The Great Conjunction

Remember last week, when I put up that stream-of-consciousness post about the big Disney infodump and said I knew I had something I was going to talk about but couldn't remember what it was in all the excitement? (Just nod along, even if you don't.) Well, one part of what I forgot was the thing about pandemic slang that I posted the other day - and the other part was about astronomy.

Has anybody else happened to notice that there are two bright starlike objects close together in the night sky in the last week or two? I noticed it when I was taking my dinner break one day last week - because it happened to be right in front of me when I walked outside - and then I noticed it again tonight, and this time I remembered to try to figure out what it was. I did correctly assume that they were planets, not stars - specifically it's Jupiter and Saturn. (The first thing I thought of was Mars, because it's been so bright lately, but then I found it elsewhere in the sky a little later, so I knew that wasn't it.) Jupiter and Saturn are in close conjunction, from our point of view, and they will be even closer next Monday, which happens to be the winter solstice, before moving apart again.

Take a look at them this week, if you get a chance. Right now they are also close to the crescent moon, which is just cool-looking. Actually it looks from what I saw when I searched that some of the lunatic fringe are living up to their name and assuming this Means Something. But heck, it's not like Jupiter and Saturn are actually about to collide - it just looks that way to us!


Also I found this website while I was searching - the Stellarium. It didn't really help me answer my question but it's awesome-looking - and probably actually useful for stargazing!

The Believer: The Mandalorian Chapter 15 (spoilers!)

I repeat, SPOILERS, not for the new episode but for last week.

Well, it's almost midnight on Thursday and that means The Mandalorian finale is on in a couple of hours, and since I haven't talked about this past week's episode yet, I might as well do that a little. It was really good. It might have been the best episode yet, in that it really hung together as a narrative and was like a little bitty action movie, really, part Fury Road and part Inglourious Basterds (so I'm told, I haven't ever actually seen the latter - I really need to do that). It pretty much redeemed the character of Mayfeld, which I don't think anybody who saw the episode The Prisoner from last year expected at all, and we actually got to see Pedro's face for more than a hot second, and there was, amazingly, no Baby Yoda whatsoever, other than that he got mentioned a few times, and I didn't even mind that, to my surprise.

The episode was called The Believer, but it was pretty vague about who it was talking about. My theory is that that was deliberate. The character who was most a believer was the Imperial captain, but we don't really care about him, it's more about the other two. Mando is working himself up to believing in family again, maybe, and Mayfeld, the ex-Imperial who had clearly stopped believing in the Empire quite a while back, is maybe getting some sort of belief system to replace that one. Something like that.

The other characters were relegated to background status here. We got to see the inside of Slave One, which was interesting, and Boba's repaired armor, and Fennec and Cara seemed to bond a little - apparently mostly because they both like to shoot things. So it was both lots of fun and really well-done, and I'm not sure it's really my favorite episode ever (I haven't put much thought into that question, I'll have to come back to that) but it's certainly one of the best, overall.

This one was short - thirty-odd minutes, I think? The new one is reportedly something like fifty-seven minutes - "a movie of the week!" Rob said when I told him that. I'm trying to keep my expectations in check for the finale. Jedi? Evil Baby Yoda? The guesses are all over the place. I have no idea, which is kind of cool. (I really don't want Evil Grogu, but I doubt Favreau and Filoni are going to listen to me. And it's too late now, in any case.)