Holy &*@$% real life is busy, and a small surprise

[delphipsmith]

A week's trip out of town, catching up from a week's trip out of town, and mass quantities of freelance work = no time for anything, including reading, writing or (in some cases) sleeping. Grrrr. Note 1 to self: Say no to any and all jobs for the next, oh, two months. Note 2: Spend newly acquired free time gloating over the lovely SSHG Exchange prompts gifted to me by the mods. Can you say Plot Bunnies??

In other news, the transit of Venus is way cool. Watching that little circle move across the sun makes my brain feel funny as I try to wrap my head around the reality of giant flaming balls of gas floating in space. It's no wonder ancient man invented things like the celestial spheres and Prolemaic model. Much easier to grasp.

In keeping with my 100 Things (Surprises) commitment, I can add that I was quite surprised to learn how important the transit of Venus was in terms of astronomy and cosmology. Scientists used it to calculate the distance from the sun to the Earth, of all things -- the NASA guys cleverly glossed over exactly how they did this, saying something about the parallax method and trigonometry (bane of my existence) before zipping on to show pictures of the sun that make it look like some sort of hell dimension (oh great, our solar system is situated on the Hellmouth...). Other surprising Venus trivia: its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, its surface pressure is 92 times that of Earth, it rains sulfuric acid, and it suffers from pretty much constant hurricane-force winds. So not a good place for a vacation. Oh, and it rotates backwards.

None of which I knew before, so today was a net gain in that I learned something. Yay me!

Comments

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

What you do is send captain cook to Tahiti with a very accurate clock and another captain to another viewing point with an accurate clock and time the appearance of the transit, wait two years for him to come back from Australia and then do some maths.

Hee

I got up at five to see it,and it was cloudy!

[delphipsmith]

Ah, that's what I was missing -- Capt. Cook. No wonder it didn't make sense LOL! Seriously though, I must have spent two hours on the interwebz trying to find a plain-English explanation and I still don't get it. I like math, but beyond a certain point it doesn't like m ;)

[anna-bird.livejournal.com]

Oooh, thanks for the links - I'd been listening to various radio coverage/comments about the Great Transit of Our Time (uh, the latest one, anyway) with half an ear, and kept forgetting to actually look anything up. Very cool!

[delphipsmith]

Yeah, it was pretty neat. I wasn't expecting to get as engrossed as I did. And now we've bought a telescope, a day late. Or, conversely, 105 years early ;)