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| Image credit: ESA |
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| Watch Saturday's Eclipse Live or on the Internet |
Nov 7, 2003 - Hate to nag, but I just wanted to give you one last reminder about Saturday night's total lunar eclipse. If you live anywhere in the Americas, Europe or Africa, you'll be able to see most if not all of the eclipse. They're a wonderful thing to watch - you can actually see the Earth's shadow slowly obscure the Moon until it turns a deep coppery red.
You don't need special equipment, or be at the right place at the right time. If you can see the Moon, you can watch the eclipse. The visible eclipse begins on Saturday, November 8 at 2332 GMT (6:32 pm EST) and ends about four hours later.
For those of you who can't see the eclipse from your part of the world, or if the weather doesn't cooperate, I'll be linking to all the astrocameras I can find providing live coverage of the eclipse on the Internet (the list is incomplete right now, but I'll fill it in as the event approaches).
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| Image credit: ESA |
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| ESA Cancels Eddington |
| Nov 7, 2003 - The European Space Agency announced this week that it has canceled Eddington, a space-based observatory designed to search for extrasolar planets. They're also going to be scaling back the BepiColombo mission to Mercury by removing the lander that was supposed to accompany the spacecraft. The agency blamed the cuts on budget overruns with other missions, such as Rosetta. One new mission was announced, however. The LISA Pathfinder will serve as a prototype to help search for gravity waves. |
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| Image credit: ESA |
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| It's Official, That Was an X28 Flare |
| Nov 7, 2003 - Astronomers have confirmed that this week's solar flare was a whopping X28 magnitude - definitely the largest flare ever recorded. The flare occurred on November 4, and quickly overwhelmed the X-ray detectors on several monitoring satellites. It was followed up by a coronal mass ejection that blasted out from the surface of the Sun at 2,300 kilometres per second. Fortunately the flare came off the side of the Sun, and seems to have had no effect on our Earth. |
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