Space and The wonders/mysteries of The Universe

Satellite shows a not completely overclouded north-east.  Did people see the total eclipse there?  We only got 75% where I am.

EDIT: meant North-West

Graduate student orientation was this morning and at noon there was a free lunch on McKeldin Mall (big grassy space, not a shopping area; halfy would know it). There were a number of people with eclipse glasses but I didn't have any, plus it was really humid so I was more concerned with eating quickly and leaving for somewhere with A/C. There was still a little bit of eclipse left when I got home though and my dad showed me the pinhole camera setup he and my stepmom used.

Before my time big tanker trucks full of beer would pull up on McKeldin Mall before each game, paid for by the university.  Did not provide the school with a good reputation, so it eventually started spending money on academics instead.  Don't remember a free lunch being there, but I was a graduate student, and grad students are often ivory-towered from campus life.

I was on a plane over central Oregon for the eclipse. Partial eclips and partial cloud cover, but everything below us turned smokey red. After the eclipse the Oregon freeways came to a standstill and I became trapped in Portland OR. Trains were sold out with lines of 200 or more for most trains. ( I finally figured out I could buy a business class ticket online and get to the front of the line [ also internet]. The train is running more than two hours late, but at least I've escaped Portland!!!! On the train now. The mood is festive, but the line to the dining car is 3 cars long and I thing they're already sold out of beer. Hoping to get home before midnight. The adventure continues!

Still a cool vantage point for an eclipse. I'm assuming you weren't thinking about the eclipse when you planned the trip or you might have avoided all this and been in position for the full eclipse.

Yes, it wasn't originally in my plans, but when I realized what was happening I decided to go with it.  My brother who was at home on the cranberry bogs reports that the sky was clear until the eclipse started, then the sudden temp drop crossed below the dew point and a swirling mist suddenly appeared. He had his full selection of welder's filters, so he kept switching to lighter and lighter filters as he watched the eclipse progress and the mist thicken. And of course as the sun returned the mists vanished as if they'd never been there. Maybe not perfect for an astronomy nerd, but maybe even cooler for a meteorology nerd, and spookily atmospheric!

That's a great meteorology story! I didn't notice any temperature drop here as we went to 75%, but buildings retain a lot of heat to radiate, and we're surrounded by them!

Also, not everybody's fortunate enough to live in a bog.

Yep, should be close to saturation much of the time....if you call that fortunate.

Did you know that rain forests actually pump out more water vapor per area than the equivalent surface of ocean right next to them?

Tomorrow (Friday) the Cassini probe will end its decades-long mission, plunging into Saturn after a series of dives through the gap between Saturn and its rings. Many scientists have devoted their lives to this one mission, and must be awfully misty-eyed. The decision to plunge it into the planet itself was made after the discovery that Enceladus and Titan both featured conditions that could foster life. Rather than risk contaminating these moons with some hardy terrestrial microbes in the unlikely chance of a collision, Cassini will sacrifice itself in a final death dive into the mists of Saturn, sending data all the way down.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ (best look at it today, where this is the feature film)

i believe that aliens made the circles

{{{ Annual Intergalatic Etch-a-Sketch Contest }}}

{{Drunken Scotshobbits crawling around in circles in the field at night }}

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/cdf1c2c8-ab4a-3c10-8e8c-a6bb94054bf4/ss_dark-energy-may-not-exist.html

This makes me very happy. Einstein's gravity had been distorted on cosmological scales to match observations; but those calculations were based on a uniform mass distribution. Using the current understanding of cosmic tendrils and sheets, the cosmological expansion can be made to fit the observations without using dark energy. Though the authors are being cautious, in my bones I feel this is the correct explanation, and one big mystery has been solved.

An even better explanation.  It's a sad statement on Cosmos magazine that Newsweek does such a better job of covering cosmology.

http://www.newsweek.com/dark-energy-exist-einstein-general-relativity-630260?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=yahoo_news&utm_campaign=rss-related&utm_content=/rss/yahoous/news

This captures the perils of simplifying assumptions that get embedded into scientific culture.  I don't know how many of you would realize what a big thing it is that the dark energy paradigm, one of the biggest mysteries of the last few decades, be overthrown just by using an obviously more accurate calculational technique. It suggests many mysteries may be solved by re-examing old assumptions with better computing power.   I'm sort of hoping dark matter falls as well, but there's several lines of independent evidence supporting that, so I'm not counting on it.

Cool! That makes me happy too! Although I understand completely why Einstein chose to start from the assumption of a bland homogeneous cosmos, this new cosmos with shapes and structures seems far more interesting

It's not space-related, but I was reading a thread on reddit, and came across something that I do not remember ever thinking about and that really blew my mind.

If you shuffle a regular deck of cards, you will almost certainly be holding an arrangement of the cards that has never existed before, and will never exist again.

Spoiler:

This may have been linked in the Reddit thread but I enjoy this discussion of all the things that could happen in the time it takes to shuffle a deck of cards 52! times at the rate of one complete shuffle every second.

https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

Think I heard it discussed on QI initially but went and found the original page later.

All that money and training and they are still held on by just hooks and ropes...

Really makes you think about our place in the universe.

large image:

Eldorion wrote:Really makes you think about our place in the universe.

large image:

No matter how many times I see that it always makes me laugh...not entirely sure why he'd want to watch though.

{{Always thought God was a bit oddly obsessed with sex given he invented it! }}