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cubinator

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Everything posted by cubinator

  1. Now THAT's a diamond ring to remember! I've been making plans for photography, but right now I need to wait for the clouds to clear to start doing practice runs. Unless I can replicate the brightness profile with my computer screen and a really bright LED flashlight...?
  2. NWS has just put out some useful resources: https://www.weather.gov/fwd/eclipse2024
  3. Today a grand solar storm hits Earth at the same time that an enormous snowstorm rolls in to cover it up.
  4. In the photo: Right dot is possibly Jupiter, lower one is probably the first stage, and one of the fairings is visible firing RCS on the left in the middle of the plume. That's my interpretation.
  5. Worked on my eclipse photography procedure. Waiting for the temperature to climb a bit closer to what I expect then to do a dress rehearsal, see how my batteries hold up etc. Since I don't have a fully automated setup, the most important balance is between effectiveness and fun.
  6. I've always wanted to see one of these scale diagrams with both rockets and dinosaurs on it...
  7. It also spent a lot of time with the heat shield only halfway in the plasma at the start there.
  8. It's been rolling a lot throughout...Not sure it's able to point its heat shield in the correct direction.
  9. No burn. Time to see what happens when this thing hits the atmosphere.
  10. Thanks! Yes, I can play bits of it. That was the movie score that inspired me to learn to play organ.
  11. Yep, those few minutes when the Sun's surface is completely covered up are the only time you can look right at it without protection. Its atmosphere is an object you'll only ever see in that moment unless you go to space. It's no brighter than the usual daytime sky, which means the light from the corona can't possibly penetrate the filters that makes the rest of the sun safe to look at.
  12. Additionally, if the sky is decently clear you should start looking for the planets when the sun's about half covered. I could see Venus and bright stars like Spica well before totality. This year's eclipse will give us a nice lineup of four bright planets. Dim Mercury I was never quite able to spot in 2017, so I wouldn't spend too much time looking for it - there are at least a dozen better things to see, and it's too dangerous to get out binoculars. Watch for news about comet 12P as the eclipse nears - it's getting close to perihelion and has a small chance of gracing us with an outburst that might just render it visible in the sky near Jupiter. My far-out hope is that there will be a CME erupting right before the eclipse, though, solar maximum and all. But first on the list is my hope that the clouds will stay away!
  13. Probably. I was browsing some eclipse links online today and finally learned just how many food trucks, ticketed events, and private property parking for sale is going to be occurring in every small town along the path in Texas. It's going to be, at best, mild madness.
  14. It is time to have plans made, and almost time to start watching the weather. Climate is a lot more menacing this time around, with the majority of the path being under frequently cloudy regions. In 2017 it was pretty easy to just head out into the desert and be pretty sure it would be clear. Still, this has been a year unlike any other. What are your plans?
  15. Pi Day means it has to go at least halfway around.
  16. At the very least, it's a very different climate than where I live, and I am biologically and geologically inclined, so I will be content with walking around in some natural park looking at the plants and dirt and bugs! Also mountains. I have not been around a mountain in a year. I will be happy to look at them.
  17. That is a very interesting point about cold water! Still pretty deadly though... Nice to know my math sounds reasonable! My intuition is to take everything I said as an absolute maximum. Any water on you that's spread thinner than whatever I assumed it was will freeze faster, and I didn't even get into heat transfer through skin. Man, I want to see windchill in W/m2 now, that makes way more sense from a physics perspective. Frostbite in x minutes is a useful metric where I'm from.
  18. Thanks! Sounds like a cool complement to the pipe organ pizza place. Thanks! Pima is on my radar, there's definitely way more there than I have time to see!
  19. I'm going to spend a weekend in Arizona for some presentations there, but will have a large amount of free time as well. I basically will have one day in Phoenix and one day in Tucson - any suggestions for cool things I should see during that time?
  20. The thing is sitting on the Moon, is working just fine, it isn't in a million pieces, and it was going less than a thousand miles an hour when it hit the ground. This is a "soft landing" accomplished in my book. Of all the milestones to fail during a moon landing, tipping gently over at the very end is the least concerning. They'll figure out what happened, and if the next one doesn't stand proudly upright they can just build wider landing legs.
  21. I wonder if they can get that third-person video of the landing and tipover, from that camera that they apparently launched out of the side(?). That would be especially exciting.
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