Saturday 22 December 2012

Christmas In Heaven

I presume everyone knows this:

...which is Monty Python's 'Christmas In Heaven' along with a thumbnail Facebook would ban.

However, so far not everyone knows this:

and they probably never will.  Here's the doobley-doo, which i can't spell:

What's Christmas like in space?  Actually, when is it Christmas in space?

Astronauts have spent Christmas in space from time to time, notably on Apollo 8 when it orbited the Moon in 1968 and on Skylab in 1973 when they made

an Xmas tree out of cans, which shows how good they were at engineering.  However, if you were on another planet, Xmas would be at a different time

for you than it is here.

On Mercury and Venus, it's Christmas every day because the days are longer than the years there.  On Mercury, there is ice at the poles so you can

even have a white Christmas, which is surprising when you think about how hot it is there during the day.

On Mars, there can be a white Christmas but Christmas only occurs once every "mir" (Martian year), which is nearly twice as long as one of your Earth

years and the snow is frozen carbon dioxide or dry ice.

On Jupiter, there's no Christmas because there are no seasons.  The axial tilt means that Jupiter has no solstices or equinoxes.  In any case,

Jupiter's year lasts nearly twelve of ours and its day is less than ten hours long, so it would be a rare event.

Saturn would have Christmases, about once every thirty years, because it has seasons.  Tethys Turlington's honeymoon, however, did not take place

during Christmas.

Uranus, because it orbits on its side and takes eighty-four years to go round the Sun, has nights and days lasting forty-two years each and as a

result its Christmas day lasts forty-two years too, and is very dark.

Neptune takes 165 years to orbit the Sun and has a sixteen hour day, so you get very little Christmas for your money if you went there, though it

would at least be a very special occasion.

Finally, Pluto isn't a planet any more.  Sorry Pluto.  Suto.

Whatever planet you're on, Merry Christmas!


Incidentally, the description's screwed up because i used Notepad to write it with the word wrap turned on.  I shall have to remember not to do that futurally.  However, the main reason for the description on YT is to ensure the tags work properly.

I'm gradually getting bolder with editing and the like.  One thing i have yet to try is to voiceover still images or do picture in picture, and i am currently presuming that we have the facilities to do that on AVLinux.  Otherwise it'll have to be Sony Vegas or whatever, though i hope not.  One thing i have done is to change the intro and outro, specifically introducing two more Easter Eggs and two subscriber buttons.  In this case there's also an Easter Egg in the main part of the video.  Not terribly appropriate for Christmas i suppose.

I'm also planning to respond to the next in the Becoming YouTube series, but i'm not sure how to incorporate it into the Christmas theme.  Actually, i take that back.  If it's about personas, as i suspect it will be, hmm...Sorted!  Though not via props.  However, i suspect the upload will be later this aften while i'm unavailable.

The views are up again, apparently, though the two-day lag, one of which i think is due to time zones and therefore probably isn't a proper day, makes it confusing and difficult to interpret.  Clearly there are other metrics and i need to learn about them.  Here's a graph:


That last rise is to 309 views and seems to be the result of tent-pole programming.

I've also just gained a subscriber, having lost one a couple of days ago.  No idea who it is because YouTube is quite unfriendly with respect to how they display subscriptions.


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