Looking upward: Eclipses and Transits

[smellie]

I do hope everyone had a good sighting of the Annular Solar Eclipse we had at supper-time, earlier today. Here, about 40% of the Sun was obscured; it looked for all the world like a huge, bright cookie with a big bite taken out of it. It started at 7:14PM (our local time: CDT) and went for just about 2 hours. It was at its height, and becoming noticeably dimmer outside, when Twosteam and myself and a mathematician friend went outside to view it. Not having an ND 8.0 filter at hand, we made do with a couple of 1As and three standard Rotating Polarisers which were rotated (all 5 filters together: we took turns) until they blocked a very great amount of the light. With this cheap set-up, we could look at the Sun without burning the eyeballs out of our heads and it was most interesting to take a good look every few minutes; you could see the Sun actually becoming fuller (more full?) as the Moon moved away.

In all a most entertaining way in which to waste half an hour, all broken up into small bits and, we are told, highly-educational as well. Well, now I have seen one.

I got thinking about just how far away that bright thing actually is and calculated the distance out at the muzzle velocity of a .280 Ross. Distance to the Sun is 93 million miles (give or take a few paces) and the MV of the .280 Ross is 3150 ft/sec. So a bulletfrom aRoss would take 155,885,710 seconds to get there, which is 2,598,095.1 minutes which is 43,301.585 hours which is 1804.2327 days..... which works out to 4 years, 11 months and 2 weeks. HOW would you possibly calculate the DROP on that?

Next thing to LOOK UP for is coming up in only a few days and it will be our ONLY chance to see this.

Coming up is the Transit of Venus: the planet Venus crosses the face of the Sun, from our point of view. This happens in cycles of TWO Transits, 8 years apart. If you missed the 2004 Transit, this is your last chance because the next will not occur for another 105 years.

TRANSIT OF VENUS will be visible June 5 - 6 (depending on which side of the Date Line you are on). The NEXT series of Transits will be in 2117 and 2125.

For more information, check out NASA or Space dot com or the Star Hustler, Jack Horkheimer (now renamed the Star Gazer; he is at the Miami Planetarium and is a lot of fun to watch).

You don't need much equipment to see this; binos and a really GOOD welding helmet are a start.

Do have fun Looking Up!
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