John Wheeler – physicist who gave birth to the term ‘black hole’, worked in nuclear fission, and was a contemporary of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr – has passed away at age 96. Full article here.
Category: Astronomy
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Lunar Eclipse!
In case you missed last night’s lunar eclipse, it was a good one. Luckily the weather mostly cooperated. I took a few pictures, these being the best two – although they are a little fuzzy due to some thin clouds. This being the last one until the end of 2010, I wanted to make sure I got to catch this one. The color on this one was good, the orange/red very visible once it reached totality. (Why is it that color, instead of totally dark? It’s the sun’s light refracting around the earth’s atmosphere as it makes its way to the moon – basically looking at a distance at all the sunrises/sunsets all at once if you were to stand on the moon.)
If you click the pictures above, you’ll see one that is wider angled has two stars visible. The one to the left is actually the planet Saturn. The other bright one above is Regulus, in the constellation Leo.
Pretty cool stuff… although the natives in this story didn’t think so…
Some people thought this was evidence of life on Mars, but it’s just a rock. It is cool how the light and shadows does make it resemble a humanlike form. Just think though, if it were a human, how much SPF they would need to protect themselves from the sun rays with Mars’ nice and thin atmosphere 
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In case you had started spring cleaning and came across some old 3-D glasses, hold on to them for now. NASA just published pictures of the sun. While the sun is no stranger to the photo shoot, this is the first done in 3-D by STEREO – a spacecraft based binocular vision. In case you had already thrown out those old glasses, you can make your own here. This would make a great project for kids in science class as part of their study of the sun – that big flaming ball that is incredibly average amongst its peers, yet does a great job of playing its role of keeping things going here. I admit that I no longer own a pair. Perhaps a trip to A.C. Moore is in order…
The Science Attic 
