Image copyright Fred Espenak. Used with permission.
By Fred Espenak
If we look 18 years into the past, we find that there was an annular solar eclipse on May 10, 1994. This eclipse passed centrally through the USA, and I photographed it near Toledo, Ohio. Those photos will give you a preview of what the May 20, 2012 eclipse will look like because the moon and sun are nearly at the same positions and distances as they were during the 1994 eclipse.
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Castello Estense, a medieval tower in northern Italy, suffered damaged in the May 20, 2012 earthquake that shook the region.
What seismologists say is “one of the strongest earthquakes to shake northern Italy” shook the region around Bologna early Sunday. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is now reporting it as a magnitude-6.0 temblor. It took place at 2:03 UTC, or 4:30 a.m. at the epicenter. Various media outlets are reporting that it killed at least six people, toppled buildings and sent residents running into the streets. At least one strong aftershock (5.1-magnitude) and one smaller aftershock has occurred since then.
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Tropical Storm Alberto is very small and disorganized near the South Carolina coast. Yellow box indicates the possible storm track. Image Credit: CIMSS
The first named storm for the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season has formed across the western Atlantic Ocean. Tropical Storm Alberto developed during the afternoon hours of Saturday, May 19, 2012. The 5 p.m. EDT advisory reported a tropical storm with sustained winds of 45 miles per hour and a barometric pressure of 1007 millibars. Two hours later, a special weather advisory was issued around 7 p.m. EDT reporting that a ship recorded a much stronger storms with winds sustained at 60 mph and a barometric pressure of 995 mb. As of now, Alberto is slightly weaker and will likely fluctuate in intensity since the storm is so small and outside forces can greatly impact the system. Alberto should not be a direct threat to land, and will eventually push northeastward out to sea.
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Watching a solar eclipse
Host: Jorge Salazar
Lead Producer: Mike Brennan
Song of the week:
Shearwater’s “You as You Were” from their new album Animal Joy. Shearwater are out on their US tour now; European tour starts in June. Catch them if you can!
This week’s featured stories:
Global Night Sky: Solar Eclipse, Lunar Eclipse Jorge Salazar and Deborah Byrd talk about the solar eclipse this weekend, and the lunar eclipse coming up on the morning of June 4.
Read the full articleMonster sunspot 1476 sent a parting blast our way, as the sun’s rotation was carrying it from view. The beautiful movie below shows a coronal mass ejection, or CME, hurtling into space from the sun on May 17, 2012. Its effects might deliver a glancing blow to Earth tomorrow (May 19).
May 17, 2012 coronal mass ejection (CME)
Photo of January 15, 2010 annular or ring eclipse. Mottling, or granulation, caused by heat convection in the sun's atmosphere can be seen around the dark lunar disk. Credit & Copyright: Mikael Svalgaard: Mikael Svalgaard. Used with permission.
Click here to expand image above
We’ve been looking at a lot of annular eclipse photos recently, as we’ve prepared information for you in advance of the May 20-21, 2012 China to Texas annular or ring eclipse. Here’s more about that upcoming eclipse. This is the most amazing annular eclipse photo we found, by Mikael Svalgaard. It shows the annular eclipse or January 15, 2010.
Be sure to click to expand!
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Red oaks in New York City were found to grow eight times faster than nearby rural oaks. The difference is thought to be due to the urban heat island effect. Image via Inhabit NYC
Native red oak seedlings grew as much as eight times faster in New York’s Central Park than in more rural, cooler settings in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains, in an experiment conducted by Columbia University scientists. These scientists say the urban heat island – a well-documented phenomenon that makes large cities hotter than surrounding countryside – is the primary reason. A fallout of airborne nitrogen — a fertilizer — from urban pollution might have helped the trees as well.
Read the full articleNew results from a NASA survey suggest there are roughly 4,700 potentially hazardous asteroids in our solar system. Potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are a subset of the larger group of near-Earth asteroids. The PHAs have the closest orbits to Earth’s, coming within five million miles (about eight million kilometers), and they are big enough to survive passing through Earth’s atmosphere and cause damage on a regional, or greater, scale.
New results from NASA's NEOWISE survey find that more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are closely aligned with the plane of our solar system than previous models suggested. This diagram shows an edge-on view of our solar system. The dots represent a snapshot of the population of NEAs and PHAs that scientists think are likely to exist based on the NEOWISE survey. Positions of a simulated population of PHAs on a typical day are shown in bright orange, and the simulated NEAs are blue. Earth's orbit is green. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Imagine watching this Sunday’s annular eclipse here …..
Photo credit: Brice Canyon. NPS/Kevin Poe and Ron Warner
National parks from California to New Mexico are inviting people to watch either the partial or the annular eclipse of the sun on May 20, 2012. This eclipse is the first solar eclipse of any kind in the mainland U.S. (not including Hawaii and Alaska) in the 21st century (2001-2100). Plus the May 20, 2012 eclipse is the first time in 18 years that the moon will cross directly in front of the sun as seen from U.S. shores. A National Park near you wants to help you view it.
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A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) high, captured on the sands of the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars on March 14, 2012 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) high! NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006 – caught sight of this beauty as it whirled on the sands of the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars on March 14, 2012.
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Stéphane Udry is an astronomer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and is involved in the search for exoplanets.. He and his team, in 2007, discovered a possibly terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, approximately 20 light years away in the constellation Libra. He also led the…read more »
Stéphane Udry: Evidence of billions of rocky, habitable planets in our galaxy
Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and Faculty Director of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Field’s research emphasizes impacts of climate change, from the molecular to the global scale. He has, for two decades, led major…read more »
In 2004 David Stuart was appointed as the Linda and David Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing. His interests in the traditional cultures of Mesoamerica are wide-ranging, but his primary research focuses is the archaeology and epigraphy of ancient Maya civilization. His early work on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs led to a MacArthur…read more »
David Stuart on the Mayan calendar and 2012 doomsday predictions
Kristin O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Biology University of Alaska Institute of Arctic Biology. She is interested in the unique biochemical and physiological characteristics that have evolved in fishes living in the chronically cold environment of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean. One of the most striking characteristics among the Antarctic fishes of the family Channichthyidae, known…read more »
Kristin O’Brien: Antarctic icefishes have translucent bodies and blood
Sukanya Chakarbarti is faculty member in the physics department at Florida Atlantic University. She researches the dynamical evolution of galaxies, with the goal of developing astrophysical probes of fundamental physics. Chakrabarti works on understanding galaxy evolution by performing hydrodynamical and magnetohydrodynamical simulations of galaxies combined with radiative transfer calculations. Dr. Chakrabarti has co-authored over 30…read more »
Sukanya Chakrabarti maps dark matter from ripples of passing satellites
