I took my inverted pendulum balancing robot, added a camera and wireless transmitter, and let everyone around the office take a spin. The event was not without mishap, but it’s a lot of fun to watch people interact with the robot, and not so much fun when they try to block it’s view, or just don’t get out of it’s way. Or they kick volleyballs at it. That’s just mean.

I remember seeing the mock-up of this on my old dos-based astronomy program when I was in 5th grade. The computer program made it out to be the most important thing that would happen in the sky for hundreds of years, and let you ”watch” the transit from different viewing points around the earth. So what’s all the fuss about anyway?

Well, I’ll let you read the whole story on your own time, but the general idea is that these transits occur only twice in anyone’s lifetime, spaced 8 years apart. This morning’s transit is the first one that any living human has seen, so we’re all seeing something new together. The last recorded transit occured in the late 19th century, and the Brits sent people out all over the world to record the times of the ”contacts.” These times represent the times when the disk of Venus makes contact with the edges of the sun. However, just like during our own sunrise and sunset, the atmosphere of Venus will refract the sunlight slightly, creating a slight distortion between Venus and the sun’s edge that makes it very difficult to record the exact contact times. Had these times been recorded a bit more accurately in the 1800’s, the astronomers could have very precisely calculated the size of the solar system. However, the actual times recorded by the various watchers around the earth were off by 20-40 seconds, making the actual calculated size of the solar system incorrect. However, even with the problems, the Brits gave a pretty good try at deploying a global array of telescopes all pointed in the same direction in a time when communication was by horse courier and long distance travel was by sail.

Between episodes of 24 the game around here lately has been Communications Systems.  A midterm tomorrow that I almost have to get an A on has kept me away from much else, but I have done a little work on the website that I am working freelance on.  Another Solar Flare yesterday was an X20+, actually overloading the sensors that measure flares for a full 11 minutes.  Looks like that one will be the largest ever recorded.  If the flare had been pointing at Earth, and not off into space, we’d probably be seeing Aurora farther south than last week, but of course, if a flare of that magnitude hit us broadside, the Aurora would be the least of our worries.  Folks in commercial airliners at high latitudes would be getting radiation doses 100 times that of a normal X-Ray.  Not fun stuff. 

It was a busy weekend, and has been a busy week so far.  Over the weekend, we finished up CQ World Wide with 1112 contacts, up 103 over last year, even amidst some fairly strong solar flares that caused radio blackouts for a few hours.  Tuesday morning we saw the third-strongest flare on record, an X17, which caused aurora as far south as Houston Tuesday night.  So last night, I took off north to see what I could see.  It was well worth it, and I got a fairly good show.  Being about 10 miles from nowhere, OK without any city lights to be seen helps.  It was also a nice drive, 250 miles and all after sunset.  Made it back here about 2, after being followed for awhile by some hick kids trying to mess with me.  It was an interesting evening.

Upcoming highlights:  Maybe more aurora tonight as a result of an X11 flare yesterday afternoon.  If the Kp index gets up to 8 or 9 there will be a pretty good chance.  Right now its back down to 5.  See spaceweather.com for more about aurora forecasting.

This is a pretty interesting story about a paper that I definitely agree with, although I would like to see some of the mathematics behind it. The jist is that time doesn’t exist as a series of moments, but as a continuous flow; in this case it becomes paradoxial and cannot exist at all. For all the theoretical physics buffs out there.