Seeing a partial solar eclipse is like going to the prom with your sister.
Cool, our 37th wedding anniversary!
And on June 5th, Venus will transit the Sun. You can observe it if you have a telescope fitted with a solar filter.
More info here:
http://www.transitofvenus.org/
http://www.space.com/14173-venus-transit-sun-2012-aas219.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus,_2012
Actual pics from the 2004 Venus Sun transit:
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=slv8-tyc8&va=venus+transit
I’m gonna watch it with one of those cardboard box with a pinhole thingys.
Spent the day at the Mt Wilson Observatory - got to see the 60 inch and hundred inch telescopes, and spent a good long time in the 150 foot solar observatory. It gets me sometimes how little of the technology has changed in the last 20 years. And just like a hundred years ago, they start each day with a manual drawing of sunspot activity.
Oh, and the normal climate change dogma is of course alive and well among the uninformed, including NOAA gear to measure greenhouse gases.
Amusing point was his describing a bit of frustration he was having this morning - he thought a squirrel or other critter had climbed up into the observatory dome and was playing with the mirror, as the sun was shaking has he was making his morning plots. He had the radio on, and heard (after coming back down from taking the cage up into the dome) that there was a minor earthquake on the San Andreas fault system, and he inadvertently discovered just how great a seismograph a 150 ft long shaft of light can be.
“... and always on a new moon ... “
Nice job there, genius author.
This is a braindead comment.
Venus appears least bright when we are able to see the largest area of its sunlit surface. This is because Venus's orbit is inside the earth's orbit. When Venus is closest to us, 25 million miles I'm guessing, we cannot see it at all because it presents its dark side to earth viewers (and also it is too close to the sun to be seen). When it is furthest away (guess 160 million miles) it presents it's sunlit surface to us (but the sun is also in the way then). Because brightness falls off as the square of distance (twice as far away, one quarter the brightness) Venus is actually brightest here when we can see it as only a brightly lit crescent.
ML/NJ
Anyone interested in a meetup at the Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA this coming Sunday (May 20, 2012) for the eclipse between 5 and 7 pm?