Connecting with the Consciousness of Stardust

Stardust.
The stuff of which dreams are made.

There's a battle raging which has been doing so since the beginning of the concept we call time.
It just doesn't end. I'm speaking of the crisis with Israel and Lebanon.
Today, Sunday, was a bad day. The terminology is that the crisis is escalating.
Just synchronistically enough, yesterday's Torah portion, Va'etchanan, begins with Moses pleading(the meaning of the word va'etchanan is pleading with the sense of supplication)
to be allowed to enter the Promised Land.
Deuteronomy 3:23 - 7:11
At that time I pleaded with God, saying,
Va'etchanan el-Adonay ba'et hahi lemor.
Please let me cross [the Jordan]. Let me see the good land across the Jordan, the good mountain and the Lebanon.
Ebrah-na ve'er'eh et-ha'arets hatovah asher be'ever haYarden hahar hatov hazeh vehaLevanon.

Yup. The Battle Has Been Raging since the Beginning. What is the End?

.....

Back to stardust sifting.
What is stardust?
A fading sun in its life cycle will first go into the stage call a red giant, in which it sheds most of its mass. Then it will fade into a white dwart, which is small and dense. The larger the star, the more quickly (1000x faster) they go through their life phases. In these larger stars (15 x the sun of our sun), the star collapses in upon itself and produces an explosion called a Supernova. A supernova is an exploding star.
All the eloements which were once part of the star itself plus heavier elements formed by the supernova re blasted out into space. This is interstellar dust.
The Stardust Mission was devised to collect the interstellar dust.
"Stardust was launched on its mission to capture dust and debris surrounding a comet in 1999.
It swept up particles from Comet Wild 2 in January 2004, as it flew within 240km (149 miles) of the frozen body of ice and dust.
As part of its trip, the probe also captured a sprinkling of dust that would have originated in distant stars. It did this by extending a retractable device containing cells filled with aerogel, a porous substance designed to trap dust molecules."
"Aerogel is one of the strangest materials ever developed. It is a solid, yet is only a few times as dense as air. If you hold it in your hand, you can only barely feel its weight, and it looks bluish and ghostly – like solid smoke. While it looks blue, it casts an orange shadow. It does this for the same reason that the sky is blue and sunsets are red!
Aerogel has extremely bizarre properties. It is a solid, glassy nanofoam, yet weighs next to nothing. Aerogel has the almost magical property that it can capture particles moving at very high speeds (several miles per second or more) better than any other material. In some cases, particles can be captured in a nearly pristine state. Particles moving at these speeds vaporize if they hit any other material."
More on aerogel from the JPL Stardust website:
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/tech/aerogel.html
One side of the collector was used for chasing the comet, the other for interstellar dust.

"A capsule containing dust from stars light years away landed in the Utah desert on Sunday.
The particles are buried in gel that was exposed to the interstellar dust stream during the probe's seven-year voyage around the Solar System.
Scientists need volunteers to sift through millions of pictures of the gel to locate the few dozen tiny grains.
The project, known as Stardust@home, has been set up by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. "No-one has ever had a contemporary interstellar dust particle in the lab, ever, to study," senior fellow Andrew Westphal told the BBC News website. "It is really a unique opportunity." "
"Volunteers will be able to access the images via a web-based "virtual microscope". To take part, they need a reasonably up-to-date computer with Netscape or Internet Explorer, patience and some spare time.
People who register will have to go through a web-based training session to see if they are suitable. Dr Westphal believes the untrained eye may be better at spotting what amounts to a cosmic needle in a haystack. "

Above quote from BBC newstories.

Stardust at Home and the University of Berkeley research project is what I am participating in as a volunteer.
We're doing interstellar dust particles. You need to look for the particle trail in the aerogel.
They look like mini sephirot. Because Berkeley is an educational institution, they feel the need to constantly test you to make sure that you're looking for the correct image. Unfortunately, these tests tend to make me not point out what might be an anomoly because then I'll get one wrong.
Oy. Testing. I see the necessity for it. They need to weed through the volunteers and see who is getting the hang of it.
What I see is a grey slide with little marks in it. You have to click trail, no trail or bad focus.
I'm looking at a VM of the aerogel collector. It is way way out.
I'm loving it
Definitely soul soothing.
Especially which the chaos on the planet.
I'm loving it.
So far I saw 19 particle tracks out of 450 real movies (as opposed to what they call Calibration Movies, which are the tests.)

"As well as the satisfaction of taking part in the space project, volunteers have another incentive - the chance to name any dust grains they find.
"There is a tradition in the interplanetary dust community that people name particles, usually those collected in the stratosphere by high flying aircraft," said Dr Westphal. "

I'm an esoteric interstellar dust sifting existential intellegensia volunteer researcher seeking solace in a crazy world.

Remember, everything IS interconnected.

Shavuoah Tov.

Peace