Pluto, space, & beyond.

[ace]

 
Wow! Imagine what the view from the moon would be like .... !
Thanks Betty ..

[Betty]

That close to mighty Jupiter the gravitation forces would be so great, it would wreak with some serious earthquakes... but gotta love the view. Just like our tiny moon make the tides rise & fall, Jupiter would cause mountains if ice & rock to rise & fall. That's why there's no meteor craters on moons very close to Jupiter or Saturn. The surfaces are constantly changing. The radiation the would be deadly there too, even with heavy shielding.

Imagine the scale of this stuff. 1,300 Earths can fit inside Jupiter. The Red Spot is 40,000 miles across, Earth is only almost 8,000 miles across. So you can fit 5 earths end to end across the spot. And Jupiter is just a small marble compared to the sun. Like comparing a marble to a basketball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EixrkUnBUZs

[Betty]

Cool meteor showers all most of the month. Watch the night sky!

http://unclegadget.com/pski/index.php/topic,58.0.html

[Betty]

Don't forget to check out the eclipse today. In my time zone in western NY state & southern Ontario, we'll only have about 74% coverage of the sun, so it won't get dark as night. You can compare the brightness change to a 100 watt light bulb & a 25 watt one, or with modern lights, a 20 watt light compared to a 5 watt light.

It may get dark enough in our area to see Jupiter in the southeast, & Venus to the west of the sun.

In my area you can expect some coverage from 1:30-3:30pm, with peak coverage around 2:30pm. At my house the peak will be exactly 2:17pm according to my software, but will vary a little just a few miles from me.

Do not stare at the sun. But contrary to the nay-sayers, & worry-worts you can glance at the sun occasionally for brief times. The animals, birds, & us do occasionally glance up at the sun, or we drive with the sun in our eyes & do not go blind. Today will be no different.

My friends & I have glanced up at every partial solar eclipse in our area. At 62 years old I still have 20/20 vision in one eye, & 20/30 vision in the other. But I do need reading glasses to focus on small print & objects nearby. That's age-related. As one gets older the eyes lose their flexibility to focus on close-up objects.

So, yes you can take quick glances at the sun, just don't stare at it. Do not take a picture of the afternoon sun without a solar filter. It may damage or burn out the camera. You can cover the camera lens with foil, & put a small pinhole in the middle. This will act as a tiny iris over the lens to reduce the light so you can take a picture. A couple clear-label CDs or DVDs over the lens may reduce the light too. Ordinary sunglasses will not reduce the light enough to take a picture or to stare at the sun.

The eclipse will happen slowly over a couple of hours. So you don't need to stare at it. You won't miss anything by just taking occasional quick glances at it.

[Betty]

It's happening right now in the NW USA & SW Canada.

https://www.nasa.gov/eclipselive/#NASA+TV+Public+Channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwMDvPCGeE0

It's also on CBS & ABC. Channel 7 also has a WNY view in the corner.

[Robyn Jodie]

Seven years from now, in 2024 there will be another solar eclipse, which will cross the US from south to north instead of west to east. Starting in Mexico, it will pass through San Antonio TX on its way to Rochester NY, then to northern Vermont and New Hampshire and on to Maine, grazing Canada along the way.  It looks like the 2017 and 2024 paths will cross in Carbondale IL, whose inhabitants will luck out as the only place in the US to get to see both eclipses.

[Betty]

Rochester will be on the edge of totality, so it will be short. Buffalo will be right in the middle of that one making totality about 4 minutes long! It's a big wide one!

The orbits of the planets & the moon aren't curricular. They're oval & off-center. So this next one will be more remarkable. The north American continent & Europe are actually a million miles further away from the sun in summer. The tilt of the earth towards the sun is what makes us warm in our summer, while making things cooler for our friends in New Zealand, Australia, S. America, & S. Africa.

The moon will be really close in 2024.

I love science & nature.

Map:

[ace]

Did you see the photo allegedly from the space station, with the milky way above the earth? Please tell me it's photoshopped or at the very least stacked! Or I would have thought the glare would have obliterated any detail of the galaxy?
 

[Betty]

That's faked. The glare of the corona around the moon, & the glare of the earth would have by far outshined it. You need to be in the darkest, clearest country or rural skies to even see the milky way.

Although, in space, it's exceptionally clear, to expose the camera's sensor long enough to see the very faint milky way, the brightness of the corona & the earth would have whited out the entire frame.

The position of the sun is wrong too. This time of year The middle of the milky way is low in the SSE as the sun sets. Even in space, they'd be on far opposite ends of our field of view, at more that 110 degrees apart. In the picture above, the field of view isn't wide enough, & the scale isn't small enough to fit the view of the galaxy & the eclipse in it at the same time.

Also the eclipse was blown up dozens of times larger than it would be seen in space to that scale of earth, while the milky way was shrunk considerably compaired to that scale of earth. The moon, 240,000 miles from earth, dosen't look bigger from 100-400miles in orbit. It looks just as big as it does here on the ground.

So not only is it very fake, the view & position of everything is scientifically totally off. Whoever put it together flunked science.

If one could dim the sun down dimmer than the moon, & brighten up the galaxy considerably, here's a view of the milky way, stars, planets, the moon, & the sun as the would have been in northern countries, provinces, & states at around sunset today (Tuesday). The position of everything in the picture is accurate.

Note the size of the moon compared to the milky way. Being just a couple hundred miles closer to it in orbit, when it's 240,000 miles away, wouldn't have made it look bigger. A zoom lens could made it bigger, but would have also made the milky was & earth look much bigger too.

[Betty]

My sky view looking south at around 10:30pm The sun & moon set long ago. Although the picture is accurate, it is not real. I made it using software. The milky way was brightened considerably. It's not even normally visible to the naked eye except in very dark rural country areas, with very clear skies.