All Cats Are Beautiful 🐱❤️

Created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during it’s flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

First look at the 2024 total solar eclipse

The path of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse begins in the United States in Texas and ends in Maine. Google, INEGI

…The length of totality varies from one eclipse to the next. The reason is that Earth is not always the same distance from the Sun, and the Moon is not always the same distance from Earth. The Earth-Sun distance varies by 3 percent and the Moon-Earth distance by 12 percent. The result is that the maximum duration of totality from 2000 b.c. to a.d. 3000 is 7 minutes, 29 seconds. (That eclipse will occur July 16, 2186, so don’t get too excited for it.)

While the maximum length of totality during the April 8, 2024, eclipse won’t be that long, it’s still a worthy chunk of time: 4 minutes, 28 seconds — 67 percent longer than the one in 2017. And as with that one, everyone in the contiguous U.S. will see at least a partial eclipse. In fact, as long as you have clear skies on eclipse day, the Moon will cover at least 16.15 percent of the Sun’s brilliant surface. That minimum comes at Tatoosh Island, a tiny speck of land west of Neah Bay, Washington. And although our satellite covering any part of the Sun’s disk sounds cool, you need to aim higher.

Read more ~ Astronomy Magazine Posted by Michael Bakich on Sunday, September 23, 2018

If the Moon were replaced with some of our planets (at night)

Image credit: yeti dynamics

Ask Ethan: Why Do Gravitational Waves Travel Exactly At The Speed Of Light?

We know that the speed of electromagnetic radiation can be derived from Maxwell’s equation[s] in a vacuum. What equations (similar to Maxwell’s - perhaps?) offer a mathematical proof that Gravity Waves must travel [at the] speed of light?

If you were to somehow make the Sun disappear, you would still see its emitted light for 8 minutes and 20 seconds: the amount of time it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth across 150,000,000 km of space. But what about gravitation? Would the Earth continue to orbit where the Sun was for that same 8 minutes and 20 seconds, or would it fly off in a straight line immediately?

There are two ways to look at this puzzle: theoretically and experimentally/observationally. From a theoretical point of view, this represents one of the most profound differences from Newton’s gravitation to Einstein’s, and demonstrates what a revolutionary leap General Relativity was. Observationally, we only had indirect measurements until 2017, where we determined the speed of gravity and the speed of light were equal to 15 significant digits!

Gravitational waves do travel at the speed of light, which equals the speed of gravity to a better precision than ever. Here’s how we know.

The funny cat stories

In October 1980 the Voyager probe discovered three small moons of Saturn, Pandora, Atlas and Prometheus. (source & images)

‘’A God’s Eye View of the Universe’‘

Credit: SpaceRip

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All cats are beautiful 🐱❤️

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