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Rare 'Annular Solar Eclipse' Tonight
New submitter Trubacca writes "The Northern-Pacific "Ring of Fire" has an opportunity tonight to observe an entirely different "ring of fire": an annular solar eclipse where the moon, owing to its distance from the Earth, seems smaller than the apparent diameter of the sun. This results in the fiery ring for which the phenomenon takes its name. Space.com has a decent write-up on the path of the eclipse, times, and tips for safe-viewing."
Its. Learn it, love it, live it and spell it CORRECTLY.
The eclipse is basically over. Here in China it's arriving just after dawn and isn't going to be headed more than a thousand miles to the west of hear. In other words, this would have been useful information yesterday or the day before, but right now it's already passed pretty much everybody posting here.
Kudos to someone who can point me to a website that lets you find out when you can see it baaed on your location. I've been looking on and off since yesterday and haven't been able to find the times for my area.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Solar eclipse during night time? Now, this is literally fantastic (i.e. pertaining to fantasy).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
We would have had a good view of it where I am, in Vancouver Canada, seeing as much as 80% coverage, but it's raining, and the forecast for today shows that it's going to stay overcast for the next couple of days.
I even managed to secure some special solar filter glasses especially for the occasion, and I won't get to actually see it.
Sometimes I hate living here.
Next one in my area, afaik, is in 2017... hopefully it won't be raining then as well, but knowing Vancouver, it's anybody's guess.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There's an eclipse tonight? It's the first I hear about it!
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Reaction of what? People? Or the sun? The answers are quite different.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
Depends where you are; Earth would have no nukes, the Sun would have an overflow of fucks not given.
This article gives information for many cities (scroll down past the maps for the text listing):
eclipse times by city
Remain calm! All is well!
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If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
The first problem would be finding a way to give all those ballistic nukes the ability to achieve escape velocity...
#DeleteChrome
If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
At a guess, they'd melt before they got anywhere near the surface and not have a chance to detonate properly.
Everybody knows that, to properly nuke the sun, you need a bomb the size of Manhattan* with a giant heat-shield and, for no adequately explored reason, despite decades of experience of getting unmanned space vehicles to nail a target 10 AUs away, a human crew to go space-crazy and jeopardise the mission.
(*the Mh is the traditional US unit for the size of an object in space, although the rest of the world use the proper FFF unit of "milliWales")
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
A sufficient mass of fusionable material launched into the sun, to cause a premature nova, would qualify as "nuking the sun"
You can't view it directly (at least not if you want your eyes to keep working) but you can make a pinhole viewer with minimal supplies and tools.
Lots of options for variation, but I did this: Cut a postage-stamp sized hole in a cereal box (or something suitably opaque). Cut a small square of aluminum foil (scavenged from your tinfoil hat, if necessary) and tape it over the hole. Then use a pin to make the smallest hole possible in the foil.
Hold the cardboard w/ pinhole up orthogonal to the sun, and project the pinhole image onto a white card.
You'll see a tiny (reversed) image of the sun in the form of a small circle, and as the moon occludes it, you'll see it clearly.
A one megaton thermonuclear weapon converts 47 grams of matter into energy. The combined nuclear arsenal of the Earth, 13,000 megatons, would convert 611,000 grams or 611 kg. or 0.611 metric tons of matter into energy. The Sun converts 400 million metric tons of matter into energy each second, thus the expression "gnat's fart in a hurricane" comes to mind.
Some broken clouds, but they weren't much of a problem.
Annular eclipses occur every 15 months on average.
NASA have a lot of solar eclipse stats for anyone interested.
That sufficient mass is well in excess of anything that could possibly be manufactured on earth... or anywhere else in the solar system, for that matter.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No need to manufacture, required material is in number of large asteroids that would only need gentle nudging over sufficient time.
The full eclipse line I found showed it to be about 10 hours drive from me. I would've gone had I been able to plan for it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
... who's to say which version of English _is_ the correct one?
To the casual observer, the answer to this question seems to be "Pretty much everyone." ;-)
In English, "correct" generally means "whatever silly 'rules' someone has taught me". We have no official standards body for the language, after all, which you'd think would mean that there is no such thing as "standard English". But the reality is that anyone and everyone feels not just permitted, but required to make up rules about the language and criticise others for violating them.
Historically, most of the well-known rules for English seem to have originated as Latin rules, imposed on English by people who thought that Latin was the perfect language, and any language that worked even slightly differently was wrong, wrong, wrong. But lately, we've heard from people who seem to have just made up rules, and critcised people who weren't even violating them. Thus, we have the common advice that "passive" is wrong, but it's clear that most people who criticise its use have no idea what "passive voice" even means.
We also have fun things like spelling "reforms" promulgated by different semi-official government or educational bodies in various English-speaking countries, without bothering to check with similar organizations in other English-speaking countries. Thus, the spell-checker in this version of FF underlines my use of "criticised" above as an error, although it's the "standard" spelling in various countries. So you can't win this game.
But it keeps us entertained. And, let's face it, verbally attacking others for poor spelling or grammar is a lot better than killing them for various real or imagined trespasses or threats.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Historically, most of the well-known rules for English seem to have originated as Latin rules, imposed on English by people who thought that Latin was the perfect language, and any language that worked even slightly differently was wrong, wrong, wrong. But lately, we've heard from people who seem to have just made up rules, and critcised people who weren't even violating them. Thus, we have the common advice that "passive" is wrong, but it's clear that most people who criticise its use have no idea what "passive voice" even means.
"English follows other languages into dark alleys, beats them up for their words and goes through their pockets for loose vocabulary." -- variously attributed
Anyone have any idea how many languages English has taken words from? Spelling rules in English are mind-bogglingly complicated because they include sub-orthographies for pretty much every one of those languages, some based on standard transliterations, others maybe kind of sort of quasi-phonetic, still others whatever worked for the first batch from that language. And of course spellings mutate over time in common usage, and sometimes the colloquial spelling will displace the "linguistically correct" one, as in almost any other language, but ten times as much in English because English has at least ten times as much vocabulary .. for the reason above. The bulk of the language is Germanic (via Old English which was basically an esoteric dialect of German), Romance (via Norman French), Latin, and Greek, in roughly that order, and the Latin/Greek distinction definitely influences a lot of seemingly contradictory rules. There's some "making it up as they go along" in the case of some source languages, but with others, the original spelling (or transliteration for non-Latin-script languages, where transliteration systems exist, and often archaic ones like the Wade-Giles system for Chinese) tends to take precedence unless it's just too weird for the average English speaker. But whole theses or possibly even dissertations could be written on this subject..
The transit of venus will be visible from most of North America (assuming no weather issues):
Unfortunately, the NASA eclipse website's taking a hammering today, but this should be the map (try the link tomorrow)
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/tran/TOV2012-Fig01.pdf
And there's an official gathering near you, too:
http://venustransit.gsfc.nasa.gov/events/viewapprovedevent/id/212
For the transit times & path from your area, see:
http://transitofvenus.nl/wp/where-when/local-transit-times/
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You obviously missed the 'or anywhere else in the solar system' part. In simple words that you might understand: 'there isn't enough matter in the solar system to do this'.
Am in Las Vegas, and was going to drive up to the center of the path to get the full effect. I decided not to waste the gas (a 240 mile round trip), and just discovered that I'm not going to miss all that much.. The NASA page with percentages of totality showed that where I was going (Zion National Park) was 96% coverage and simply staying here in Las Vegas, I get 92%.... Don't have any welders goggles, so I'm using the old "two cardboard pieces with a pinhole in one".. Went out about 15 min ago and sure enough, theres a little munch out of the sun.. Its 6pm now and our max is reached at about 6:35 per the chart..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
The Sun might give a small polite belch. Honestly the whole Earth could drop into the Sun and it wouldn't cause a huge (for the Sun) reaction. The Sun's mass is 330,000 times the mass of the Earth. That's like dropping an ounce of water into 10 tons of it.
Dude, the Sun is 330000 times the mass of the Earth. It's 1000 times the mass of Jupiter which is 2.5 times more massive than all of the other planets (including Pluto) put together. The Sun wouldn't even notice your gently nudged asteroids.
It's pretty cool, though. :-) The moon is passing through, say, upper two-thirds of the sun sideways. Cloudless sky, but the light is dimmed like it was overcast.
Birds are going apeshit. Rats are fleeing down the storm drains. Insects are doing synchro dance in the air. It's possible I'm lying.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
The first problem would be finding a way to give all those ballistic nukes the ability to achieve escape velocity...
Then you'd have to deal with the second problem, cancelling each nuke's orbital momentum (around the sun). The people who do the various probes have explained that the most difficult problem was the recent probe that's now orbiting Mercury. Reaching Mercury, or even worse, the sun, requires dumping most of the momentum that your craft inherits from the Earth, and doing that directly takes a huge amount of fuel. The current Mercury orbiter took several years to get there, because they saved fuel by using the orbital "slingshot" approach of making numerous passes past other planets (mostly Earth and Mercury) in such a way that those planets "stole" momentum from the probe. The math for this is a bit tricky, and I'm not about to try posting it here. (But google can find it for you, if you're interested. ;-)
If you want to get rid of all our nukes, a far better approach would be to extract the fissile material and recycle it as power-plant rods. That would also have the benefit of converting part of it into valuable isotopes for medical and scientific uses.
OTOH, if you really wanted to waste it by tossing it into the sun, the sun wouldn't even notice such a trivial amount of added matter. The radioactivity would be trivial compared to what the sun (basically a huge runaway fusion reactor) is producing every second.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Here's my pics of the eclipse, as the sun set past the Sandia Mountains.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Well, if you could convert the mass of all that matter to energy that would probably nuke the sun pretty effectively, but good luck finding some way to do that. The sun already converts hundreds of millions of tons of matter to energy every second, and apparently hasn't blown apart yet.
If you dumped a substantial portion of the sun's mass in iron into the sun that might trigger a supernova relatively soon (I would think the extra mass would increase its gravitational pull, increasing the density of the gas inside, causing it to burn much faster and accelerating the stellar lifecycle, and putting it over the Chandrasekhar limit).
Eclipse start time: 4:56PM Eastern
No idea where you got that link from, but as the Fine Article says, the eclipse actually "begins at 6:36 p.m. EDT (2236 GMT) in southern China." And it takes some time for it to move eastward from there to the US; it didn't start where I am until some time around 7:00pm CDT (8:00pm EDT). While I didn't depend on /. to tell me about the eclipse, if I did, I would've been informed in time.
The sun might be big but it does not generate that kind of energy - its energy output is about 100 times smaller than your number at 5 million tons of mass per second converted to energy which it gets from the 700 million tons of hydrogen it fuses into helium every second.
Solar eclipse during night time? Now, this is literally fantastic (i.e. pertaining to fantasy).
Check the article title: now you know why it is a _rare_ annular eclipse...normal annular solar eclipses are almost annual too (not quite but once every 1-3 years).
The title sure looks strange. I guess for some people the event would occur at their night, but the important people today are the ones who are in daylight at the time and can see it and send photos for the rest of the world to see. Probably some of them are also slasdotters and will also wonder about the eclipse "tonight" article.
Tough viewing conditions in the Republic of Boulder, Colorado as lots of clouds - check out this image showing a lotta crud between me and the sun.
... if I had been just a little bit farther South, I probably would have been totally skunked. Plus we weren't in totality, so never got the ring-o-fire. But still very cool to watch and here's my time-lapse video.
... cut out one of the "eyepieces" from my Son's Eclipse Glasses and wedged that into the 2xTC teleconvertor! ;-)
I was hoping to catch a time-lapse of the partially eclipsed sun setting over Longs Peak and it re-appeared literally at the last minute
BTW, since I didn't have an ND filter, mine was total makeshift
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Tonight? You mean, after sunset? Really?
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You would get your motor running & head out on the highway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm glad you included it. It makes all the difference.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Forget the west coast and pacific rim - here in the east, the rotation of the earth completely blocked the sun for almost 10 hours - spectacular!
Don't look at it with remaining eye.
Don't underestimate the gnat's fart effect though, there are those who claim it's even more powerful than a butterfly wingflap.
We ended up in Redding CA to get to clear skies, but worth it. Can't wait for 2017!
You'd get a Superman clone with a blond mullet, of course.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)