Stars: Birthday, Looking At, and Dancing With

Let's talk for a moment about stars: the ones you look at in the night sky, the one that's your birthday star, and the first elimination round on the TV show Dancing with the Stars.

Miss Cellania is posting about birthdays this morning, today being her birthday, and as usual, she has a lot of interesting links to fun and enjoyable spots. One of the featured links is to a site called Birthday Stars, which offers a calculator that identifies your personal birthday star - the star whose light left home on the day you were born. My birthday star turns out to be Tau 01 Hydrae, in the constellation Hydra - the light we see from this star today started its journey 55.8 years ago, meaning it's 55.8 light years away. I find that fascinating.

I'm fascinated by stars in general. The night sky is a wonderful display of the glory of creation that can make one feel either very small and humble, a part of the vastness of the universe, or both. Because I live in a major urban area, much of the grandeur of the night sky is unfortunately washed out by "light pollution," and I have to recall the view from memory. One of my favorite memories is of the first time I saw the Milky Way in all its glory, as I crawled out of my sleeping bag in the remote mountains of southwestern Colorado one early morning in the summer of 1969 - the sight literally took my breath away, and I still remember - and miss - it all these years later.

Which leads us to Dancing with the Stars. For those of you who live outside the US, you may know the show as "Strictly Come Dancing" in the UK, or under some other name elsewhere. It features "stars" of generally lesser magnitude dancing with professional partners through a series of elimination rounds. The latest season of the show started this week, and last night the first of the 12 competing stars was eliminated from the competition: actress/model Josie Maran left the show after dancing a disappointing first-round Slow Foxtrot. On the upside, though, one of my all-time favorite actresses, Jane Seymour, continues on...her Slow Foxtrot with professional dancer Tony Dovolani was a joy to watch. And even better, I realized that she and Agnes and I are all the same age! And if I didn't have a near life-long crush on Ms Seymour, I'd still root for her because of her partner - Agnes and I met and got some coaching from Tony Dovolani while we were competing at the Grand National Ballroom Championships in Miami last year, so we have a bit of a personal connection.

So...no grand message today, just a few thoughts on stars of various types.

Have a good day. Go dancing. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo