Princeton is a great university, but there is one aspect of it I hate with a passion: it's official colour.

Orange. Ugh.

Astronomy images are generally stunning, but at a talk recently I saw a picture that completely took my breath away. At first glance I thought it was an impression by a particularly good artist, but it turns out that nature is more than poetic enough to provide this image.

This is a mosaic of some images taken by the Cassini spacecraft which is currently in orbit around Saturn. Cassini happened to pass right behind Saturn, which completely eclipsed the Sun at a distance of 2.2 million km from the spacecraft.

The sunlight spilling past the Saturn's disk has illuminated its rings beautifully in a glow of pastel colours, revealing faint inner and outer rings which are normally invisible. Most poetically, within the left side of the rings, one can glimpse the pale blue dot that we call our home, almost insignificant in the splendour of the cosmos.

I had a very interesting (not necessarily in a good way) experience with one of my homeworks, which was to construct a simple theoretical model for a red giant. First of all, it was due about 2 weeks ago, but Jeremy (the prof) is so smart that he won't have any trouble marking it at any time (most people try to mark homeworks all in one go to get into the mindset). In any case, the deadlines are only 'suggestions' because no one really cares very much about the grade so long as the students are learning.

The reason I'm 2 weeks overdue is that the problem set is difficult, and I'm not the only one to discover this. I've spent several whole days trying to figure out the problem and I had to disregard some of the conditions set out by the question in order to solve the problem.

Then today I found out the probable reason why I was having so much trouble. Jeremy himself apparently hasn't bothered working out the answer for the question himself yet.