Slashdot Mirror
Eclipse Today, Meteor Shower Friday
Many people wrote in with these links: Today (Wednesday) BBC has streaming video of the total solar eclipse visible from England to India. Friday the 13th, starting at 0300 US EDT, NASA will post live shots from the Perseid meteor shower taken from a camera mounted on a high-altitude balloon. Check the links for details galore. It's an excellent week for space and astronomy buffs online!
4 minute video from Cornwall, 2 and a bit from Germany.
X-fileget from 2Bsys works great for Windows machines for getting most .RAM -> RM files
- HeadBastard, who has left his brand-spanking-new login at work, and is now an AC
Yeah looked okay from Bracknell in the UK's Thames Valley (where Oracle, MS, Novell, COGNOS,JDE, BAAN, Peoplesoft, etc, et) are located).
All the offices emptied and there was quite a buzz altho the clouds covered at just the wrong moment it was as good as we could have hoped.
The eldritch light was cool - haven't seen it like that since I did acid last.
The festivals in cornwall looked cool on TV tho' - Dodger is just jealous cos Harl (a mutual friend) went to the lizard with VIP tickets. I really wish I was there rather than stuck in this office coding an crappy application server on crappy NT (although as soon as Notes for Linux finishes installing I'll be playing with that).
I didn't think i'd cope this well - not too upset that I could have been with my fiancee in cornwall - in my home town right under totality (Falmouth) with all my friends. Bah!
A.
Intranet/Internet Developer & Linux Advocate
umm... i'm just thinking about the whole dual eclipse theory and wondering how that's going to happen... isn't it the case that a solar eclipse take place when the moon comes between the earth and the sun and a lunar eclipse takes place when the earth is between the moon and the sun... wouldn't these have to be at least 14 days apart so the moon could get through half its rotation?
i'm no astronomer so i could be wrong on this i'm just wondering if there's some kind of simple explanation that i'm missing
I was looking to the next ridge of fields to the west, and there was a big spot of direct sunshine (lucky people). I could also see a few other fields further north and west.
Right before the totality the field about 5 Kms west just faded out, and then a second later we got into darkness ourselves, so I missed that moment where the last bead of light winks out. I made up for it by seeing the sun re-appear, so I didnt see if there was a wave of light rushing to the west.
There were too many clouds around the area to properly see the shadow. I've seen the shadow approach in another eclipse years ago in North America, where we had a good clear sky. But it happens so fast you have to decide where you are going to be looking, either up or in the direction of the shadow.
The bad part about having a sky mostly filled with clouds was no interference patterns on the ground. In an eclipse with a clear sky, there are wavy light patterns all over everything. Its a pretty cool side effect.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Outside of a little village called Villers-la-Chevre (the goat village).
There was a few hundred blue sky seekers there, most drove up in the last few minutes before totality. But the big spot of blue sky kind of filled up at the last minute as the temperature dropped. Not bad enough to miss any of the eclipse.
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The Maya calendar is accurate.
The problem is in figuring out which of our less accurate day-labels corresponds to the day that the Maya calendar so accurately indicates.
(Um, actually, the design parameters for the calendars are quite different. You ask two different questions, you get two different answers. The Maya calendar, IIRC, solves the problem of the year not being an integer number of days by having a 360 day year with either 5 or 6 days being completely off the calendar. You just don't do ANYTHING on those days, so there is no need to schedule appointments or record events.)
Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
Homer
We apologize for the inconvenience.
The man page on cal specifically states that the year is 1-9999. So I guess technically it is not a bug in calendar to not accept negative years. However it is a limitation that I would love to see fixed. It might get tricky since '-' means that an option is to follow. So that might get a bit tricky syntactically (sp).
err..... a bit tricky with the syntax. (thats better)
As for "cal 5.5".. that looks like a bug. Kinda lame of cal to swallow stupid numbers.
One thing about watching the BBCs real video is that you get to see one of the world's most unlikely TV presenters - Partick Moore (the old bloke with the dodgy eyes in the beginning of the broadcast).
He has been broadcasting his programme (the sky at night) for so long, nobody can remember it not being on.
Also, as nobody watches it except for (former Queen Guitarist) Brian May, if it was taken off the air, and old Patrick was just stuck in a studio somewhere - sans camera, nobody would ever notice.
Play that funky xylophone white boy!
In the words of Red Dward, "What a guy!".
Mark.
L'an mil neuf cent nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffrayeur
Resusciter la grand Roy d'Angolmois.
Aunt après Mars regner par bonheur.
Hmmm... I'm pretty sure that the Mayan calandar ends Dec 22, 2012. At least, if my shadowrun memory is correct. =) I think the Aztec Calander is a cyclical calander that doesn "end". But I'm not sure... =/
Pax -- Ob
East European servers couldn't handle it as well... http://www.zatmenislunce.cz/ stopped responding about a half hour before it went through Prague (only about 90% here...)
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
As opposed to Oslo, the capitol of... wyoming?
;)
:-D
I just wanted to protect myself from comments like; "Norway? Isn't that the capitol of Sweden?" or "Oslo? Isn't that north of Dallas?".
BTW: No; there are not polar-bears in the streets.
Var det noe mer du lurte på?
ObEclipse: cloudy in Swansea (95% or so), but the pinhole camera worked. I'd forgotten how much fun such things were. Eerie light quality, and a definite temperature drop.
So can we take the continued existence of the earth as a refutation of Nostradamus' predictions in general? Can we have a "celebrate rational thought and the fruits of science" day?
Of course not, as we'll be told: the continued existence of the world only proves that Nostradamus didn't say it would end.
The millennial-insanity stuff is just getting started.
While I dont exactly believe in Doomsday predictions, but in two of Nostradamus' quatrains he forsees both of these astronomical effects. In one (quatrain 72) he says that in July 1999 a great object will fall from the sky. While he may be 1 month off, in another passage (quatrain 51) he tells of a great meteor that is hiding behind a solar eclipse will fall to the ground at the end of the millenium (he doesnt specify which millenium). Could this all be coincidence?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Paul M
"There are no innocent bystanders
What where they doing there in the first place"
Paul M
"There are no innocent bystanders. What where they doing there in the first place"
William S Burroughs
I noticed no difference in the light at all in Stockholm, although I was having Lunch outdoors throughout the entire thing. I guess its not that surprising, 70% is not reffering to the strength of the light.
:-).
I wasn't looking at the Sun itself (I'm committed to destroying my eyes by stairing at small text on a monitor, nothing else), but people who did did see something of a moonshadow.
However, the weather here was perfect
Does anyone have a track of where the eclipse should be visible?
-awc
The eclipse looked pretty good here in Watford this morning. Apparently, there was cloud across most of southern England, and Watford was one of the few places which was (mostly) clear.
And I've seen that meteor shower before, one year when I was in Israel. We spent the night in the desert, outside, looking straight up at the clearest skies I've ever seen. Stunning!
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
I watched the eclipse on the asahi site, and for my money, the best view was in Austria...Since eclipses are something like the Kentucky Derby...several hours of build-up, two minutes of glory, I fired up my UNIX box next to the iMac and played Paranoia while waiting. I was rewarded by a view of the last sliver of sun disappearing...a suspicion of a lunar mountain...and then... Glory. The solar corona must have been especially active. Beads of reddish light, the only thing missing was abberant starlight. Fantastic. It took two whole minutes, then a brilliant burst of pure SUN ....Watched the rest of the spots...Hungary, Roumania...Iran was a wash, the connection kept dropping... It suddenly hit me...no sound. Wish I had had the Eclipse music from "Einstein on the Beach", the Eclipse music from Farinelli, or even a good percussion section...gotta scare that dragon away... But a cosmic event nonetheless. (BTW, I'm first!!!)
teleny, friend of cats.
Eclipse update: Apple PR stunts shocks World
the sky is falling! the sky is falling! Its TEOTWAWKI.
During our lunch break in Holland we could catch a glimpse of the sun throughout the clouds. Unfortunately the eclipse was not total here and it just got darker (to the point of turning street lights on), but it did not get dark enough to see the stars. I envyed the lucky bastards that passed above us on a 747 coming from East, well above the clouds and in the darkness. I should have found a cheap charter flight and gone to Roumania...
Here in Oslo, the capitol of Norway, we had a 75% solar eclipse. The result of a 75% solar eclipse is simply a banana shaped sun.. It may have been a little darker too, but the a cloud blocked the sun when the eclipse was at its peak, so it was hard to tell.
;-)
All in all it was interesting to look at, but nothing spectacular.
Anyway; it was an excuse to take a break from work (Y2K testing).
For more streams and general eclipse info see http://www.solar-eclipse.org/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm sure Nostradamus fanatics will claim afterwords that Nostradamus' 1999 prediction was a prediction of the JFK jr. plane crash or something.
Nostradamus' quantrains are like poetry, and are cryptic. I've seen many predictions of the future based on them (Killer Earthquake in CA in 1988, etc.) all have failed.
But people claim afterwords that he predicted things like the death of Princess Di, because they found a quantrain that sounds like that event. I've even found someone who claimed that one quantrain predicted the Pentium bug! The same quantrain has been interpreted by others to be a prediction of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even if Nostradamus's "Centuries" do predict the future, they're pretty useless because nobody understands what they mean. Personally, I think he deliberatly wrote a book of giberish poetry, knowing how gullible people are.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
The meteors that you'll see streaking across the sky are only the size of a grain of sand. Of course they're hitting the atmosphere at 30,000 mph, but they're harmless.
Yes... but the meteors themselves are not as much of a concern as what happens if one hits Cassini. Sure, they're harmless to the earth, the Perseid shower in itself is nothing to worry about, but a grain of sand hitting Cassini at 30kmph while it's so close to earth could cause a bit more damage.
I love a good meteor shower, I just imagine my enjoyment of it will be rather tainted by the knowledge that 72 pounds of plutonium 238 are bouncing around up there with 'em.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
No, I believe it is Dec. 22, 2007. I remember this from a book i read a while ago only because It's my 22nd Birthday and freaks the hell out of me!
--
remove government if you want to reply to me thru email
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
I heard nothing about a planned blockade, and my parents live down there.
It'd be a pretty stupid thing to do - Cornwall desperately needs all the money it can get...
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
L'an mil neuf cent nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffrayeur
Resusciter la grand Roy d'Angolmois.
Aunt après Mars regner par bonheur.
The year millet nine hundred and ninety nine seven months,
From the sky will come large Roy deffrayor
Resusciter large Roy d' Angolmois.
Aunt after Mars regner happily.
Hooray for babelfish!
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
I don't know about the Aztec calendar, but the Mayan calendar ends in 2011 or 2012 (depending on who you listen to)
;-)
Also I think there is a planetary alignment called the "great cross" sometime this week, and NASA's Cassini space probe, which is carrying a large quantity of plutonium, is supposed to flyby earth next week, within only a few hundred miles (to use Earth's gravity as a boost to go deep into space).
Some speculate that the Cassini space probe will crash into Earth, causing a major environmental disaster, NASA says that there is no problem. Nostradamus says that the "King of terror" will "come from the sky" during or after the seventh month of 1999.
In short, it's an interesting week!
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
I can't remember what that the haloe around the Moon is called. I see that often here in Colorado where the evenings are often cold. I don't remember how the phenomenae occurs either.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I'd sorta like to know whether or not there'll be a massive ecological disaster next week.
No need to wait, we can answer this question now: There won't be a *new* ecological disaster next week. But there will still be all the ecological disasters we already had.
If you want to see where Cassini is right now, look here: Where is Cassini Now?
aj
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
I understand why eclipses happen, and the pattern or the earth, moon and sun and all that stuff, but one question no one has ever been able to answer me: Why isn't there an eclipse every month?. The moon revolves around once a month, and therefore must pass in front of the earth every month, right? I have read several astronomy books, even textbooks, and they don't address this simple question. Also, some guy posted there was going to be a lunar eclipse too tonight. Sorry, but I don't think the two can happen at once, as the moon has to be on one side of the earth for one, and on the complete opposite for the other. Let me know if I am wrong here. Ever notice when the moon gets kind of orange? Well that's a really weak version of a lunar eclipse. Those happen often, though I've never seen a complete one. And yes it is a little eerie that the Persieds(sp?) and a solar eclipse are happening at the same time.
The most dangerous thing Cassini could do to you would be if it falls out of the sky and happens to hit you in the head. And at least that would eliminate your ignorance.
It's either 2011 or 2012, on either Dec 22, 23, or 24, or maybe July... (depending on who's counting)
Anyway they say that the Mayan calendar is more accurate than our own.
So here's my question:
If it's so accurate, why can't we even figure out the exact day it ends?
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
I think that the Plutonium dioxide would hardly be detectable against all of the other radiation sources (most notably our Sun).
Anyone can look at this issue at the Cassini web site: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassi ni/rtg/rtginfoframes.htm
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Do you know *anything* at all? If something hits Cassini nothing at all will happen.
You watch too many B movies, and you worry about things too much.
If you're really worried, please take a look at some useful web sites like www.nasa.gov, www.jamesrandi.com, and www.snopes.com and you will learn that Cassini isn't going to hurt you and you can't believe everything you heard in the checkout line at the grocery store.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Actually, the Perseid meteor shower peaks
a ug99_1.htm#observe
/ constellations/Perseus.html
Aug 12 21UT (2pm PDT). Continues through
to Aug 13.
Observing tips from Nasa Science:
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast09
The shower's radiant is in the Constellation
Perseus. Brief info on Perseus:
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations
-My Two Cents
How the hell do you figure that a "massive ecological disaster" could possibly be caused by 72 pounds of non weapons grade plutonium, in the form of ceramic pellets, which is only dangerous if ground up into powder form and inhaled, and can even be eaten safely. You must be one of those gullible people who enjoyed the Blair Witch Project. I suggest doing a search of the old comments on Slashdot for "Cassini". This topic was already discussed about a month ago.
I wish i thought of that, my eyes hurt :-)
I also saw it in Reading.
One really neat effect was that leaves
of trees effectively produced hundreds
of pinhole cameras, causing lots of bright crescents in the shadow.
Indeed, the BBC maxed out it's ISP (VBC) and as a result VBC routers went bye bye, cutting off all it's leased line customers (that'd be me then..) The BBC were shifting in excess of 200Mbps constantly all day, indeed still are...
Wow - are the bits in secti on 6/8 talking about Bill Gates (antichrist), or what!!! I liked the bit at the end about the length of the antichrist's reign... ;)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
What you're probably missing is that the earth makes a complete rotation around its own axis every 24 hours. The moon, making a complete rotation around the earth every 28 days, follows the earth as it rotates, therefore completing only 1/28th of a complete rotation during this 24 hour period. i.e. the earth can be between the sun and the moon roughly 12 hours after the moon has been between the sun and the earth.
Check this out: ;-)
Nostradamus predicted the Pentium bugOf all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
I believe it was about 97% coverage here, and we were lucky enough to have clear skies.
:-)
It was a fairly strange and worthwhile sight. Even though it remained light throughout, the daylight did have a bizarre washed-out quality, sort of like twilight, but still with sharp shadows and the sun high in the sky.
Well, it was a fine excuse for the entire office to stand outside with their homemade pin-hole cameras for 20 minutes... it's amazing what you can do with a 17" monitor box, a pin and sheet of white paper
What you're probably missing is that the earth makes a complete rotation around its own axis every 24 hours.
So? What does this have to do with anything?
The moon, making a complete rotation around the earth every 28 days, therefore completing only 1/28th of a complete rotation during this 24 hour period.
So 12 hours after a solar eclipse, the moon will be 1/56th of a rotation further along in its orbit, which hardly puts it on the other side of the Earth from the sun. It is in fact about 6.4 degrees from the sun (roughly 13 moon diameters) - not 180 degrees.
Get a flashlight, a tennis ball and a ping pong ball....
aj
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Even if Nostradamus's "Centuries" do predict the future, they're pretty useless because nobody understands what they mean. Personally, I think he deliberatly wrote a book of giberish poetry, knowing how gullible people are.
The quatrains are a lot like inkblots. Everybody sees something different, and if you give a person a quatrain and tell them it predicts [insert anything at all here], most people will go "Oh yeah, I can see that."
It's like those "biorhythm" charts or whatnot. One debunker, as a demonstration, gave a woman a biorhythm chart for a completely wrong birthdate. She wrote back praising him for his skill at predicting her rhythms. He wrote back and (deliberately) enclosed a second wrong chart, with a note of apology saying the first one was miscalculated.
Her reply was yet more praise about how the new chart was even more accurate than the old one!
(Source: Martin Gardner, Mathematical Games)
As much as I hate to say it, we live in a world where marketing to the "stupid segment" is not only possible but highly profitable.
-- Old Man Kensey
the site is here if you'd like to see some pictures.
Uwe
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Unfortunately it was cloudy, but here's my writeup I cant copy/paste, and i dont have the time to retype it, sorry
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
How fortuitous that Nature decided to usher in the Linux millennium in so grand a fashion. Nature herself smiled on Linux today as she decided to display her celestial crown jewels and pay homage to the Linux fraternity and its priests celebrating the high holydays of the Linuxbierwanderung
Of course, I'll be living in my elaborate underground labrynth I've been building for the impending Y2K disaster. So if the satellite doesn't get us, we've always got Y2K to finish us off. I'm already seeing more empty shelves in my neighborhood grocery store. Y2K isn't going to kill us, it is all the fscking idiots that are going to panic (stock market crashes, runs on banks and food supplies, etc..) that will probably do us in.
for a few seconds the clouds broke up and i saw the remaining seconds of the totality. very impressive! i even climbed on the roof to see the moon-shadow coming from a distance. didn't work. the overall mood of the light was very strange. the horizon whas very bright but you were able to see the stars & planets. and before i forget to mention: it was friggin cold!! the temp sank by 8 degree! and then *poof* it was bright again. i am very happy that i was able to watch this event. so, wheres the next total-eclipse? in angola? i must hurry and get some flight tickets. :-) ps. i'm from germany/bavaria
The main problem with the Blair Witch Project is that the whole concept of a "witch" is so absurd that it makes it impossible to take the movie seriously. Unless you're a 6 year old who still believes in witches, Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy. The only logical explanation for what happened in the movie is that the kids were really stupid, and someone was playing pranks on them. I'm sorry, but I don't find that scary at all. I think the way they made the movie was neat, it might have been good had they based it on something a little less silly than witches and warlocks.
Was out in eastern france earlier today, beat the traffic out there by leaving last night, then spent the morning finding a place with some sunshine.
I was up on the top of a ridge with a few hundred other people spread around the fields. We were able to see the shadow coming at us across the fields right as the sun winked out. Then there was a lot of cheering and horn honking, and when the light came back 2 minutes later everyone just went wild.
The temperature dropped from 17 C at 11:00, to 12 C during the eclipse, then went back up to 21 later in the day. And the clouds got thicker as the temperature dropped, which made it a bust for most people.
The corona was amazing. It was so bright in the sky, but everything else around was dark. Didn't see any stars or planets, but that was because there were still too many clouds in the area, and most of the time I was looking at the corona through a thin cloud.
And the GSM telephone network was saturated for about 20 minutes, as everyone phoned everyone else to swap stories.
It took 7 hours to get back to Paris, the traffic was pretty dense. Millions of dutch and germans heading north, millions more parisians heading home. What was wild is that everyone seems friendly today on the roads, having all been out to share a common experience.
Thats all from france,
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
the Mayan calendar does not end on Dec 22,2012. It crosses over fron the Fifth age to the Sixth age. this is supposed to signal a significant change it the world
oops
Anybody nostalgic for Blue Peter can check out my pinhole camera designs in case they want to get ready for the next one in 2081 CE.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Indeed, Cassini does fit the prophetical bill... ;-)
The Grand Cross is actually, for those who are interested, a line-up of planets in the fixed signs of the zodiac. We have Mars in Scorpio, the Solar eclipse in Leo, Saturn in Taurus and Uranus in Aquarius. And our little blue ball earth stuck in the middle. Anybody's life a little more tense/hectic than normal these days? This is why! Doubly so if you are one of the aforementioed fixed signs. Now what is really freaky is that the animal/humanoid representations of these fixed signs appear on cathedral windows and tarot cards all over the place...on the World tarot card, the four figures in the corners are the angel (Aquarius), the lion (Leo), the phoenix or griffin (Scorpio) and the bull (Taurus). What the heck does that mean? Not sure but I thought it worth mentioning. Somebody else can take it from here.
Class dismissed! Fornication in the streets begins promptly at 3!
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I put up a little GPhoto HTML Gallery of pictures I took from Herford, Germany here.
Although occultation was only about 93% we had some very eerie lighting and a drop in temperature of stunning 13 degrees C.
Enjoy,
Uwe
m. Wealthy U.S. businessman a closet revolutionary and Nazi
Ip. 154 (cV-75)
A very wealthy and famous businessman in the U.S. will be secretly involved with the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan in the south. The man's sole ambition in life is to overthrow the American government as it is presently constituted. The man will be involved with politics but will stay low-key, spinning webs of power and expanding his influence behind the scenes. This groundwork will prove useful for the Antichrist later on. The man will have a puppet, a figurehead, but he will pull the strings. The link will not be known until the time of the Antichrist.
Does that give you the chills or what? Wonder if it's Billy G..
Are you on crack?
Other more likely candidates:
Newt Gingrich
Patrick Buchanan
Steve Forbes
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's not the end of the world after a
John
John_Chalisque
There is _no_ way that a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse can occur on the same day. A solar eclipse only occurs when the moon is between the earth and the sun. A lunar eclipse only occurs when the earth is between the sun and the moon. So, no, there is not a lunar eclipse tonight. There was a lunar eclipse across Europe 14 days ago (it almost always happens that there is a lunar eclipse on the moon cycle before the solar eclipse). But the moon is new now, which means a lunar eclipse is impossible. BTW, there is a lunar eclipse coming up soon in the US. Mid-January of 2000, I believe.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Don't you mean 24 Kilograms?
Just what kind of ecological disaster are you refering to? PU-238 has a half life of ~88 YEARS. Its primary decay is Alpha. Radioactively its not that dangerous. Its only slightly worse than the Americium in your smoke detector. (or do you live in a fire proof cave somewhere?) Or course we're talking kilograms not milligrams.....
At this point the only "disaster" I can think of is the scientific lost if the probe does get hit. The chances of it hurting anyone on earth are so frighteningly small its not even worth debating.
If it had blown up at launch the only people that would have gotten hurt were all the anti-nuke whiners that it would have landed on...
"If it's so accurate, why can't we even figure out the exact day it ends?"
Because the real task isn't using it to count the days, it's comparing their calendar to ours in order to see when they match up. The first one I heard was Dec 22, 2012, but I haven't heard of other dates until now. Any idea where they get 2011 from?
...sorry, I was just so proud of myself for figuring out your acronym. :)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Cassini passed earth on swing-by today, IIRC. Everything went fine (in spite of the total eclipse :-), and Cassini is now on its way away from earth. If it would be destroyed, nothing would fall on earth.
Also, if I am correct, I believe the same symbols line the corners of the Wheel of Fortune card as well...
Driph
--
driph
We were in the Englischer Garten, waiting for the corona to show. My friends and I had bought a bottle of champagne for the occasion, and we had just gotten our lunch to each during the show. Although the sky was partially cloudy, it was clear in the section that the sun was until about 3 minutes before the actual corona showed (read: total eclipse). Then, as if by an act of God, a large cloud came over the sun and covered everything up. We ended up seeing the corona (and by the way, it was much more visible than at night; I could easily read a paper if I had wanted to at that time) for about two seconds. So much for the "two minutes of spectacular corona" that filled the hotels in Munich and all the surrounding town to overflowing. Too bad that where I actually lived, in the south of Munich, where my parents and brothers were, it was perfectly clear and we could see anything ;-P
I hope other people had better experiences with the eclipse, although it was kind of funny when a bunch of sun worshipers ran through the Garten yelling "Wir waeren alle tot!" (that is, "we're all gonna die!".
-- K
To see why its so hard, type "cal 1752" on your Unix box and look at September. "man cal" explains why September is so strange, but in that context, our calendar is actually very inaccurate. To try and determine dates that are mentioned in historical documents, astronomical events are used to try and solidify the true date.
For "vague" instance, phrases in the bible are interpreted to mean a lunar eclipse, or planet alignments, or etc.. From that they use a decent astronomical program to try and trace backwards to get a date in reference to our current date. However, how many programs take into account September 1752, as well as all the other leap year issues that occurred in the past. It's very difficult to pin down ancient dates.
I believe the way to calculate the end of the Aztec calendar is to find a date in the past where you can synch up the two calendars and then count forward. Some archeologist has to try and determine the two days that can be synched. I imagine that is difficult and has some interpretation built into it.
I've put my best picture here. (This is not the artist's impression ;)
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
Chris
-- I reserve the right to be completely wrong --
While not in the path of totality, we caught about 95%. My impromptu pinhole camera showed the cresent rotate as the moon went past.
Nice, but overhyped.
I tried a couple of pictures with my digicam (using the LCD as a viewfinder) but all I got was lense flare - didn't think to bring a filter...
--
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
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The solar eclipse should be visible along a line from 450 miles east of NY (in the atlantic) through India. If you live in Europe, there's a good chance you'll see atleast a partial eclipse if its not cloudy. Also, tonight for us Americans, there's a Lunar eclipse. It takes an hour or so for it to completely cycle, but it still looks pretty cool. When you view these things, try to visualize it in 3D, it makes it much cooler.
A Lunar and Solar eclipse only occurrs when the Moon is full (or close to full) and its axis of revolution is even so that it falls along the same plane as the Sun. Just thought I'd drop some info out there.
i'd like to get a good copy of the video of the total for archiving -
http://www.solformoerkelse.dk
I'm a bit disappointed, i had to stay in Budapest, and here we had 98%, but the sky was clouded, so we had not much to see. It was not to dark, and it didn't even take too long.
Yes, as a matter of fact, there will be quite a disaster next week, directly related to Cassini's plutonomium. Here's what will happen...
There are no armed guards in space. The Cassini probe is a sitting duck (well, actually a duck travelling at thousands of miles per hour, but I'm speaking metaphorically) for a terrorist plutonium mining expedition. At the last minute, Bruce Willis' character will find out what is going on, and will attempt to stop them. Here's the disaster: At one point near the end of the movie, the terrorists' rocket (concealed in an abandoned hollowed-out skyscraper in a large city) full of fuel will explode, showering the surrounding city blocks with burning shrapnel. The head bad guy will escape, though, so Bruce's character will have to chase him down for the final showdown.
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Have a Sloppy night!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Let's be alarmed by things we shouldn't. Did you know you're dying as we speak? That oxygen is ripping your cellular DNA apart like swiss cheeze? That your bathroom tiles emit radiation? How about sugar, gasoline, breathing, hyperventilation, and numerous other every day chemicals causing Olney's lesions on your brain?
Every second you've got roughly 60 billion neutrinos streaming through every square cenimeter of your body? Too bad they have almost no mass. And most would travel through a lightyear of lead unscathed. (props to sciam) How about the breeding fields of bacteria on your kitchen counters? The flesh eating mites that dwell on your clothes right now.
So, we've got some plutonium, non weapons grade, shielded, in safe tablets, blazing past us at mind bending speeds. So, a micrometeorite hits it, and perhaps knocks it a few hundred feet, or maybe a few inches. So what? Even if it was to by some improbable fluke slam into our atmosphere, odds are it'd a:) bounce off into space, or b:) burn up.
It can't, and won't kill us. It won't crash, if it was to, it wouldn't be a problem. Of course... I don't pay my taxes yet, so no problem of mine.
Now excuse me, I'll take my neutrino bombarded, flesh mite riddled, irradiated, lesioned, breathing, self out for a cigarette. They kill you? you don't say...
I disagree and hold myself in contempt, what blashphemy!
That was cool! I think it was the only place in North America where we could see it.
Although a bit cloudy I had a wonderful view here in Southwest Germany (we followed a blue hole in the sky through little villages like those hurricane chasers in the USA). A reddish and greenish corona. What a pity that it lasted only 1.5 minutes...
YESSSSSS!!!!!!!! I MADE ITTTTT!!!
Cloudy but not too cloudy - and what you need to do is to remember to go down to the local observatory where they have a nice big telescope rigged for solar projection...
The Uni Astronomical Soc went to Devon - SUCKERS!
Wrt the Perseids, it's nice of people to put them on the web - shame the maximum was 3am this morning (and I'm reliably informed that they tail off quite quickly after the maximum, too).
Well, I figure kevlar has been flamed enough for his mistake. (Hopefully he's *wearing* some kevlar today). What annoys me, though, is that his post was moderated *up* for being insightful.
aj
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
I'm sure I'll get moderated down for this =P, but Thanks Bud! for remembering that most of us CAN read french..
Extracted from "Fingerprints Of The Gods"; Crown Trade, 1995 -
"Consider the crowning jewel of Maya calendrics, the so-called 'Long Count'. This system of calculating dates also expressed beliefs about the past - notably, the widely held belief that time operated in Great Cycles which witnessed recurrent creations and destructions of the world. According to the Maya, the current Great Cycle began in darkness on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, a date corresponding to 13 August 3114 BC in our own calendar. As we have seen, it was also believed that the cycle will come to an end, amid global destruction, on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin: 23 December 2012 AD in our calendar. The function of the Long Count was to record the elapse of time since the beginning of the current Great Cycle, literally to count off, one by one, the 5125 years allotted to our present creation.
So, at any rate, thought the Maya."
I should also point out that this so-called "Mayan Mythology" is actually not Mayan at all, it's Olmec. It is widely suspected that the Mayans were the descendants of the Olmecs, so it makes sense that many of their traditions would survive...it also makes this calendar thousands of years old. The Olmec prophecy stated that: "the Fifth Sun will end with the Earth 'toppling from its axis', and great earthquakes will level mountains and rend the continents apart."
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
"...From the sky will come large Roy deffrayor..."
Ya gotta watch out for Roy Deffrayor, I tell ya. Ol' Roy's a real tough cookie.
His friend, Roy D'Angolmois, ain't no picnic either.
I hear that their Aunt's not so bad, though.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Anyone who can do a better job is invited to do so... I've twisted things around (a lot) just so that it makes any sense at all... I've also dropped some stuff and ad-libbed a bit.
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- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Woah, I never knew that (was worth surfin slashdot today!) about 1752. But, sadly, I found a bg in our cal... Try cal 5.5, or cal 1.1, or whatever. While cal tells you cal 0 is not valid, it doesn't remind you of this for clearly incorrect decimal years... BTW: Why aren't negative values and zero accepted? I thought our calendar could be used into the BC days too? Or am I confused? Must.... fix.... minor.... Linux.... problem.... (Note, this is cal from Slackware 3.4, so perhaps it's been fixed now?)
Hopefully NASA's coverage of the Perseid meteor shower will include tracking of the Cassini space probe that'll be passing through it on the 17th/18th. Y'know, the one loaded with 72 pounds of plutonium 238?
I'd sorta like to know whether or not there'll be a massive ecological disaster next week.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
It's not just the sun that faded - nearly all links did that had to do with the solar eclipse went down starting this morning about 09:30 MESZ (=GMT/UTC+2h) - eclipse here around 12:40. Especially webcam sites were unreachable.
As I operate our gateway systems I was able to see (average) traffic requests jump to more than 180% of normal usage - driving our line deeply into saturation...
This ain't astronomy, it's the end of the world! Pacco Rabanne is right!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
With the proposed budget cuts for FY2000 I hear they're just going to attach some really really big balloons to the space station and suspend it about a mile up in the air.. it's cheaper to get supplies to it via helicopter then. ;-)
I was supposed to get the big (51") screen TV on Friday! Now I won't get DSS reception well for the day... ARGH!
so if your name is Roy Deffrayor, and you are overweight, you probably shouldn't be planning to get on an airplane anytime soon. ;-)
Cassini is using 3 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (minimizing chances that a single event can damage all the power sources), each of which contains 10.9 kg (24 lbs) of non-weapons grade isotope (plutonium-238 dioxide) in ceramic form (tends to break into chunks, not dust) contained in a platinum-30 rhodium alloy clad. Each RTG also has an external graphite aeroshell (a reentry shield) and a graphite insulator protect the fuel from impacts, fires and atmospheric reentry conditions.
h tm
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/rtg/intro2true.
-- Ender, Duke of URL
I missed this one :-( but I did see the one last year from Venezuela. I was completely convinced that I would be able to see the moon's shadow coming a few seconds before totality and that there would be an instantaneous difference between 99.9% and 100.0% total. Unfortunately, I saw none of that, and didn't even realize it was total until about a minute into totality. Aaaargh!
It *does* seem like you should be able to see it coming. I had a good view too.
I am planning to see the June 21, 2001 eclipse from Zimbabwe. I need another chance!!!
As the general eclipse start, things were looking bleak: it was cloudy and a little rainy, too. However, when the total eclipse approached, we got lucky: The sun was in the center of a big patch of perfectly blue sky - we were able to watch the total eclipse for the full 1.5 minutes with no clouds at all. It was brilliant ! So amazing to be able to look at the sun with the naked eye. Pictures simply don't compare to the experience itself..
As we drove back in the evening, we were again stuck in the eclipse jam. Didn't matter, it was worth it..
I looked at the statistics and found that the 50% chance in Germany was less than the 60% chance in Hungary. Turned out good this time.
The view of a 99% ecclipse is worth 1% of a 100% ecclipse!
It was not completely dark, more like early morning, but the read at the horison covered 360degrees. And up there high in the sky was this increadible ring of fire. Nothing like it at all! It was so big, and so bright. The temperature droppend, and it fealt almost cold. (It had beed 37 Celcius the day before.)
A total ecclipse is worth 4 stars in the Michelin guide classification.
Hans Rosbach (haro) from Cafe Stein, Wien
As we were among the few to have full sight on the solar eclipse. It simply was great!!!
Not only the sun itself, but the fast moving shadow wall and all the surrounding, the Alpes partly in shadow and partly in light, behind us (in the North) the big rain clouds falling down.
And then the diamond light when the sun reappeared. It's very hard to describe all of that in a few sentences...
We had so much luck that you simply must believe that God is a Chiemgau'ian.:-)))
Sebastian
I haven't verified this but if I remember correctly this Friday is the end of the Aztec calendar. The end. The calendar just stops. I don't know how but it does. So my question is: does anyone know if these meteors are just a little bit bigger than usual? :-)
Leknor
http://Leknor.com
"So many idiots, so few comets"
Plain and simple.
I cycled down to teignmouth, and got to watch the lights go out (and street lights on) for about 15 seconds.
There was one brief hole in the clouds where we could see a glowing banana, but a totality, just clouds.
That said, the sight of the shadow cast on the clouds rushing in is still a little spectacular.
John
John_Chalisque
I had heard rumors that the locals were going to band together to 'shut off' Cornwall from England to keep the already heavy summer population rise down.
Anyone know? Wish I coulda been there. Somebody should have gone out by the merry maidens and seen if anything lined up.
Blech. Signatures.
Excellent smoke coming from servers all over Europe. Much to my dismay, http://www.eumetsat.de/ wavered then died. And according to http://www.theregister.co.uk/, bbc.co.uk maxed out its' bandwidth and eclipse99.co.uk was eaten by the gods.
:)
I headed off to the park to watch the foreseen confusion with wildlife. Confused coots? panic'ing swans? They just wanted to know what all these people were doing there and why it was so cold.
Good pictures off Eumetsat when they bring it back up.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Only had about 90% here in Dublin, but at least we had very little cloud. No open spaces near the office, so I turned one of the windows into a pinhole, and used a CD in fornt of the other window to project the sun onto the ceiling...pretty impressive...didn't notice any drop in light tho' cos I had most of the windows covered...buggrit!
Leo
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I've got green eyes, red hair, and I'm left handed. A hundred years ago, I'd have been considered in league with the De
Dunno if you could download and save it though - high time someone reverse-engineered the RealAudio protocol(s), at least enough to save files from the 'net.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life