Ewan's Corner » fascinating

Annular Solar Eclipse underway – January 15th 2010

ewan — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 07:18:53 +0000

The first solar eclipse of the year is happening today. Twitter is buzzing, you can see photos being added to Flickr, Google’s real-time search results are brilliant. Almost makes up for not being able to see it myself – we only saw a tiny 3.5% coverage here in Durban this morning (07h30 SAT) – or would have if it wasn’t cloudy!

Path details and animations for almost every city are available at the excellent UK Eclipses Online site (doubly useful since the NASA eclipse page seems to be down, probably buckling under the extra traffic – google cached version is available though). Wikipedia as usual has excellent info.

Some great photos from Nairobi, thanks @paulakahumbu

Update:

* MailOnline’s report – some great photos and a great video.
* NASA’s MODIS satellite caught an image of the Moon’s shadow over India and the Bay of Bengal (a roughly 300km wide shadow).
* SpaceWeather.com has a great gallery of eclipse photos (and commentary for most of them) – well worth seeing
ESA has a beautiful animated image of the eclipse as seen by their Sun-watching Proba-2.

Feeling Small

ewan — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 09:04:59 +0000

A sense of scale, and relative importance.

Russian Booster Rocket Re-Entry – Live Video Footage

ewan — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 09:41:57 +0000

MyFox (Fox 31), a local TV station in Denver, Colorado, got lucky when their helicopter traffic monitor crew captured live video of space debris breaking up in the early morning sky. The video is beautiful, and the reactions from the pilot and anchors are great :-)
You can view the video from the MyFox website (Space Debris Breaks Up on LIVE TV) or grab a local copy from this site (7mb flash video file, which you can view with the latest version of VLC Media Player).
This was not a meteor – this was most likely video footage of a spent Russian booster rocket burning up on re-entry:

“A spent Russian booster rocket re-entered the atmosphere Thursday over Colorado and Wyoming, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said. NORAD spokesman Sean Kelly said the agency was trying to confirm a report that a piece of the rocket may have hit the ground near Riverton, Wyoming, at about 6 a.m. Kelly said military personnel had not yet reached the scene. No damage was reported and the debris was not believed to be hazardous, NORAD said. Eyewitnesses reported seeing flaming objects in the sky at the time the rocket was re-entering, Kelly said.”

Slashdot – Russian Rocket Hits Wyoming
CNN – NORAD looking for Russian rocket in Wyoming

I, Pencil

ewan — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 10:26:32 +0000

Fascinating! I, Pencil – a genealogy, fascinating story, mystery, compelling argument for the freedom of creativity and perhaps an argument against intelligent design? Written by Leonard E. Read, published in December 1958.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.