sun

I can't be the only one thinking about turning this 3 day weekend into 4 with the way Friday is going to be.

I was looking for the solar eclipse here in Maine, but I never noticed it.

This Sunday morning, May 22, Mars, Earth and the sun will line up perfectly in the sky. This called Mars opposition because Mars and the sun will be on opposite sides of the Earth.

Today, Monday May 9 the planet Mercury will go directly in front of the sun. This is a rare ‘transit’ that happens only 13 times a century.

A woman in Spain, Maria Duran, is suing eBay because they will not allow her to sell the ‘sun’ on their website. She had been selling 11 square-foot plots for $1 each and had received 600 orders before eBay shut her down.

It may seem like winter already but the official start of the winter solstice for the Northern Hemisphere begins Saturday, December 21st and runs until Wednesday, March 19th. Winter begins when the sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees.

According to space physicist Pete Riley, a senior scientist at Predictive Science in San Diego, the Earth has a 12% chance of being hit by a megaflare from the sun in the next 10 years. If something like that would happen in could cause trillions of dollars in damage and take a decade to recover.

Something we all learned in school about the planet Venus is it’s too close to the sun to sustain life and now scientists taking a closer look at the planet confirm it is in a prolonged molten state. Venus has an atmosphere and some water as it was developing, but being so close to the sun, they didn’t last very long.

It will be the slowest computer in the world when it’s completed, but it will be able to keep accurate time for 10,000 years, that is why it’s called the 10,000-year clock. The official name is the Clock of the Long Now, and is the brainchild of Danny Hillis, who wanted a clock that would use the sun to keep time and have a century hand that will advance once every 100 years.