Stellarator , JackDole , Gnargenox is referring to a small asteroid hitting the Moon during the eclipse.  Impacts big enough for the flash to be observed from Earth actually happen fairly often. :) Smp7TqccTpY I checked if any of my photos might have captured it, but alas no.  The impact happened j...

One thing to be cautious with when reviewing studies of the effects of CO2 and warming on crops is how they isolate (or not) the effects.  Controlled greenhouse studies show the fertilization effect of increasing CO2 concentration, but this is not uniform across all types of crops.  Adding in the ef...

This photo (taken within 1 minute of maximum eclipse) could probably be used to estimate my location relatively accurately (ignoring that it's shown in my profile).  But perhaps more interestingly, if there are other people with photos showing the stars near the Moon taken at the same time and from...

At my house it was mostly cloudy, with new clouds forming over the hill the Moon had risen behind, and I only got one brief view as totality began.  Decided to drive around to try elsewhere, and sure enough as soon as I got away from the hills, the sky opened up and stayed clear the whole time.  It'...

26457 How strong would the laser have to be to stop that object from moving away or even just slowing it down enough so we could study it further? Assuming you're referring to 'Oumuamua?  It would have to be so strong that it would generate particle/antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum (I'm not eve...

26452 The human caused 6th mass extinction is already underway and half of species in the wild will likely be extinct by 2100. Although the rate of extinction right now is comparable to the rate of extinction seen in the fossil record, this is a deeply flawed comparison.  The fossil record preferen...

It is much easier to accelerate something to 0.2c by laser than it is to accelerate it to -0.2c (i.e. pull back towards you that fast).  The latter would be like shooting a bullet at a target and expecting the target to fly straight back at you.  Doesn't work that way, since momentum must be conserv...

Using a laser as a "tractor beam" is surprisingly easy to do at home, provided a laser with sufficiently high power, adjustable focus, and a good Gaussian beam profile.  The way this works is due to the momentum carried by light, and small objects can be levitated and even moved around wit...

The hardest part about getting something to it -- and getting meaningful data back -- is that if we send something there in a reasonable time then it will be very hard to slow down once it gets there. 'Oumuamua is (we think) less than 1 km across, so getting data from a high speed flyby is even more...

26418 Although I don't necessarily disagree with you here, it does seem to be a bit of a logical fallacy on your part to scoff at the alien probe hypothesis while accepting it's no less extreme natural origin. Accepting a hypothesis requires that we test and isolate that hypothesis as the only work...

A different spin on the question:   What is the most time dilation we could get by accelerating at 1g?   If we find a 10 billion solar mass black hole (about the most massive that we know of), then hovering at 12.66 horizon radii would yield about 9.8m/s 2  of gravitational acceleration, wi...

26214 My seismometer, however, has drowned in noise from a million waves crashing into the coast a 1000 km away. Wow!  This also really puts into perspective the challenges for the LIGO gravitational wave detector here in Washington.  If I recall right, they simply don't bother observing whenever t...

Nyarlasothoth , that's very nice.  I'm not sure if it's the same program, but the setup reminds me a lot of Rainmeter, which I used way back in the day and loved it: https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/intermediary/f/7a52cf34-11d1-4fa6-a2f9-e0c6b0edf6f8/d2qdqyx-2e8012b4-0d54-430...

26398 Wat- how fast would we have to accelerate to complete this 6 month "trip" in let's say one hour?  95% of the speed of light? *chuckles*   6 months in 1 hour is a time dilation factor of 4380.  To achieve this by special relativity, we must travel at a speed of 0.9999999739c, or 7.81...