February 02, 2016 at 03:53AM

Today I Learned: 1) Our best images of single stars (other than our own) come from IR interferometer telescopes. IR means it collects infra-red light, presumably because it... actually, I don't know why IR would be better than visible light. In any case, an interferometer is a telescope array that collects the same image and compares them from slightly different angles*. Anyway, one of the IR interferometers has captured some pictures of other stars that are, like, more than one pixel! We're talking about images on the order of a couple dozen pixels square. It turns out that a lot of the big ones (which are easiest to image) are really squashed-looking -- they rotate so fast that they bulge at the center. This effect happens in all spinning bodies, but on the ones in our solar system the effect is small. *Apparently the total resolution you get is the sum of the resolutions of the individual telescopes, and it's easier to build a bunch of small telescopes than it is to build one big one. You can probably also split up an array to do a bunch of low-resolution tasks at once, though this is just speculation on my part. 2) Glassblowing, as a field, has a lot of really archaic verbage. Here are a couple of terms I learned today (I learned them verbally so the spelling is virtually guaranteed to be wrong). The puntee is the rod on which you gather glass. Puntees can be solid, for making solid glass pieces, or hollow, so you can blow into them to create things with holes or big rounded cavities. Gathering glass, by the way, is what you do when you put a blob of glass on the end of a puntee. The blob of glass on the end of the puntee is the moil. One of the common things one does with a moil is to roll it on a mauvre, which is a plate traditionally made of marble (from which the name comes), but now is more likely... steel? I'm fuzzy on this. In any case, you roll a moil around on the mauvre to shape it. Thanks to Tasha Johnson for teaching me these! 3) ...what a Luer lock is. Basically, it's a standard of screw fitting for plastic parts like syringe tips and tubing. I've been using them for a while now but I just now learned what they're called.