:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 6.09.2004 ::
:: "A little dot ..." ::
And the dash for the sight of a lifetime
Tim Radford, science editor
The Guardian UK
Millions in Britain, Europe and the Middle East watched the greatest show not on Earth yesterday: the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun.
This rare event - it pops up in the astronomical clockwork only four times every 243 years - was last seen and photographed by professional astronomers in 1882. This time it was monitored by at least one orbiting solar observatory, and Scandinavian airlines handed out eclipse-viewing spectacles to 3,500 travellers on Nordic flights.
The six hour transit left its observers star-struck.
"It teaches you about the universe and God Almighty's wonders," Nemr Ramzi, a 10-year-old Palestinian boy told Associated Press as he watched a monitor screen in a tent. "One day I want to be a pilot and reach up there."
Hala Kaiksow, 13, watching from the Bahrain University campus, said: "It is like an ant crawling on earth."
The transit happened in the American night, but a party from Sonoroa University in Mexico set up their telescopes at the American University in Cairo.
"This is an important and historical event, because Mexico took part in this event in 1874, when it sent an expedition to Japan," one of them said.
"It is an astonishing moment which I will explain to my grandchildren later."
In 1639 the first observations of the transit confirmed the Corpernican view of the universe and demonstrated that Venus was simply another world, like the Earth.
The 1769 transit launched the great exploration of the Pacific and observations in 1882 enabled the most accurate estimates to be made of the distance between the Earth and its parent star - known as the astronomical unit. This time astronomers had other challenges. A team from the US Centre for Atmospheric Research used sunlight filtering through the dense atmosphere of Venus to search for the spectral signature of water vapour.
posted by me
:: 12:58:00 AM [+] ::
...
