Medical professionals are seeing people with eye pain and irritation after Monday's eclipse. No surprise there, but it's probably not what you would think. Apparently a number of Einstein's thought they had an ingenious alternate way of protecting their eyes while viewing the eclipse. Yep... Put sunblock on the old eyeballs. Didn't work....

 

Some people are ridiculously ill-prepared for living.

One week ago today, many people in North America were treated to a standard, single, partial solar eclipse. Fewer people, all congregated along a narrow path, experienced the eerie daytime darkness of a total solar eclipse. A dedicated few with fast enough camera equipment, however, were able to capture a double eclipse -- a simultaneous partial eclipse of the Sun by [I]both the Moon and the International Space Station (ISS). [/i]The Earth-orbiting ISS crossed the Sun in less than a second, but to keep the ISS from appearing blurry, exposure times must be less than 1/1000th of a second. The featured image composite captured the ISS multiple times in succession as it zipped across the face of the Sun. The picture was taken in a specific color emitted by hydrogen which highlights the Sun's chromosphere, a layer hotter and higher up than the usually photographed photosphere.

 

Blue... and gold????

 

The picture below is a long distance dedication sent out to my fellow astronomy enthusiast and BGP'er True Blue& Gold.

 

Why is Saturn partly blue? The featured picture of Saturn approximates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The image was taken in 2006 March by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Here Saturn's majestic rings appear directly only as a thin vertical line. The rings show their complex structure in the dark shadows they create on the image left. Saturn's fountain moon Enceladus(one of only four worlds in the solar system known to currently to have volcanic activity), only about 500 kilometers across, is seen as the bump in the plane of the rings. The northern hemisphere of Saturn can appear partly blue for the same reason that Earth's skies can appear blue -- molecules in the cloudless portions of both planet's atmospheres are better at scattering blue light than red. When looking deep into Saturn's clouds, however, the natural gold hue of Saturn's clouds becomes dominant. It is not known why southern Saturn does not show the same blue hue -- one hypothesis holds that clouds are higher there. It is also not known why Saturn's clouds are colored gold. Next month, Cassini will end its mission with a final dramatic dive into Saturn's atmosphere.

 

What was happening in the sky during last week's total solar eclipse? For my fellow BGP astronomy enthusiasts' viewing pleasure, this little-planet, all-sky, double time-lapse, digitally-fused composite captured celestial action during both night and day from a single location. In this 360x180 panorama, north and south are at the image bottom and top, while east and west are at the left and right edges, respectively. During four hours the night before the eclipse, star trails were captured circling the north celestial pole (bottom) as the Earth spun. During the day of the total eclipse, the Sun was captured every fifteen minutes from sunrise to sunset (top), sometimes in partial eclipse. All of these images were then digitally merged onto a single image taken exactly during the total solar eclipse. Then, the Sun's bright corona could be seen flaring around the dark new Moon (upper left), while Venus simultaneously became easily visible (top). The tree in the middle, below the camera, is a Douglas fir. The images were taken at Magone Lake in Oregon, USA.

 

Ever wonder what the Sun would look like from, say, Neptune or Pluto? Probably not. Only astronomy nerds like me would ponder such a thing. First, a little math. The inverse square law tells us that the intensity of light from an object falls off with the square of the distance. So, for example, sunlight is about 900 times dimmer on Neptune than on Earth because Neptune is about 30 times farther from the sun (30 x 30 = 900). So maybe skip the sunscreen on Neptune.

 

Pluto has an average distance from the sun of about 3.7 billion miles. That’s about 40 times the distance from Earth to the sun. From Pluto, the sunlight is 1,600(40x40) times dimmer than on Earth. Still, that’s 250 times brighter than a full moon here on Earth — bright enough to outshine every other object in the sky and hard to look at directly.

An occultation happens when one celestial object passes in front of another from an observer's perspective. A simple example is a solar eclipse. It's not unusual for the Moon to occult a star or a planet. In fact, the Moon occulted Aldabaron earlier this year. A planet occulting another planet is much, much rarer. The last time that occurred, I believe, was 1818.

 

 

Moon about to occult Venus in 2015:

 

 

Moon about to hide Saturn in 2014:

 

I mentioned in the post last night about how rare planet-on-planet occultations and transits are. The most recent event occurred on January 3, 1818, and the next will occur on November 22, 2065. Both involve the same two planets: Venus and Jupiter. Folks that's almost 248 years apart!!!

 

Further, in the 500 year period from 1700 to 2200 , there are only 18 mutual planetary transits and occultations, with the longest gap occurring between the Venus transits of Jupiter in 1818 and 2065. Yes, planet-on-planet action is pretty rare indeed. For those who are are into cryogenic technology and plan to defrost in the 22nd century, here are the dates of some future(and past) mutual planetary transits and occultations. You're welcome...

 

19 September 1702 – Jupiter occults Neptune

20 July 1705 – Mercury transits Jupiter

14 July 1708 – Mercury occults Uranus

4 October 1708 – Mercury transits Jupiter

28 May 1737 – Venus occults Mercury

29 August 1771 – Venus transits Saturn

21 July 1793 – Mercury occults Uranus

9 December 1808 – Mercury transits Saturn

3 January 1818 – Venus transits Jupiter

22 November 2065 – Venus transits Jupiter

15 July 2067 – Mercury occults Neptune

11 August 2079 – Mercury occults Mars

27 October 2088 – Mercury transits Jupiter

7 April 2094 – Mercury transits Jupiter

21 August 2104 – Venus occults Neptune

14 September 2123 – Venus transits Jupiter

29 July 2126 – Mercury occults Mars

3 December 2133 – Venus occults Mercury

Anyone care to guess when and from where this image of Earth was captured?

 

Florence Y'ALL....

 

NASA welcomes large near-Earth asteroid Florence - CNET

 

Say hello to Florence. Florence is an asteroid.

 

Florence is 2.7 miles (4.4 kilometers) across and will come within a celestial spitting distance of Earth on Sept. 1 when it closes to within around 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers) of our fair planet.

Anyone care to guess when and from where this image of Earth was captured?

 

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Any thoughts about the Earth pic?

Florence Y'ALL....

 

NASA welcomes large near-Earth asteroid Florence - CNET

 

Say hello to Florence. Florence is an asteroid.

 

Florence is 2.7 miles (4.4 kilometers) across and will come within a celestial spitting distance of Earth on Sept. 1 when it closes to within around 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers) of our fair planet.

 

 

Florence is the largest space rock to pass this close to Earth since NASA has been tracking asteroids. Other asteroids have passed closer but have been smaller in size. Florence hasn't passed this close to us since 1890 and won't be this close again until 2500. Florence reached peak brightness late last night and into early Friday morning and will remain this bright for several days. Those of us who have even a modest backyard scope should be able to view Florence. "She" will be as bright as a ninth magnitude star.

 

An especially good time to view Florence(assuming that Harvey has left us and skies have cleared) is Saturday evening around 8 P.M. EDT when the big rock crosses the head of constellation Delphinus.

 

Btw, if you're curious, Florence was named in honor of the great Florence Nightingale.

I hope you are not tired of eclipse pictures yet. I'm still trying to come down off an eclipse- high. How about a view of the eclipse before it even reached the U.S. mainland?

Making landfall in Oregon, the Moon's dark umbral shadow toured the United States on August 21. Those gathered along its coast to coast path were witness to a total eclipse of the Sun, possibly the most widely shared celestial event in history. But first, the Moon's shadow touched the northern Pacific and raced eastward toward land. This dramatic snapshot was taken while crossing the shadow path 250 miles off the Oregon coast, 45,000 feet above the cloudy northern Pacific. Though from a shorter totality, it captures the eclipse before it could be seen from the US mainland. With the eclipsed Sun not far above, beautiful colors appear along the western horizon giving way to a clear, pitch-black, stratospheric sky in the shadow of the Moon.

 

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^^^^

 

 

Let me try again with the pic of the eclipse just off the Pacific coastline.

 

GAE just before making landfall:

 

Anyone care to guess when and from where this image of Earth was captured?

 

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Any thoughts about the Earth pic?

 

Looks a little shady to me. :watching:

Looks a little shady to me. :watching:

 

Very shady indeed... If you had been in the Lunar Orbiter at this time, this would have been your view.

 

Swinging around the lunar nearside on August 21, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter turned to look back on a bright, Full Earth. As anticipated its Narrow Angle Camera scanned this sharp view of our fair planet, catching the shadow of the Moon racing along a path across the United States at about 1,500 miles per hour. In fact, the dark lunar shadow is centered over Hopkinsville, Kentucky at 1:25:30pm Central Daylight Time. From there, the New Moon blocked the Sun high in clear skies for about 2 minutes and 40 seconds in a total solar eclipse.