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Spectacular Sky Show: Venus, Jupiter and the Moon Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
SPACE.com
Fri Jan 25, 9:46 AM ET



The most spectacular celestial sights over the next couple of weeks are reserved for the early morning sky. Two bright planets will converge, then be joined by the moon.


Kenneth L. Franklin (1923-2007), the former Chairman and Chief Astronomer at New York's Hayden Planetarium, would often make reference to our "dynamic and ever-changing sky."


Such an eloquent description certainly fits our current morning sky, for these final days of January and the first days of February will be an exceptional time for predawn sky watchers with a beautiful pairing of the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter. They will appear closest together in the dawn sky of Friday, Feb. 1, and a few mornings later, the waning crescent moon will later drop by to join them.


Dazzling "double planet"


For the past several months, dazzling Venus has been prominent in our morning sky. And about a week ago, brilliant Jupiter also began to emerge from out of the glare of the Sun.


The two planets are currently rising out of the east-southeast horizon about two hours before sunrise.


From now through the end of January, the gap between the two will noticeably close, until on Feb. 1 they'll be separated by just over one-half degree, which is roughly the apparent width of the moon (The width of your fist, held at arm's length roughly corresponds to 10 degrees). Jupiter will shine brilliantly at magnitude -1.9, yet it will appear only 1/7 as bright as Venus, which will gleam at magnitude -4.0.


Together they will make for a spectacular "double planet" low in the dawn twilight. In the mornings thereafter they will appear to slowly separate, but before they have a chance to get too far apart the moon will join the picture.


Celestial summit meeting


At last quarter (half) phase on Jan. 30, the moon will stand alone, high toward the south at sunrise. But with each passing morning, as it wanes to a slender crescent, it will shift toward the east, ultimately into the same region of the sky as our two planets.


Early on Sunday morning, Feb. 3, the moon will sit well off to the west (right) of the planets. On the following morning, Monday, Feb. 4, the show will reach its peak when, about 45 minutes before sunrise, Venus, Jupiter and the moon — the three brightest objects of the night sky — will form a striking isosceles triangle, with the two planets 3 degrees apart and the moon marking the vertex of the triangle just over 5 degrees below the "dynamic duo."


Imagine the astrological significance that the ancients might have ascribed to a celestial summit meeting such as this!


You might want to check your southeast horizon in advance to make sure that there are no tall trees or buildings that might obstruct your view of the moon which will be sitting very low to the horizon.


Like a painting, this celestial tableau might, at first glance may appear rather flat and one-dimensional. But by gazing at this scene long enough, our minds can perhaps picture these objects strung out across the solar system, along our line of sight as they really are.


Beyond our moon — figuratively a stone's throw away at 247,000 miles (397,000 kilometers) — we first reach Venus, about 510 times farther out, or 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) from Earth. The lesser gem flanking Venus — Jupiter, largest of all the planets — is nearly 4 and a half times more distant than Venus at a distance of 560 million miles (901 million kilometers).


Generally speaking, at least for the immediate future, conjunctions between Venus and Jupiter will come in pairs. The first conjunction takes place in the morning sky, followed about 10 months later by another in the evening sky. Then, after about two and a half years, Venus and Jupiter are again in conjunction, again in the morning sky.


When Venus and Jupiter next get together, it will be in the evening sky late next fall, on Dec. 1. After that, we'll have to wait until May 2011 (morning sky) and Mar. 2012 (evening sky) for the next set of Venus-Jupiter conjunctions.

Video Player: New Horizons - Jupiter Fly-by Venus Image Gallery Jupiter Image Gallery Online Sky Maps and More

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

How a Lunar Eclipse Saved Columbus

By Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
posted: 08 February 2008
04:44 am ET

On the night of Feb. 20, the full moon will pass into Earth's shadow in an event that will be visible across all of the United States and Canada.

The total lunar eclipse will be made even more striking by the presence of the nearby planet Saturn and the bright bluish star, Regulus.

Eclipses in the distant past often terrified viewers who took them as evil omens. Certain lunar eclipses had an overwhelming effect on historic events. One of the most famous examples is the trick pulled by Christopher Columbus.

Shipwrecked

On Oct. 12, 1492, as every schoolchild has been taught, Columbus came ashore on an island northeast of Cuba. He later named it San Salvador (Holy Savior). Over the next ten years Columbus would make three more voyages to the "New World," which only bolstered his belief that he reached the Far East by sailing West.

It was on his fourth and final voyage, while exploring the coast of Central America that Columbus found himself in dire straits. He left Cádiz, Spain on May 11, 1502, with the ships Capitana, Gallega, Vizcaína and Santiago de Palos. Unfortunately, thanks to an epidemic of shipworms eating holes in the planking of his fleet, Columbus' was forced to abandon two of his ships and finally had to beach his last two caravels on the north coast of Jamaica on June 25, 1503.

Initially, the Jamaican natives welcomed the castaways, providing them with food and shelter, but as the days dragged into weeks, tensions mounted. Finally, after being stranded for more than six months, half of Columbus' crew mutinied, robbing and murdering some of the natives, who, themselves grew weary of supplying cassava, corn and fish in exchange for little tin whistles, trinkets, hawk's bells and other rubbishy goods.

With famine now threatening, Columbus formulated a desperate, albeit ingenious plan.

Almanac to the rescue

Coming to the Admiral's rescue was Johannes Müller von Königsberg (1436-1476), known by his Latin pseudonym Regiomontanus. He was an important German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer.

Before his death, Regiomontanus published an almanac containing astronomical tables covering the years 1475-1506. Regiomontanus' almanac turned out to be of great value, for his astronomical tables provided detailed information about the sun, moon and planets, as well as the more important stars and constellations by which to navigate. After it was published, no sailor dared set out without a copy. With its help, explorers were able to leave their customary routes and venture out into the unknown seas in search of new frontiers.

Columbus, of course, had a copy of the Almanac with him when he was stranded on Jamaica. And he soon discovered from studying its tables that on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 29, 1504, a total eclipse of the moon would take place soon after the time of moonrise.



Armed with this knowledge, three days before the eclipse, Columbus asked for a meeting with the natives Cacique ("chief") and announced to him that his Christian god was angry with his people for no longer supplying Columbus and his men with food. Therefore, he was about to provide a clear sign of his displeasure: Three nights hence, he would all but obliterate the rising full moon, making it appear "inflamed with wrath," which would signify the evils that would soon be inflicted upon all of them.



Bad moon rising

On the appointed evening, as the Sun set in the West and the moon started emerging from beyond the eastern horizon, it was plainly obvious to all that something was terribly wrong. By the time the moon appeared in full view, its lower edge was missing!

And, just over an hour later, as full darkness descended, the moon indeed exhibited an eerily inflamed and "bloody" appearance: In place of the normally brilliant late winter full moon there now hung a dim red ball in the eastern sky.

According to Columbus' son, Ferdinand, the natives were terrified at this sight and ". . . with great howling and lamentation came running from every direction to the ships laden with provisions, praying to the Admiral to intercede with his god on their behalf." They promised that they would gladly cooperate with Columbus and his men if only he would restore the moon back to its normal self. The great explorer told the natives that he would have to retire to confer privately with his god. He then shut himself in his cabin for about fifty minutes.

"His god" was a sandglass that Columbus turned every half hour to time the various stages of the eclipse, based on the calculations provided by Regiomontanus' almanac.

Just moments before the end of the total phase Columbus reappeared, announcing to the natives that his god had pardoned them and would now allow the moon to gradually return. And at that moment, true to Columbus' word, the moon slowly began to reappear and as it emerged from the Earth's shadow, the grateful natives hurried away. They then kept Columbus and his men well supplied and well fed until a relief caravel from Hispaniola finally arrived on June 29, 1504. Columbus and his men returned to Spain on Nov. 7.

Another side to the story

In an interesting postscript to this story, in 1889, Mark Twain, likely influenced by the eclipse trick, wrote the novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In it, his main character, Hank Morgan, used a gambit similar to Columbus'.



Morgan is about to be burned at the stake, so he "predicts" a solar eclipse he knows will occur, and in the process, claimed power over the sun. He gladly offers to return the sun to the sky in return for his freedom and a position as "perpetual minister and executive" to the king.



The only problem with this story is that on the date that Mark Twain quoted — June 21, 528 A.D. — no such eclipse took place. In fact, the moon was three days past full, a setup that can't generate an eclipse.

Perhaps he should have consulted an almanac!

Climate Change Has Major Impact On Oceans


Rising greenhouse gas emissions are warming the world's oceans and providing yet a new threat to coral reefs. (Credit: Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary)ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2008) — Climate change is rapidly transforming the world's oceans by increasing the temperature and acidity of seawater, and altering atmospheric and oceanic circulation, reported a panel of scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston.

"The vastness of our oceans may have engendered a sense of complacency about potential impacts from global climate change," said Jane Lubchenco, the Wayne and Gladys Valley Chair of Marine Biology at Oregon State University, who moderated the panel. "The world's oceans are undergoing profound physical, chemical and biological changes whose impacts are just beginning to be felt."

Panelist Gretchen Hofmann, a molecular physiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes the situation as "multiple jeopardy."

"Ocean ecosystems are facing new stresses and new combinations of stress," Hofmann said. "The water is warmer, circulation patterns are changing in unpredictable ways, and oceans are becoming acidic."

Rising greenhouse gas emissions are warming the world's oceans and providing yet a new threat to coral reefs, which already are among the most threatened of all marine ecosystems, the panelists say. Even modest warming of a degree or two above normal maximum temperatures can cause a breakdown in the relationship between corals and their symbiotic algae, zooxanthellae, said Nancy Knowlton, a marine biologist with the Smithsonian Institution.

Without zooxanthellae corals appear white, or "bleached," and grow more slowly. They also are more susceptible to disease and may not reproduce. In 1998 there were worldwide mass bleaching events, Knowlton pointed out, affecting 80 percent of the corals in the Indian Ocean, 20 percent of which died. In 2005, severe bleaching occurred over much of the Caribbean as a result of overly warm water temperatures.

"We have already lost some 80 percent of the reef corals in the Caribbean over the last three decades, and losses in the Pacific Ocean also are widespread and severe," Knowlton said. "Reefs are like cities, with some parts growing and some parts being destroyed, and only when net growth is positive can reefs persist. These reefs already are under threat to overfishing and local pollution and unless drastic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is taken soon, these reefs will cease to exist as we know them."

These same greenhouse gas emissions also are creating dramatic buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is rapidly making the world's oceans more acidic, said panelist Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Current CO2 levels of 380 parts per million already are 30 percent higher than pre-industrial values and many scientific models predict that those rates will triple by the end of the century under "business as usual" scenarios.

While much of the scientific attention on ocean acidification has looked at the impact of coral reefs, the potential danger to other marine ecosystems is equally severe, Doney said.

"Ocean acidification harms plants and animals that form shells from calcium carbonate," he said. "Calcifying organisms include not just corals, but many plankton, pteropods (marine snails), clams and oysters, and lobsters. Many of these organisms provide critical food sources or habitats for other organisms and the impact of acidification on food webs and higher trophic levels is not well understood.

"Newly emerging evidence suggests that larval and juvenile fish may also be susceptible to changes in ocean pH levels," Doney added. "Ocean acidification is rapidly becoming a real problem."

Michael Behrenfeld, an oceanographer from Oregon State University, is studying relationships between climate and the global activity of ocean plants called phytoplankton.

"Phytoplankton are of tremendous human importance because their photosynthesis yields oxygen for us to breathe and they are the base of the ocean food webs that support our global fisheries," Behrenfeld said. "Using NASA satellites, we can track changes in phytoplankton on a global basis and what we find is that warming ocean temperatures are linked to decreasing photosynthesis. Satellites are one of the most important tools we have for understanding the link between climate and ocean biology because they provide measurements of the whole planet on a daily basis, which could never be accomplished by ship.

"Unfortunately," he added, "it is at this very time when we need satellites most that we are facing the end of NASA ocean biology satellites because of budget cutbacks or new priorities. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.

"Instead of facing the end of these critical missions and becoming blind to the changes occurring in our oceans," Behrenfeld said, "we should be building even better ones to see more clearly than we have in the past, and to gauge the potential consequences of climate change on ocean productivity."

The panelists also called for greater investment in ocean observing systems that would allow scientists to better measure changing in the ocean ecosystem, including large-scale circulation and coastal upwelling systems around the world. Klaus Keller of Penn State University reported on the economic costs and benefits of effective ocean observing systems to detect changes in the north Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

Jack Barth, an oceanographer at Oregon State University, reported on the hypoxia events that have plagued the Pacific Northwest coast since 2000. These low-oxygen zones in the near-shore are unprecedented over the last five decades of scientific observation and likely linked to stronger, more persistent winds that are expected to occur with global warming. The California Current System provides a case study for similar changes in coastal upwelling zones off South America, southern Africa and northern Africa, Barth said.

"One of the things we've observed is how wind patterns have changed and greatly affected upwelling," Barth said. "Two decades ago, the winds would last for three or four days, and then subside. Now they persist for 20 to 40 days before settling down. This creates significant impacts on upwelling and biological productivity, but these impacts can swing wildly from one extreme to another and have been difficult to predict."

Space Shuttle Endeavour to Launch March 11

The shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven astronauts will launch in less than two weeks on what will be the longest mission to date headed for the International Space Station (ISS), top NASA officials said Friday.

Shuttle commander Dominic Gorie and his STS-123 crew are now officially set to lift off at 2:28 a.m. EDT (0628 GMT) on March 11 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a 16-day mission to deliver a new orbital room and robot to the ISS.

"The teams are ready to go launch on March 11," NASA space operations chief Bill Gerstenmaier told reporters in a briefing at KSC. "This is an extremely complex mission."

Gorie and his crewmates are charged with delivering the first module of Japan's Kibo laboratory and a Canadian-built robot for exterior maintenance, as well as replacing one member of the station's three-person crew. The astronauts will perform five spacewalks to install the Japanese-built module, Canada's two-armed Dextre robot and test a shuttle heat shield repair technique among their other station work.

"This is really the international portion of the International Space Station," said Gerstenmaier, adding that new control centers in Japan and France will join others in the U.S., Russia and Germany during the flight.

Leftover debris from the Feb. 20 destruction of a U.S. spy satellite, which prompted a launch delay for a new reconnaissance spacecraft this week, will not hinder Endeavour's planned liftoff, mission managers said. The U.S. Navy destroyed the dead satellite with a missile to prevent its half-ton load of toxic rocket fuel from endangering people on the Earth.

"It really poses no risk to the shuttle," said Gerstenmaier, adding that the odds of Endeavour suffering a major debris strike increased only slightly from a 1-in-269 chance to 1-in-259. "We don't see any concern or problems."

Endeavour's planned March 11 launch comes less than three weeks after the successful return of its sister ship Atlantis, which landed Feb. 20 after delivering Europe's Columbus laboratory to the ISS.

"Space is getting very busy," said John Shannon, NASA's shuttle program manager. "The team is turned around and ready to go for this new mission."

Launch traffic ahead

Endeavour is set to launch between two other spacecraft also bound for the ISS; the European-built unmanned cargo ship Jules Verne, to launch March 7, and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to lift off on April 8.

NASA shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach said Endeavour has least two opportunities to fly, on March 11 and March 12, before standing down for five days to allow an unmanned Delta 2 rocket to launch a navigation satellite from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station near KSC.

Endeavour must also lift off by March 23 in order to complete its mission before the April Soyuz launch to ferry a new crew to the ISS, Leinbach added.

"Life is getting more complicated," Gerstenmaier said. "We've got lots of stuff flying in space."

If Jules Verne, the European Space Agency's first Automated Transfer Vehicle, launches March 7, there will likely be intermittent communication outages with Endeavour due to the finite satellite resources available for use by the cargo ship, shuttle and space station, Shannon said.

While the shuttle is docked at the ISS, Jules Verne will be parked about 1,243 miles (2,000 km) away from the station before continuing its shakedown cruise, mission managers added.

Endeavour's crew is scheduled to head toward NASA's KSC spaceport on March 7 to begin countdown procedures for their March 11 lauch

Saturn Moon Rhea May Have Rings

New observations by a spacecraft suggest Saturn's second-largest moon may be surrounded by rings. If confirmed, it would the first time a ring system has been found around a moon.

The international Cassini spacecraft detected what appeared to be a large debris disk around the 950-mile-wide moon Rhea during a flyby in 2005. Scientists proposed that the halo likely contained particles ranging from the size of grains to boulders.

The finding was described in a study published in the March 7 issue of the journal Science.

Unlike the rings around Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, the apparent arcs around Rhea remain invisible and have not been directly seen. Scientists inferred their existence based on measurements by Cassini, which detected a drop in electrons on both sides of the moon, suggesting the presence of rings was absorbing the electrons.

It's unclear where the rings would have originated, but one explanation is they may be the result of an ancient asteroid or comet collision that spewed material around Rhea.

"Rings may even have survived since Rhea's formation," wrote lead author Geraint Jones, a space physicist from University College London.

Until now, only planets were known to have rings, said Jones, who began the research while at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.

The Cassini mission, funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena

Stellar Explosion Is Most Distant Object Visible to Naked Eye
By SPACE.com staff

posted: 21 March 2008
10:29 am ET


A powerful stellar explosion that has shattered the record for the most distant object visible to the naked eye was detected by NASA's Swift satellite on Wednesday.


The explosion, known as a gamma-ray burst, also ranks as the most intrinsically bright object in the universe ever observed by humans.


"It's amazing — we've been waiting for a flash this bright from a gamma-ray burst ever since Swift began observing the sky three years ago, and now we've got one that is so bright that it was visible to the naked eye even though its source is half-way across the universe," said David Burrows of Penn State University, who directs the continuing operation of Swift's X-ray telescope and the analysis of the data it collects.


Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe since the Big Bang and occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. The stars' cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars and release an intense burst of high-energy gamma-rays and jets of energetic particles.


The jets rip through space at nearly the speed of light, heating the surrounding interstellar gas like turbocharged cosmic blowtorches, often generating a bright afterglow.


"These optical flashes from gamma-ray bursts are the most extreme such phenomena that we know of," said Swift science team member Derek Fox, also of Penn State. "If this burst had happened in our galaxy, it would have been shining brighter than the Sun for almost a minute — sunglasses would definitely be advised."


Penn State astronomer and Swift team member Peter Meszaros said an unusual combination of circumstances may have made the burst's afterglow so exceptionally bright in the visible wavelengths of light.


"When the jet that formed during the explosion of the star slammed into the surrounding gas clouds, shock waves were generated that heated the jet," he explained. "The exceptional brightness of this burst requires the jet to have just the right combination of magnetic fields and velocity, which occurs very rarely."


Astronomers don't know for sure what made the burst, dubbed GRB 080319B, so bright, but further analysis of the event is under way. The burst could possibly have been more energetic than others, or the burst's energy may have been concentrated in a jet aimed directly at Earth.


The afterglow of GRB 080319B was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever recorded.


Astronomers have placed the star in the constellation Boötes. They have estimated it to be 7.5 billion light years away from Earth, meaning the explosion took place when the universe was less than half its current age and before Earth formed.


The most distant previous object that could be seen by the naked eye is the galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light-years from Earth.


The burst was detected by Swift at 2:12 EDT on March 19 and was one of five gamma-ray bursts detected that day, the same day that famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died.


"Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma-ray bursts," said Swift science team member Judith Racusin, a Penn State graduate student.

Shuttle Astronauts Rest up After Ambitious Spaceflight
By Tariq Malik
Senior Editor
posted: 27 March 2008
4:20 p.m. ET


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The seven astronauts of NASA's shuttle Endeavour are readjusting to Earth's gravity after their marathon construction flight to the International Space Station (ISS).

Shuttle commander Dominic Gorie and his crewmates returned to Earth late Wednesday in a night landing that capped a 16-day flight to the space station, where the astronauts delivered a new Japanese storage room and a Canadian-built robot repairman named Dextre.

"We've had one of the most remarkable missions I could have ever imagined," said Gorie, a four-time shuttle flyer. "Five [spacewalks], a staggering, ambitious flight that we set out for, and it turned out just wonderfully."

Endeavour touched down under darkness on a runway here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center to complete the longest shuttle mission ever sent to the space station. The astronauts also performed five spacewalks, the most ever for a docked shuttle crew, while at the orbiting laboratory.

"Flying over Orlando last night was just spectacular," Gorie said, adding that he and pilot Gregory H. Johnson saw no trace of the cloud deck that thwarted their first landing attempt earlier in the day. "We never passed through any clouds...we had a good clear view of the runway from the point it came through the commander's window."

Returning to Earth with Gorie and Johnson were NASA mission specialists Robert Behnken, Mike Foreman, Rick Linnehan and Japanese astronaut Takao Doi. The astronauts were scheduled to return to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston later today.

French spaceflyer Leopold Eyharts, of the European Space Agency, also landed aboard Endeavour to complete a nearly 49-day trek to the space station. Eyharts launched to the station in early February to deliver the station's ESA Columbus lab and handed his Expedition 16 crew assignment over to NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman - who arrived aboard Endeavour - before returning to Earth.

"It was a strange feeling coming back to gravity after such a long time," Eyharts said via telephone, adding that he may need a couple of days to get back to full strength. "I feel actually well. I think the adaptation is going as was expecting."

Johnson, Behnken and Foreman made their first career spaceflight during Endeavour's STS-123 mission.

"The thing that jumps out at me is the launch," Johnson said of Endeavour's March 11 liftoff. "I couldn't imagine how it was going to be until we actually did it."

For Behnken and Foreman, who participated in three of the mission's five spacewalks, the orbital work outside took center stage.

"I got to climb around on the space station quite a bit," said Behnken, adding that he clambered over the station's new Japanese module and European-built Columbus lab while outside. "The views that I was able to see, looking down on the shuttle, looking down on the Earth, was just remarkable for me."

"I've tried to burn some of those images into my mind, because I know it will seem like a dream here after a few days," Foreman added.

Endeavour's crew constructed the Canadian Space Agency's $209-million Dextre robot during three separate spacewalks, and had to use some elbow grease at times to loose stuck bolts and the automaton's stubborn, 11-foot (3.4-meter) long arms.

"It looked like a giant Transformer to me...it was kind of like this giant arachnid with these arms and legs and booms sticking out everywhere. He even has the semblance of a head," Linnehan said. "It was the robots against the humans and the humans prevailed."

Doi, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut, said he was honored to help deliver the Japanese Logistics Module, a squat cylinder with a 14-foot (4.2-meter) wide interior that will serve as a sort of orbital attic for his country's Kibo laboratory. The main pressurized section for Kibo (Japanese for "Hope") is a massive module the size of a school bus and is scheduled to launch aboard NASA's shuttle Discovery in late May.

To commemorate the first Kibo addition to the ISS, Doi took a selection of Japanese space food, which Gorie and station commander Peggy Whitson lauded as some of the tastiest treats during the docked mission. Doi also took souvenir chopsticks for his crewmates and the space station astronauts, initially as just token gifts.

"I just wanted to just give them to them, but they started using chopsticks in space and it was a good surprise to me," Doi said. "They are very good because there's no gravity. They don't miss anything."

'Aliens' Attacking Bosnian Man with Meteorites
By Bill Christensen


posted: 10 April 2008
05:08 pm ET


Five meteorites have fallen on Radivoje Lajic's house in the past six months. There is only one possible conclusion. Lajic says:

"I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate."

Belgrade University scientists have confirmed that all of the rocks presented to them by Lajic are meteorites.



The first meteorite smashed into his house last November. Since that time, four more have hit his home.



Lajic has since installed a steel-girder reinforced roof on his home in Gornja Lamovite.

"I am being targeted by aliens. They are playing games with me. I don't know why they are doing this."

Although this story is somewhat hard to believe (it would be helpful to see the meteors in situ, having blown through the house, for example), it is as good a reason as any to discuss orbital kinetic energy weapons.



The first time I read about kinetic energy weapons in orbit was in a science fiction novel; Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote about it in Footfall, their 1985 novel.



"You take a big iron bar. Give it a rudimentary sensor, and a steerable vane for guidance. Put bundles of them in orbit. To use it, call it down from orbit, aimed at the area you're working on..."
(Read more about flying crowbars)



Jerry Pournelle described a weapons system like this in a paper twenty years earlier; it gets its "punch" from kinetic energy alone:



"Thor will impact a target area at about 12,000 feet per second; that is sufficient kinetic energy to destroy most hard targets, with minimum collateral damage and of course no fall-out. Achievable accuracy has been estimated at ten to twenty feet CEP (circular error of probability)."



SF writer Greg Bear made use of a similar technology in his 2007 novel Quantico:



"Lancets - essentially guided steel telephone poles tipped with a chemical warhead. They're designed to fall from low Earth orbit and punch a hole in the ground..."
(Read more about Bear's orbital weapon lancet)

Coolest, Darkest Brown Dwarf Star Discovered

The coolest brown dwarf star has been discovered, with a surface temperature of 623 Kelvin (that's only 350 Celsius or 660 degrees Fahrenheit). Compare with the surface temperature of our Sun, a modest 6,000 Kelvin, you can see that this featherweight dwarf "star" is a little odd. As far as stars go, this one is pretty unspectacular, but it does hold a vast amount of interest. It may not be as sexy as a supernova or as exotic as a neutron star, the humble brown dwarf may provide the essential link between planets (specifically gas giants) and stars. They are effectively failed stars, and this new discovery demonstrates just how cold they can be…

Brown dwarfs are the link between massive planets and small stars. They have an upper limit of about 80 Jupiter masses, but are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion in their core. They do however experience convection from the interior to the surface. The confusion arises when trying to find the lower limit of brown dwarf size, at what mass does the gas giant planet start being a brown dwarf star? This grey area is thought to be characterized by an entirely new stellar type: Y-class dwarfs. Until now Y-class dwarfs have been very elusive and have only existed in theory.

Astronomers using near-infrared and infrared instruments at the Canada France Hawaii and Gemini North telescopes and the European Southern Observatory in Chile have discovered a Y-class dwarf, bringing this strange failed star from theory and into reality. What's more, it's in our cosmic neighbourhood, only 40 light-years from Earth. This brown dwarf has been unglamorously named "CFBDS0059", but I would have called it something like "The Dark Star" or "The Death Star", as it is so dim and its surface temperature is approximately the same as the surface temperature of the planet Mercury (but much cooler than the surface temperature of Venus). As it is so cool, it isn't very luminescent and only radiates in the near-infrared wavelengths (it's not even as hot as a standard electric stove element), requiring specialist equipment to detect it. As it turns out, CFBDS0059 is small, only 15-30 times the mass of Jupiter, fulfilling the lower mass limit of brown dwarf stars and will be known as the first Y-class dwarf to be observed.

But what is the indicator that a Y-class brown dwarf has been observed? Using spectrometers, astronomers have been able to see the constituent compounds making up the brown dwarf's atmosphere. Should ammonia be discovered, it's a pretty sure sign that a Y-class dwarf has been found.

There are two other verified classes of dwarfs, L and T-class dwarfs. L-class dwarfs are hotter, with temperatures from 2200 to 3600°F and T-class dwarfs are cooler than 2190°F and methane-rich. CFBDS0059 is obviously much, much cooler, but researchers believe there may be still cooler dwarfs out there, possibly condensing any water vapour in their atmospheres to form clouds, setting Y-class dwarfs far from the characteristics of its L and T-class cousins. Should they get any colder, water will freeze into ice crystals, giving them more planetary than stellar characteristics.

Space Shuttle Discovery Moves Closer to Launch
By Tariq Malik
Senior Editor
posted: 26 April 2008
11:07 am ET


The space shuttle Discovery moved a step closer to launch early Saturday as NASA engineers hauled the spacecraft into a massive hangar to join its fuel tank and twin rocket boosters.

Discovery made the short morning move from its processing building to the cavernous, 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to prepare for its planned May 31 launch.

The shuttle's seven-astronaut crew, commanded by veteran spaceflyer Mark Kelly, will deliver Kibo - a massive Japanese laboratory the size of a tour bus - to the International Space Station during a planned 13-day mission.

Engineers rolled Discovery out of its processing facility atop a 76-wheel transporter at 7:17 a.m. EDT (1117 GMT) and into the Vehicle Assembly Building at about 8:05 a.m. EDT (1205 GMT), where engineers will hoist it into a vertical position for external tank attachment. The move occurred two days earlier than planned due to swift work by shuttle workers, NASA officials said.

"That's usually a pretty good sign when you can gain some time in the schedule," NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel told SPACE.com. "They just didn't encounter a lot of problems and things have been going extremely well."

The extra two days will give shuttle workers more flexibility should they encounter any unexpected issues later, Beutel added.

Discovery is slated to roll out to its Pad 39A launch site at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) on May 3, where shuttle workers will prepare it for a planned 5:02 p.m. EDT (0902 GMT) liftoff on May 31.

During their mission, Kelly and his crew will install the 37-foot (11-meter) Kibo laboratory, relocate its attic-like storage module delivered on an earlier flight and swap out one member of the space station's crew. Two spacewalks are planned for the mission, NASA said.

Discovery astronauts will perform a full dress rehearsal of their launch day on May 9.

Kibo's delivery will mark the second laboratory added to the space station this year. Astronauts installed Europe's Columbus laboratory during a February shuttle mission, with a March flight delivering Kibo's storage module and a Canadian-built maintenance robot.

Hydrothermal Vents on Mars Could Have Supported Life

Scientists have found signs that water may once have gurgled up through the Martian soil in hydrothermal vents similar to those in Yellowstone National Park.


The site of these proposed vents could possibly contain preserved traces of ancient Martian life, scientists say. That assumes, of course, that life might once have existed on Mars. No firm evidence for that idea has ever been found, however.


The vents evidence comes from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. The robotic explorer found deposits of pure silica, a form of the element silicon that occurs when hot water reacts with rocks (quartz is a pure silica), in Mars' Gusev Crater in 2007. The discovery was announced briefly at the time, but scientists have now had time to fully analyze the deposits. The results are detailed in the May 23 issue of the journal Science.


Silica surprise


The silica was found when Spirit was exploring the Columbia Hills, which rise 300 feet (100 meters) from the middle of the flat lava plain that fills Gusev Crater. Scientists were uncertain about just what had formed these hills.


While Spirit was parked near an area known as the Tyrone site, mission scientists used the rover's Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) to look at some nearby "knobby outcrops," said study team member Steven Ruff of Arizona State University.


"It wasn't clear what we were seeing in the knobby outcrops because they were contaminated with dust and wind-blown soil. But I thought they might be silica-rich," Ruff said.


Surveys of other crops showed the same hints of silica, but were likewise contaminated. That's when the rover's jammed right front wheel came to the rescue. As the rover was driving in reverse, its crippled wheel dug a trench behind it.


"We aimed the Mini-TES at the trench and it showed a clear silica spectrum," Ruff said. They also analyzed the trench's white soil with the rover's Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer which showed that the soil was more than 90 percent silica. "That a record high for silica on Mars," Ruff said.


Hot habitat for life?


Making such pure silica requires a lot of hot water, Ruff said. "On Earth, the only way to have this kind of silica enrichment is by hot water reacting with rocks," he said, making the connection to hydrothermal vents.


This relationship also links the silica to Home Plate, a football field-sized volcanic feature in the Columbia Hills. "Home Plate came from an explosive volcanic event with water or ice being involved," Ruff explained.


The team eventually found silica deposits in many other places nearby. Because hydrothermal vents on Earth harbor life, scientists suspect that they may once have done so on Mars. And the trace could be left in the silica deposits.


"On Earth, hydrothermal deposits teem with life and the associated silica deposits typically contain fossil remains of microbes," said study team member Jack Farmer, also of ASU.


"But we don't know if that's the case here," he added, "because the rovers don't carry instruments that can detect microscopic life."


The site stands in contrast to the one that NASA hopes will be explored by its Phoenix Mars Lander starting next week, because while Phoenix will be looking at the potential habitability of Mars' north polar region today and in the more recent geologic past, the silica deposits in Gusev Crater represent a "possible habitable environment of Mars' ancient past," Ruff told SPACE.com.

Virgin Galactic Spaceline: Mega-Mothership Set for Rollout Debut
By Leonard David
Special Correspondent, SPACE.com
posted: 06 June 2008
12:39 pm ET


WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rollout of Scaled Composites' mega-mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, is anticipated late July in Mojave, California — the first phase of a project to create a private space travel business — SPACE.com has learned in an exclusive interview.

WhiteKnightTwo is a specially designed jet carrier aircraft, built to haul the passenger and crew-filled SpaceShipTwo to release altitude of roughly 50,000 feet.

Once on its own, SpaceShipTwo guns itself on a suborbital trek to over 68 miles (109 kilometers) high, reaching a speed of just over three times the speed of sound, and then returns its six rubber-necking tourists and two pilots back to Earth.

And even in space, yes, you can hear cash registers ringing up sales.

That's the word from Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic, the company owned and established by British businessman and billionaire, Richard Branson and his Virgin Group, to fashion the world's first commercial spaceline.

"I think we are above the plan we originally had in terms of the number of tickets we sold before we started flying," Whitehorn told SPACE.com in an exclusive May 29 interview here during the National Space Society's International Space Development Conference.

Priority seating

Some 254 people have plopped down cash to earn priority seating onboard SpaceShipTwo in the first couple of years of suborbital flying, Whitehorn explained. "They've paid up-front between $20,000 and $200,000 ... and we've got about $36 million, as of today, in the bank."

Whitehorn said Virgin Galactic's ambition since day one has been to sell the first year's operations before firing the starting gun on ticketed runs to space. While that date is still to be determined, he said that the firm would want to sell about 500 or 600 tickets before then.

"We see ourselves carrying that many people in the first year," Whitehorn said. "Virgin isn't going to fund a business that isn't a real business."

But the true foundation for closing Virgin Galactic's public space travel business case is test, test and then test some more.

Extensive flight testing

"We've designed a test program at the moment which is incredibly conservative," Whitehorn advised — a program that he thinks might be shortened. "We're into sort of a 130 to 150 flight category program, which is extensive."

That test program starts with rollout of the huge WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane, now targeted for the end of July. The aircraft will be ground tested for days or weeks at the Mojave Air and Space Port, depending on the opinion of Scaled Composites experts, Whitehorn emphasized, but the hope is to have the plane airborne by September.

Scaled Composites founder, Burt Rutan, has led his company team in shaping the suborbital space travel hardware, and was recently named Chief Technology Officer and Chairman Emeritus of the company.

SpaceShipTwo will still be under shrouds next month, Whitehorn added, before it is publicly unveiled in the early part of next year.

"The business plan would obviously love us to start flying as soon as possible. The safety plan may well agree with that at the end of the day ... but it may not," Whitehorn suggested.

Open space

The beast that is WhiteKnightTwo has its work cut out for it ... and then some.

Virgin Galactic officials — including its cadre of sales agents — have proven that there is a suborbital market that could justify building the WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo system. That fact was not known at start of construction, Whitehorn admitted.

Still, there's more business oomph in WhiteKnightTwo than handling passenger traffic on suborbital jaunts.

"WhiteKnightTwo is the world's most advanced payload carrier. It has the best fuel efficiency of any aircraft ever built in history. It is the world's first 100 percent carbon composite aircraft ... 100 percent minus the blades and undercarriage," Whitehorn pointed out. "Even the control wires are carbon composite ... a first in aviation ... and a patented technology."

A look at WhiteKnightTwo artwork shows the "open architecture" of the twin booms on the craft. Within that open space, a multi-purpose range of payloads can be cradled under the aircraft.

"WhiteKnightTwo has got incredible abilities," Whitehorn emphasized. For one, serving as a high-altitude launch platform, the aircraft can toss microsatellites into low Earth orbit.

Another idea that is bubbling up for study is whether the aircraft can act as a forest fire water bomber. A massive carbon composite water tank can be hauled by WhiteKnightTwo, one that can be quickly replenished to make repeat runs over rampaging fires.

"It is also a zero-g aircraft so we can train our passengers in it. It can also do microgravity science flights, high-altitude testing, and it can launch payloads ... other than SpaceShipTwo," Whitehorn said. "My background in aviation told me, right from the early days, that if we just give WhiteKnightTwo a single purpose, then it's less likely to be profitable in the future."

Margin of error

If all goes according to plan, WhiteKnightTwo should be in the air by early September. "We've got to take it to the limit of its operating ceiling and test it up there before we under-sling anything under it," Whitehorn noted.

One of the biggest issues with any aviation or space project – when you are developing something at the cutting edge of technology — is typically weight, Whitehorn said. And at this moment, there is the capacity to cope with growth of weight in what Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites is doing ... because of WhiteKnightTwo.

"That is the thing that gives me the most comfort that we're going to achieve 'commercialality' with it. Because, if we had no room for margin of error on weight now, we'd be in, I think, a difficult place," Whitehorn pointed out. "But we've got lots of room for margin of error."

For more information on Virgin Galactic, go to http://www.virgingalactic.com/

Astronomers on verge of finding Earth's twin

Planet hunters say doppelgänger is almost surely hiding in our galaxy

By Jeanna Bryner

updated 1:19 p.m. ET, Tues., June. 24, 2008
Planet hunters say it's just a matter of time before they lasso Earth's twin, which almost surely is hiding somewhere in our star-studded galaxy.

Momentum is building: Just last week, astronomers announced they had discovered three super-Earths — worlds more massive than ours but small enough to most likely be rocky — orbiting a single star. And dozens of other worlds suspected of having masses in that same range were found around other stars.

"Being able to find three Earth-mass planets around a single star really makes the point that not only may many stars have one Earth, but they may very well have a couple of Earths," said Alan Boss, a planet formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C.

Since the early 1990s, when the first planets outside of our solar system were detected orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257, astronomers have identified nearly 300 such worlds. However, most of them are gas giants called hot Jupiters that orbit close to their stars because, simply, they are easier to find.

"So far we've found Jupiters and Saturns, and now our technology is becoming good enough to detect planets smaller, more like the size of Uranus and Neptune, and even smaller," said one of the top planet hunters on this world, Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley.

Marcy, Boss and other scientists are optimistic that within the next five or so years headlines will be splashed with news of a near twin of Earth in another star system.

"What is amazing to me is that for thousands of years humans have gazed at the stars, wondering if there might be another Earth out there somewhere," Boss told SPACE.com. "Now we know enough to say that Earth-like planets are indeed orbiting many of those stars, unseen perhaps, but there nevertheless."

Seeing tiny planets
Two techniques are now standard for spotting other worlds. Most of the planets noted to date have been discovered using the radial velocity method, in which astronomers look for slight wobbles in a star's motion due to the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. This favors detection of very massive planets that are very close to their host stars.

With the transit method, astronomers watch for a dimming of light when a planet passes in front of its host star. Though more haphazard, this approach works when telescopes scan the light from hundreds or thousands of stars at once.

Both methods are limited by their ability to block out the overshadowing light of the host star. For instance, the sun is 100 times larger, 300,000 times more massive and up to 10 billion times brighter than Earth. "Detecting Earth in reflected light is like searching for a firefly six feet from a searchlight that is 2,400 miles distant," writes a panel of astronomers recently in their final report of the Exoplanet Task Force.

With upgrades in spectrometers and digital cameras attached to telescopes, astronomers' eyes have become more sensitive to relatively tiny stellar wobbles (measured by changes in certain wavelengths of light) and dips in starlight from ever smaller planets.

The discovery of super-Earths announced last week reflects this technological leap.

"I think why astronomers are really excited [about the super-Earth discovery] is it just shows that technology has really matured and so they're able to see these very subtle wobbles due to these low-mass planets," said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. "Those were fairly massive stars. If they were able to get the same precision on a lower-mass star, they would be able to look at even lower-mass planets and so those really would be analogs of the Earth."

To eek out even more sensitivity from current technologies, Charbonneau suggests astronomers look for worlds around small stars.

He and other astronomers are in fact probing the universe for transiting planets orbiting M dwarfs, or red dwarfs, which are about 50 percent dimmer than the sun and much less massive. Red dwarfs are also considered the most common star type in the universe.

"I think the real opportunity there is to study low-mass stars, and that's because we're looking for very small planets," Charbonneau said. "The difficulty is the ratio between the planet's mass and the star's mass or the planet's size and the star's size depending on how you want to find it."

The low mass and luminosity means any changes to the star due to an Earth-mass planet are much more likely to be detected.

"A late M star is about 10 times smaller than the sun," said Penn State's James Kasting, who studies planetary atmospheres and the habitable zones of exoplanets. "So Earth going in front of an M star would give a 1 percent signal. That's like Jupiter going in front of the sun." Kasting added, "We could conceivably find an Earth analog planet by this method within the next five or ten years."

Other teams are gearing up to look for Earth-like worlds orbiting massive stars like the sun. NASA's Kepler observatory is scheduled for launch in February 2009, after which the high-powered telescope will monitor about 100,000 stars in the Milky Way looking for periodic dimming of starlight due to a planet's transit in front of the star.

The French COROT mission is already up in space working in a similar fashion.

The ultimate goal of planet-hunting projects is to find Earth twins.

"We are looking for twins of the Earth, analogs that walk and talk and smell like our own Earth," Marcy said during a telephone interview. He is currently looking for super-Earths using the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Such a twin would be rocky, with a similar chemical composition to Earth, and would orbit within the habitable zone of its star.

The habitable zone defines the distance at which a planet must orbit from its star for liquid water to exist on its surface — not too hot like Venus, not too cold like Neptune or Pluto.

Astronomers have found planets orbiting pretty close to the habitable zone, but none so far within it.

"I suspect there are Earth-like planets with lakes and rivers and waterfalls and deep glacial gorges and that are spectacularly beautiful," Marcy said.

Finding a planet in the habitable zone is the first step toward finding alien life.

"When we say it's a habitable world, all we're doing is saying it potentially could hold life," Boss said. "To go beyond that to say, 'Here's a habitable world; is it inhabited,' then you need to start studying the atmosphere of the planet."

Her computer models have shown that plate tectonics, the forces that move continents and lift gigantic mountain ranges, are key to life on Earth as we know it, and possibly to life on other worlds. That's because as the rocky plates that form the planet's outer shell move about, they also recycle carbon dioxide. This greenhouse gas keeps our planet's temperature balmy, but not too hot. And the telltale signal would be certain levels of carbon dioxide, suggesting that just as on Earth, this other world relies on plate tectonics to cycle carbon.

But first things first. "There's no doubt that other Earths exist, simply due to the sheer vast numbers of other stars and galaxies in our universe," Marcy said. "There's a deeper question — how common are Earth-like planets? Are Earth-like planets a dime a dozen, or are they quite rare, quirky precious planets that are one in a thousand or one in a million?"

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled for launch in 2013, could do just that.

"There might be a signal in the atmosphere that could be a smoking gun and would suggest that plate tectonics is there," said earth and planetary scientist Diana Valencia of Harvard University.

Solar Eclipse


Friday, August 1 is a red-letter day for eclipse enthusiasts. On that date, the sun will be partially eclipsed over an immense area that includes western and central Asia, parts of northern and central Europe, all of Greenland and even a small slice of northeastern North America.


A total solar eclipse — the first in nearly two and a half years — will be visible along a narrow track that will start over the Northwest Passage of Canada, gives a glancing blow to northern Greenland, then shifts southeast through Siberia and western Mongolia and before ending near the famed Silk Route of China.


The path of totality for this upcoming eclipse is never more than 157 miles (252 km) wide.


Where it's visible


The total eclipse begins at sunrise over Northern Canada's Queen Maud Gulf, where the moon's umbra will first touch down on the Earth, resulting in Canada's hosting its first total solar eclipse since February 26, 1979.


As the sun comes into view over the north-northeast horizon its disk will become completely blocked by the moon. This is in the area of the famous Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic archipelago of Canada. The various islands of the archipelago are separated from one another and the Canadian mainland by a series of Arctic waterways collectively known as the Northwestern Passages. Politically, this region belongs to Nunavut, the largest and newest of the territories of Canada; it was separated officially from the vast Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999.


Although the umbral shadow narrowly misses the towns of Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island, and Resolute on Cornwallis Island, its northern edge just clips the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world: Canada's remote outpost of Alert, which lies just 508 miles (817 km) from the North Pole and has a population of just 5. Here, totality will last 43 seconds.


Crossing the open Arctic, the southern half of the totality path slides across the many fjords of northermost Greenland, coming to within 450 miles (720 km) of the North Pole at 9:38 UT over the Arctic Ocean before turning southeast. Totality sweeps over the Norwegian island group of Svalbard, while the northern edge of the umbra's path just grazes Russia's Franz Josef Land island group, then cuts across the crescent-shaped island of Novaya Zemlya on its way to central Asia. The umbra first touches the Russian coast on the Yamal Peninsula. Not far inland, greatest eclipse, producing 2 minutes 27 seconds of totality, is attained near the town of Nadym (pop. ~46,000), just inland from the boot-shaped Gulf of Obskaja.


Spending part of your summer in Siberia may sound a bit more appealing upon hearing that the central path passes almost directly over the city of Novosibirsk, Russia's third most populous city (pop. ~1.4 million) where totality begins at 10:44 UT and will last 2 minutes 18 seconds. The center of the path will then follow the Mongolia-China border for several hundred kilometers, with Olgij, Mongolia getting 1 min 36s of totality. Totality finally whisks into north-central China, crossing the west end of the Great Wall before leaving the Earth at a point northeast of the major city of Xi'an (pop. 3.9 million).


The northern half of Maine as well as the Canadian Maritime Provinces will experience a partial eclipse at sunrise.


Eclipse expedition


A most unusual attempt to rendezvous with the moon's shadow will be made by an Airbus A330-200 twin-engine long-range aircraft. Following a flight plan optimized specifically for the purpose of viewing this eclipse, all of the many unusual requirements of this flight have been evaluated and satisfied with arrangements by the air charter company Deutsche Polarflug (AirEvents) which has previously operated successful over-flights of the North Pole with this same aircraft.


Glenn Schneider, from the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory and a veteran of 26 total eclipses, has worked out the detailed formulation of the flight plan. He is targeting a point from the high polar north, at approximately +83-degrees latitude and about 440 nautical miles from the North Pole at an altitude of 37,000 feet above the Arctic Ocean.


This will be a unique event in the annals of solar eclipse-chasing since there are no records of any total solar eclipse observations as far north as this. While total solar eclipses in the polar regions are not rare, accessibility is very difficult. Until this juncture in time (and technology) very high-latitude (north or south) total solar eclipses have been elusive. The total solar eclipse of 23 November 2003 was the first in history to have been observed from the Antarctic.


Once again it needs repeating: to look at the sun without proper eye protection is dangerous. Even if you are in the path of the total eclipse you will need to protect your eyes during the partial phases.

The Science Behind the Eclipse Galleries: Solar Eclipse in 2005 and 2006 Local Viewing Circumstances

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.