Birthday month extravaganza

Back in 2019, some people (including a friend of mine from Swinburne) got together and created a website at a Python in Astronomy hackathon. This website, https://cakedays.space/, allows you to input your birthday (on Earth), and it will output a calendar which you can add to e.g. Google Calendar which will tell you when you'd have birthdays on each of the other planets in our solar system. It's quite a cute idea, and I've been meaning to write about it for a while now. I've finally gotten around to it because, while checking my calendar for this month, I discovered that I have four birthdays this month, one each week on all four of the terrestrial planets!

Hence the title of this post, as I'll be putting up a post on each birthday as it comes around this month. Not sure what I'll do for them yet. We'll find out…later this week. (Also, if you want to set up your own birthday calendar using the website, there are two boxes called “Skip Mercury/Venus Birthdays by” which skip as many as you specify. If you, like me, want to see every birthday, just put a 0 in those boxes. Putting a 1 would cause every other one to be shown, etc..)

On a more somber astronomically-related note, I saw that Michael Collins, the command module pilot for Apollo 11, passed away last week. As the guy who stayed in orbit, he's been called "the loneliest man in history" for his time spent on the far side of the Moon during each lunar orbit, out of radio contact with anyone. He himself described it as relaxing (which I can totally relate to as an introvert), and that he felt a mixture of emotions including "awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation." A fond farewell to an oft-overlooked man whose presence was as integral to Apollo 11's mission as the other two.

Anyway, I'll end this post here, with the promise of several more to come this month. A hui hou!