Smile for the picture! Wave at Uncle Leon!

Say, whatcha got planned for the late afternoon of Friday, July 19th?  Laundry, ironing, mowing the lawn, going down to the Giant supermarket, waxing the Biscayne...all these can wait, because that's the day we are supposed to Wave At Saturn!

Starting at 5:27 PM (Eastern) time, from a billion miles away, a NASA operation will take pictures of Planet Earth, and they are encouraging you to wave at the sky on that day, if you want to be in the picture.

Since I know about as much about astronomy as I do about seasoning a crêpe pan, I'll just send you over to this article about it from the BBC.

I do know that Saturn is a giant ball of gas (and so it could just as easily have been called "Limbaugh") that, as of today, it is the only planet wise enough to have taken Beyonce's advice and put a ring on it.

I can't say this for sure, but the name of this project, "Wave at Saturn," is pretty much a direct ripoff of an idea hatched by me and several other purposeless teenagers during an afternoon of fishing and emptying beer cans at Loch Raven Reservoir some years ago.  We thought that dropping trou on a a moonlit night would really give the man in the moon something to look at.

Of course, we called the project "Moon The Moon" and we hoped to be invited to be on the news, but we were just a bunch of cheeky kids.