Today I need to write something positive, just cuz.  So, here’s a blog post about some random ‘favorites’ of mine…with certain follow-ups.

First up: Favorite Colors

Yes, kindergarten is over thirty years behind me, and yet I am still going to tell you about my favorite colors.  I really, really like colors, okay?  …Which means I can’t possibly have a favorite.  But some colors I adore are:

• Emerald green: Trees and forests are one of my favorite things, and there is something about a really green green that is just good.  This color does make me a tiny bit sad though (actually envious), because I really, really wish I could wear this color – and I really cannot.  So, if you’re a lucky person who can wear jewel tones, please enjoy it for me!
• Iridescent blue: By this I mean that super-duper blue you get on some butterfly wings.  That’s all.  It’s an amazing color.  (And butterflies are awesome too).
• Orange!: This one is a color I can actually wear, and as such I’ve come to love just how rich and vibrant it can be.  Orange is a color for smiling in.
• Storm-cloud blue: I’ve always loved this color, and obviously there is a mental link there to actual storm-clouds.  A blue sky is nice and all, but storm clouds give the sky real depth and vastness, revealing the world as bigger than it seemed before.

So, what’s more wonderful than gorgeous colors?  Gorgeous color-combinations.  A single, flat color is (sadly) never as amazing as it seems like it ought to be.  The richness comes when there are variations in tone and shade.  Or, you can enhance colors all around by pairing them with other colors they love, which also makes them more evocative (because somewhere, deep down, everything is my head is just art and story).  Emerald-green and pearly white – like moss on a quartz boulder.  Iridescent blue and chocolate brown – elegance.  Orange and pink – yes really! take a close look at some really sumptuous fabrics sometime.  Storm-cloud blue and peach – like clouds and sunshine.

Next: Favorite Animals

(Don’t pretend you don’t have a favorite animal (or five).)

Of course, there are a whole bunch of really cool animals, and when I was a kid I wanted to be a zoologist.  I think my favorite animal when I was a kid was a white tiger (charismatic macro-fauna, as some would point out; not that I’ve strayed so very far from that aesthetic since then).  These days I don’t think I could pick one favorite animal, because so many different types of animals are cool, and they can be cool in different ways, whether it’s just in the awesomeness that is themselves, or in the ways they echo across art and literature, or both!  Some favorites of mine include:

• Bats: I think one of the things that’s compelling about bats is that they exist in kind of an in-between space in terms of what’s familiar and what’s not.  They’re mammals, but they can fly.  Which is what birds do, but bats do it at night.  They like to hang out upside-down rather than right-side-up.  Also, they’re weirdly adorable, even though they have a reputation for being scary.  They’re a reminder that even the world that is very close by is stranger and more complex and more interesting than we often remember it is.
• Frogs and Toads: This for me is an artistic preference.  There’s something about frogs and toads that seems like it should be lumpy and ugly, and yet isn’t.  Some of them have iridescent skin that is just cool looking.  And I really like to hear frogs singing in the evening.  I almost never actually see them, but it’s always delightful when I get to, like a fun, random present!
• Owls: Most specifically, barn-owls I think are just gorgeous.  I am not, for the most part, a bird person, but there is something about owls that is a lot like bats – but way prettier (more charismatic?).  And I associate them with the Moon, and I really, really like the Moon (perhaps you noticed).  So, yeah, mostly an artistic preference.
• Octopuses: Octopuses are patently awesome and they look really cool incorporated into artwork.  They’re crafty and smart, but they think with their whole bodies.  They have eyes that are just like regular-animals’ (vertebrates’) eyes, but they evolved entirely separately.  They’re generally loners, but they still play.  They’re a fascinating mix of alien and not alien, real.
• Crows: They’re very smart, spending a lot of their time playing (rather than just surviving).  And they’re black, which is always classy.  Also, ‘murder of crows’ will never not sound super cool.  I would have put this choice as ‘Crows and Ravens’ but I feel like ravens steal too much of the limelight and I’m really contrary, so: Team Crows! (which you might also have noticed before).

Now, the very important follow-up question to all of those is: So, Anna, you like lots of animals, but if you could shape-shift into an animal, which animal would it be?

Answer: None of the above! If I could, I would definitely shape-shift into some sort of small and very dexterous monkey, and then I would GO EXPLORE THE TREETOPS!  (As mentioned above, trees and forests are one of my favorite things.)  Animals are cool in themselves, and they can be worked into stories and artwork in really cool ways, but to be an animal would be getting to experience their world, and the part of the world that I would really like to explore more closely is treetops.  That’s all there is to it.

Finally: Favorite Planets

(I have a PhD in Astronomy, I am definitely allowed to talk about my favorite planets.)

Very favorite: Earth!  Okay, that’s the boring, obvious choice.  But in all seriousness, Earth is definitely the best planet.  I would not trade it for any other planet, ever.

But, if we’re talking favorite planets that aren’t Earth, there are actually a lot of really awesome ones to choose from.  First, though, I should warn you: As ‘planet’, I’m going to count dwarf planets (Ceres, Pluto, etc.) and satellite planets (our Moon, & multiple moons of Jupiter and Saturn).  All planetary-mass objects are cool!

Which means that it is hard to choose a favorite.  So, top three:

• Mars:  Mars is smaller than Earth, but a lot of its geologic features are bigger.  Valles Marineris is like the Grand Canyon on Mars, if the Grand Canyon stretched the length of the entire United States.  Olympus Mons is the biggest volcano in the Solar System (dormant now, but that’s not something you can assume about all non-Earth volcanoes – check out Io) – it’s over 13 miles tall! (2-3 times taller than Mount Everest.)  And even though Mars is a desert now, many of its features show us that it had a lot of water in the past – massive flood plains and flood-carved valleys.
• Europa:  Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter, the second-closest-in of the 4 Galilean moons you can see through any telescope.  There is a lot of ice in the outer solar system, but it’s not all frozen, and Europa is one of the best examples of that.  Europa has an outer shell of thick ice, but evidence suggests that below the ice is vast a liquid-water ocean.  (A lot of its heat comes from orbiting so close to Jupiter, which produces strong tidal forces.)  Many people would like to search Europa for signs of life, but even if there isn’t life there, the unique ice-and-water geology means that, of all the non-Earth planets, Europa’s surface is the most ethereally beautiful.
• Titan:  Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, and in 2005 we landed a probe there.  I mentioned that the outer solar system has a lot of ice.  Well, it’s not all water ice.  On Titan, there is a whole lot of methane ice and ammonia ice.  What’s really cool, though, is that that ‘ice’ isn’t all solid.  Titan has an atmosphere!  It has lakes of liquid methane.  It rains on Titan.  There are active geysers on Titan.  There are boulders rounded like river rocks, and all of that geology is made out of ice (because the surface is about -290 Fahrenheit).  Titan is the true definition of an alien world (that would kill you instantly if you stepped foot on it unprotected), and is So Cool!

Now, all of those super-cool planetary bodies exist in our very own Solar System.  So, if I could get on a spaceship and travel to outer-space, where would I go?

Actually, what I really want to see isn’t a planet at all.  What I really want to see is called a protoplanetary disk.  It’s the thing that exists before there are planets, while a star system (and possibly the star itself) is still being formed.  One of the crazy, wacky (super-awesome) things about Astronomy is that the scale of things is so extreme.  Protoplanetary disks are really dense – for outer space.  All sorts of things are running into each other and building up and accreting to the point of building planets!  But those densities are still so low that the physics and types fluid-dynamics you have to keep in mind when trying to understand these places don’t really have equivalents on Earth (we’re talking 10^-7 g/cm^3 is considered really dense in these scenarios).  Earth’s atmosphere is way too dense to be an analog until you’re at least 50 miles up.  And yet, in those vast spaces within a protoplanetary disk, there is turbulence, there are particles running into each other, growing bigger like rain drops, experiencing drag in the ‘wind’ of vast, orbiting gasses.  When I was in grad-school, I once had a vision that it must be something like a great big blizzard, swirling around, particles sticking together loosely, like fat, fluffy snowflakes.  If I could travel to space, I’d want to go see if that vision was right, to go see what it’s really like inside a protoplanetary disk, where planets are being born.

Yeah.  That worked.  That cheered me up.