Astronomy

Those two bright spots on Ceres are what interest me the most.

It might be a long wait…

I've been having a look at Vesta, the largest asteroid in the solar system.

As I'm writing this I'm watching the solar eclipse in the uk - not total, only 80% where I am. It's 9.45 am GMT here and 80% happened around 9.30, I could see a crescent sun that indeed looked about 20%! The sky was still quite bright - brighter than before the clouds cleared. (I'm amazingly lucky to have seen this, it was forecast to be total cloud cover, but it cleared at just the right time.)

When I realised it was sunny I hurriedly made a simple pinhole camera. "Don't stare directly at the sun, folks," as they keep on saying. To do that use a pin to make a small hole in a piece of photocopy paper, with a pin, than project the image of the sun onto another piece of photocopy paper. The image you get is small (dime size) but you can easily see the moon covering the sun, and the change in the amount of cover, which happens over several minutes.

The birds are making some strange chirping noises. It's definitely getting brighter as the minutes wear on. A dog is barking. The neighbours are giving me strange looks as I manipulate two pieces of photocopy paper into strange positions in my garden...

10am now and the moon is now only covering 50/60% of the sun.

The BBC hired a plane to fly above the clouds and capture totality:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/l...e-live-updates

Still my less expensive approach was 80% as good, I reckon, for a lot less than 20% of the effort! It's great to actually go out into your garden and do this rather than watching it on the web. I can say I was there :)

I saw the partial eclipse too. It got noticeably darker when it happened between 10.50 and 11.05, and the birds went quiet. Animals know its happening, which I find fascinating. I reckon it got 50 percent partial eclipse in Sweden: http://www.thelocal.se/20150320/swed...-solar-eclipse

It is interesting that animals may have sensed it. It does get darker.

The last time I saw a total eclipse was almost two decades ago. Many of us were out looking through pinholes in paper but underneath a maple tree we could see projected on the sidewalk many tiny eclipses showing through the leaves of the tree.

I have jet read about the new James Webb Telescope to be launched in 2018. You can read about it here.

In looking at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope) this telescope would collect five times as much light and be focused on the infrared. I can see how one can collect more radiation: just build a bigger surface. But I don't know what it means to focus on the infrared. The position of the telescope would be at a Lagrangian point in earth's orbit around the Sun. I suppose it would not be able to be repaired as easily as Hubble in low-earth orbit.

Good points!

I had also not thought of the problem of making repairs so far out in space.

I am hoping to see the lunar eclipse tomorrow morning. It would be about 5:16 my time in Chicago. There is a good chance I will be asleep, but I wasn't able to see the solar eclipse a couple weeks ago since it was at night my time.

It turns out I woke up early enough this morning to see the Moon get almost completely eclipsed before it disappeared in the clouds above my neighbor's house in the west.

I was hoping to see the moonshadows disappear, but dawn made them disappear first.

Also, considering the curvature of the Earth's shadow on the Moon, clearly the Earth is far bigger than the moon. I wonder if there are such things as the Earth's shadow eclipsing outer planets such as Mars and Jupiter. I'll have to look that up. The Earth would not eclipse Venus or Mercury since they are closer to the Sun than the Earth and so the Earth can't get in the way of the Sun's light.

A lunar eclipse shows the moon as red, as this is the colour that is visible through the earth's atmosphere. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse. I don't think the shadow of the earth projects far enough to eclipse any of the outer planets, but such events certainly happen when the earth comes between the sun and any of its planets.

I found a very nice astronomy blog from Northern Ireland, http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/ divided up into solar system, our galaxy, universe, and a miscellany category weird and fun. Its well written and very informative. The Armagh Planetarium has its own webpage, too: http://www.armaghplanet.com.

The article about the solar flyby 70,000 years ago and the four species of humans alive then was pretty interesting: http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/did...ent-skies.html

As far as those four species, I knew about the Neanderthal, but not the Denosovan nor Homo floresciensis.

Yet another probe that I had never heard of - this time Japanese, Akatsuki - that missed its orbit around Venus and went round the sun instead. It has also got boost propellent (not sure what kind) but its back and on track for its orbiting around Venus. See also this Astronomy Now piece.

I had not heard of Akatsuki before either. From the links, it will be looking for lightning and volcanic activity if it gets into orbit around Venus. I wonder why lightning would be of interest. I can see how volcanic activity would show that the planet is still active.

There seem to be a number of large objects circling the sun between Jupiter and Pluto. This one from space.com is about a Centaur, Chiron:

After its discovery in 1977, Chiron was classified as the first "centaur" — a body between Jupiter and Pluto with characteristics common to both asteroids and comets. Today, there are more than 200 known centaurs, and scientists estimate that there are more than 44,000 of these hybrid asteroid-comets in the solar system.

Thats amazing, Chiron has rings around it, like Saturn. It is large, too, minor planet, comet-asteroid, it is 145 miles wide.

Read more about it here: http://www.space.com/29067-chiron-ce...kly_2015-04-13.