addedentry, posts by tag: science - LiveJournal

I've been lucky enough to witness a number of rare and exciting astronomical events. Halley's Comet has an orbital period around 76 years: it last visited when I was nine, and I hope to be alive when it returns in 2061. The solar eclipse of 1999 was one of the few whose path of totality clips Britain (next one, 2090): I saw it with huskyteer from the middle of the English Channel, rather than overcast Cornwall.

On Tuesday, most of the world will have the chance see the first transit of Venus since 1882. This is when Venus crosses the disc of the Sun as seen from Earth (its orbit is inclined with respect to Earth's, so this happens infrequently). The original interest in this phenomenon was to triangulate the distance between Earth and the Sun by observing the transit from different locations. This year, the way Venus blocks the Sun's light as it passes will be measured to help the search for exoplanets crossing distant stars.

The next transit will occur on 6 June 2012 - and isn't it impressive that a natural event can be predicted with such accuracy? - but it will be night-time in Britain. Fortunately, this Tuesday morning is predicted to be cloudless! Here is a guide to events in Britain; I plan to be at Greenwich Observatory before work. Alternatively, you can watch from home, with a pinhole projector or online.

"It's right up there with stuff like crop circles being made by extra-terrestrials," says Robert Massey, astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich ... "Your mobile phone, your television, your washing machine - any electrical equipment you have generates far stronger magnetic fields than the Earth's field."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,…

My brother there, not suffering fools or astrologers. Nor mobile-phone-mast paranoiacs, should they dare to go near a computer.

Maybe I should have cared about the University Boat Race. But sport is just the same damn thing after another, so I was content to snub my own university and spend a day in the Other Place. I can't say whether this was a pretext to see j4 or whether seeing j4 was a pretext to visit Cambridge.

Before meeting Janet, I went to the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, which is housed in a 17th-century schoolroom. The main gallery has space for only a single case per subject, which can be dizzying: here are the astrolabes, and next to them, the pocket calculators! Here are the navigational instruments, and here the phrenology heads! But these bite-sized displays were at the right level for me, I confess.

The current exhibition at the University Library is 'Sacred Scripts', part of which shows off the missionary translation collection of the British and Foreign Bible Society. There are Bibles in Cree and Tswana, and a Massachusetts psalter (Uk-kuttoohomaongash David). In this context, the geometric signs of the Cree syllabary reminded me of The Gospel By Signal (thanks, again, to alfaguru).