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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.
Reaction of what? People? Or the sun? The answers are quite different.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2012-may-20 is a nice resource.
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.
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It doesn't start in the US for a few hours.
If you care about viewing astronomical events, you may want to find a more reliable space information source than /. (like an astronomy magazine).
Also, you can't view this eclipse without eye protection.
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.
This is incorrect. Here is a live feed. Kicks off at 6PM Pacific time.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The media was trying to obscure the event, but we saw the light anyway as details seeped out the periphery.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
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'
If you install stellarium you can run time back and forth for your location. You can judge the time by eye that way.
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'.
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.
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
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.
No, Asia was at the beginning. Both the sun's and moon's apparent motion is East-to-West, but the moon's *actual* (monthly) motion is West-to-East. The moon's orbital velocity is faster than the Earth's rotational velocity (in magnitude,) so the shadow's net velocity is still West-to-East.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
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
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