This post was written and posted by Sandra Tayler because Howard is at Comic Con and unable to connect to the internet.

If you have any difficulties reaching www.schlockmercenary.com over the next few days, please click over to www.schlocktroops.com.  It has been set up as an alternate location for fans to get their daily Schlock fix.  Please spread the word in the event of a problem.  That is the important information.  Like any good reporter, I’ve put it first in case people don’t care to read the rest of the story. 

The rest of the story:  We are in the process of renewing the Schlock Mercenary domain name.  Due to a comedy of errors (some of which are our fault, why did we not take care of this months ago?  I keep asking myself this and then remembering exactly how busy we’ve been for the last three months.  That’s my excuse.  I’m sticking to it.) the renewal may not be complete before the domain expires.  We’ve set up the www.schlocktroops.com site so that no one need to go Schlockless while we sort things out.

Some of you may remember the domain name snafu of last summer when Howard and I only became aware of the domain expiration after the site went down.  We vowed to not let that happen again because that was really embarrassing.  So we’ve improved.  Perhaps next time we need to renew the domain, we’ll figure out how to do it without a public brouhaha.  That would be nice.

It’s all in the subject line. Now, bed.

I’m configuring an old laptop with all the tools I need for browsing, blogging, and checking email while at Comic-Con. This particular laptop runs optimally with Win98 on it.

Ah, good times. This OS is older than two of my children. It’s older than my comic. In internet years it is positively ANCIENT.

But it works. (Knocking on wood now…)

I looked at today’s APOD and wondered “how big is that galaxy?”

The article said “the arcing structures form tenuous loops extending more than 150,000 light-years from the narrow, edge-on spiral,” so a thumbnail measurement told me that the disc was around 150,000 light-years across… assuming the loops and the disc were all the same distance from the camera. Clicking on the links in the article gave me a bunch of information that did not include helpful things like “this galaxy has an estimated diameter of…”

But they DID tell me that it was 40,000,000 light-years away*, and was 12.8 arc-seconds in diameter as observed from Earth. It’s been a long time since I took any trigonometry, but I remembered enough to know that I had all the information I needed to calculate diameter. I just needed to google the formula.

The formula, so you know, is D (diameter) = (2pi*(distance)(angular diameter))/360, where angular diameter and “360” are both expressed in degrees. Thus “degrees/degrees” drops that unit from the result, leaving only the unit of measure used for “distance” behind to be applied to the diameter (or in this case “length” since the object being observed is does not present a disc)

Rounding to the comma, the galaxy in question is 146,000 light-years in diameter.

(*Note: I didn’t ask how astronomers measured the distance to the galaxy in question, but I assume it has to do with luminosity, red-shift, and other stuff. Obviously if the distance figure changes as a result of new measurements, the calculated diameter of the object will also change.)