BAN #318: Writing advice: just start somewhere, Gorgeous images of nearby galaxies

29 April 2021   Issue #318

April 29, 2021

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Inside a Writer’s Brain

Free advice is worth every penny

I write a lot. I mean, I think that’s obvious enough. I have the blog, and this newsletter, and emails, and a big project I’m still wrestling with. There are days when getting 300 words down is hard, and others where I breeze through 3,000+.

This morning I was in a grumpy mood (woke up with a headache, sinus shenanigans, and so on) and not wanting to work at all. But I sat down at my computer, convincing myself I needed to get something done, especially since my average has been low the past few days. With reticence I opened up my email, and then — my brain choked.

I was looking at several press releases in a row in my inbox, all of which I wanted to write about. Not even at a conscious level, though, my brain was thinking, “Each of those is cool and fun and would make a great blog post but it’ll also take a couple of hours to write any one of them and you have this other thing to do and that other thing and OHMYGOD don’t forget THE THIRD THING and if you spend time writing one of those you won’t be writing the others or doing the other things and bzzzbzzzz bzbzzzzzzzzzz (sounds of short circuiting and total entropic collapse of all my synapses).”

Yes, my brain thinks in run-on sentences.

It’s irritating to see a list of things to do and think there’s no way I can do all of them, so I wind up… not doing anything. So I wander off, checking Twitter, or looking at the weather map. Whatever.

And it’s so nonsensical. JUST PICK ONE AND DO IT AND THEN IT’LL BE A THING DONE AND WE CAN GET ON WITH WHATEVER’S NEXT YOU JERK I yell at my brain like it’s not the font of my own actual identity.

This almost never works, and I go to bed that night frustrated and worried that I have too any things to do. This is a fun cycle that not only doesn’t end but gets worse, because duh, I’m not working and more stuff is piling up. That’s when writing isn’t fun anymore, but a slog.

But somehow, for some reason — maybe my second cup of coffee? — the other day, miraculously, it did work. I looked at the press releases and saw one I knew would be fun to research, to read a couple of journal papers about it to get background, and then use the stuff floating around in my memory to add color to the description. So rather arbitrarily I picked it and started at it. And lo, when I looked up next I had 1,000 words down and they were fairly lucid.

And not to get too meta, this article you’re reading now occurred to me at that moment, so here we are. Bonus thing done.

This isn’t advice so much as just a glimpse into my own frenetic chaos of method. Sometimes you really do have to pull your head out of the Möbius strip of thinking and just pick something to do. The immense relief of having done it is actually a pretty good motivator for me… when I remember to think of it that way.

It may not work tomorrow, but it’ll work again at some point. And when it doesn’t work I’ll find some other way to get things on my list done. Assign numbers to tasks and roll dice. Pick something easy so that I can scratch it off the to-do list (that’s a great one, with such accomplishment to it, such pleasure at drawing a line through words to indicate their pastness). Do them in alphabetical order, or arrange them by how many times the letter h is in them, or whatever (bonus: procrastination and getting something accomplished).

What’s needed is to find the path to getting them done. Once I take a single step on it, it’s suddenly easy. The hard part was getting to the trailhead. Find a way to do that, and maybe your tasks will get easier, too.

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a gigantic disk 120,000 light years across. We’re part of a group of galaxies (called the Local Group, which is a functional but uninspired name; still, astronomers have come up with worse names for things) with roughly a hundred other galaxies in it. Some of these galaxies orbit the Milky Way, and two of them are decently big. Visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, they’re called the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (they do look like clouds by eye, to be fair).

Because they’re close, less than 200,000 light years from us, and bright, when you use a big telescope and a camera with great resolution, the images of them can be very detailed.

The Dark Energy Camera is a 520 megapixel (!!) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile. A team of astronomers used it to take a massive survey of them satellite galaxies, called the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History, or SMASH, to probe deeply into the galaxies and space around them to map their structure and hopefully get clues about their behavior.

The science is amazing, but hot damn, so are the images. Check. This. Out.

Oof. And that’s just 1000 pixels wide; the hi-res version is 3827 x 3190 pixels!

As you can see, the SMC (as we in the know call it) is an irregular galaxy, literally without a defined shape. Oddly, it has lots of nebulae and star formation on the left, but not nearly as much on the right. The LMC and SMC have interacted in the past, and I wonder if that’s why, with some close pass of the two creating chaos in one part of the galaxy.

By coincidence two globular clusters (roughly spherical star clusters typically several thousand light years from Earth) appear near it in the sky; the big one to the upper right is 47 Tucanae, and is so big and bright it’s one of only a few globulars you can see by eye. The other on the upper left is NGC 362, visible with binoculars. Both globulars are much, much closer to Earth and just happen to line up with the SMC.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is bigger, and has some intense nebulae forming stars at gangbuster rates. The bright red knot to the upper left is the Tarantula Nebula, birthing so many stars some astronomers think it’s creating a globular cluster itself. It used to be classified as irregular, but that bar across the middle and arc around it indicate it’s a burgeoning spiral galaxy, though much smaller than the Milky Way.

Oh and the hi-res version of that is a whopping 6737 x 6536 pixels, so yeah, you might wanna take a look.

These are the deepest images (meaning seeing the faintest objects) ever taken of our two cosmic companions, and astronomers will have a field day examining them. We can learn about the star formation history, the way the galaxies have changed over time, how they’ve interacted with each other and the Milky Way, and much more.

It’s my favorite: Great science coupled with overwhelming beauty. It’s why I still love doing what I do after all these years.

Et alia

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