Today is the big debut date for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Extended Edition, with 40-some-odd minutes of deleted scenes. WOOHOO!!! :)

I have the DVD on reserve at Suncoast Motion Picture Company in the Superstition Springs Mall, and Becky and I will be meeting there after she finishes class and I finish work (there’s an express bus that runs directly from downtown to the mall), to pick up the DVD and then head over to her parents’ house, where we will watch it on their big-screen TV.

That’s not the only reason we’re going to her parents’. We also plan to watch the Leonid meteor shower there, where the sky is much darker. The shower — which should produce a meteor every minute or two — peaks in the wee hours of tomorrow morning.

That’s right, we’re going to watch a four-hour-long version of The Two Towers, then sleep for a few hours, then get up early and watch meteors. Tolkien and astronomy, all in one night… it’ll be a real party. Call it Nerd-a-palooza 2003. :)

Due to these various events, I will not have time to post a new “tribute to Michigan” tonight. Thus, I’ll have to post a double-tribute tomorrow evening. Twice as many fun facts, twice as much ass-kissing! :)

The recent unusual, out-of-cycle solar activity is nothing to worry about, SpaceWeather.com’s Dr. Tony Phillips assures us. “The sun isn’t about to explode, nor is the sunspot cycle broken,” his article states. Excerpt:

Indeed, it’s possible that what we’ve just experienced is a normal part of the solar cycle, speculates [David Hathaway, a NASA solar physicist]. “There’s a curious tendency for the biggest flares to occur after solar maximum–on the downslope toward solar minimum. This has happened during two of the last three solar cycles.” (The article includes an excellent chart illustrating this point.)

Dr. Werner Dappen, a solar expert who taught the general-education astronomy class that I took at USC, and who I count among my favorite teachers of all time, concurs: “I suspect many ‘irreguarities’ are just regular,” he told me in an e-mail. (Although, in response to my question “You don’t think the Sun is about to go nova on us a few billion years early, do you?,” he initially replied, “Well, it does not have to go nova; even leaving the main sequence and becoming a red giant prematurely would obliterate all climate discussions down here!!” Heh. Global warming, indeed.)

This tidbit from Phillips’s article made me instantly jealous of Californians:

In California, where smoke from wildfires dimmed the sun enough to look straight at it, casual sky watchers were startled by the huge blotches on the sun.

No fair!!! I had to use welder’s glass and metalized mylar, while you bastards got to stare directly and the sunspots — and you didn’t even go blind! Sheesh. Wildfire-stricken states have the life. :)

When I was traveling through Northern California during last summer’s wildfires, and I got to look directly at the Sun, I observed that it would be really cool to be in such a situation during a partial solar eclipse. It didn’t occur to me that the same would hold true during big sunspot periods.

Well anyway, solar activity could pick up again soon. Giant sunspots #486 and 488 will soon re-emerge on the left-hand side of the Sun after two weeks out of sight. And we know they’re still there — remarkable holographic images that allow us to peer through the Sun reveal that they are still presently active on the far side:

In other space news, the Leonid meteor shower is coming next Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. As I mentioned earlier, this coincides with the release of the Two Towers Extended Edition DVD; it also coincides with the release of Britney Spears’s new album. Clearly these things are all related, somehow. :)