Tomorrow, America will experience its first annular eclipse since May 10, 1994. Weather permitting, I’ll get to see it as an 85% partial eclipse in Denver — the second solar eclipse I’ve ever witnessed, and the first since (again) May 10, 1994. It will also be the first solar eclipse I’m witnessed safely, with proper eye protection. On May 10,… Read more »
Get your eclipse glasses, pinhole viewers, or Shade 14 welder’s glass out, and your “penumbras and emanations” jokes ready, because there’s a solar eclipse a-comin’ on Sunday evening! The photo above (by Kevin Baird) shows roughly what the eclipse will look like along the central “line of annularity,” which stretches from parts of China and Japan, across the Pacific, to… Read more »
A wildfire southwest of Denver is still totally uncontained this morning, one day after it killed one person, destroyed 15 to 25 strucutres, burned more than 3,000 acres, and gave off a huge smoke plume, blown northeastward by galeforce winds, that was impressively well-defined on radar: Another way of viewing that smoke plume is by looking at the brief time-lapse… Read more »
I can’t remember exactly how old I was when my dad brought home the first computer I would ever use, a Mac Classic I believe, for summer from the high school where he worked. My first memory of using a computer was playing the black and white version of The Oregon Trail. Fast forward a few years and I was… Read more »
Apple co-founder, chairman and (until very recently) CEO Steve Jobs, whose inventions repeatedly changed the world as we know it, died today of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 56. His death prompted massive news coverage (totally overshadowing Sarah Palin’s decision not to run for president) and an overwhelming outpouring of public grief more typical of a head of state’s… Read more »
[NOTE: For the latest, follow @UARS_Reentry on Twitter.] NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, better known as “UARS,” will soon crash back to Earth in an uncontrolled re-entry. NASA previously thought this would happen this afternoon, which meant North America was seemingly out of the woods. But according to an update this morning, the satellite’s descent has slowed, and re-entry is… Read more »
A true must-see: NASA: “Video of the Aurora Australis taken by the crew of Expedition 29 on board the International Space Station. This sequence of shots was taken September 17, 2011 from 17:22:27 to 17:45:12 GMT, on an ascending pass from south of Madagascar to just north of Australia over the Indian Ocean.” Dr. Jeff Masters: “The rippling green curtains… Read more »
I’m blogging again over at Weather Nerd. Here’s an excerpt from this morning’s update on Tropical Storm Nate: Sometimes, in the life of a tropical cyclone, there is a distinct turning point in the evolution of the track forecast, where the computer models suddenly shift toward a new and markedly different solution. When this happens, the National Hurricane Center…generally waits… Read more »
Katia, the storm that took Katrina’s place on the name list, is now officially a hurricane as of 11pm EDT, with winds of 75 mph. Hurricane Katia is expected to keep strengthening — to 100 mph in 1 day, 110 mph in 2 days, 115 mph in 3 days and 120 in 4 days (and it would hardly be shocking… Read more »
Dude… it’s PajamasMedia.com. I apologize to my LRT readers for having so little coverage of Hurricane Irene here, while I was blogging up a storm (pun intended) over at my Pajamas Media site, Weather Nerd. Ideally, I would have done more partial cross-posting — understandably, PJM doesn’t let me do full cross-posts, since they pay me for exclusive content, but… Read more »
