of helium and hydrogen, yet the methane in it's atmosphere makes it reflect blue. Neptunes year is 165x that of Earth, so it's seasons last quite long. The southern pole is currently pointed at the sun, and has heated up during this 40 years of summer. The average temperature on Neptune is -392F, but at the south pole it heats up to around 18F degress. There is more on this on the Nasa.gov site.

-A