[via APOD]
Mars is at opposition tonight, opposite the Sun in planet Earth’s sky. Of course, it will be easy to spot because Mars appears close to tonight’s Full Moon, also opposite the Sun in Earth’s night sky in the constellation Cancer.
For this opposition, Mars remains just over 99 million kilometers away, not a particularly close approach for the Red Planet. Still, this sharp view of Mars recorded on January 22nd is an example of the telescopic images possible in the coming days.
[via APOD]
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An asterism is just a recognized pattern of stars that is not one the 88 official constellations. For example, one of the most famous (and largest) asterisms is the Big Dipper within the constellation Ursa Major. But this pretty chain of stars, visible with binoculars towards the long-necked constellation of Camelopardalis, is also a recognized asterism. Known as Kemble’s Cascade, it contains about 20 stars nearly in a row, stretching over five times the width of a full moon.
[via deviantart.com]
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[via consumerist.com]
Craig Cunningham has made $20,000 from 18 lawsuits he’s filed against debt collectors for violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). In fact, it’s something a part-time job/hobby for him. To ensnare his first FDCPA-violating collector, with voice recorder running, he called back the number they left on his answering machine, and asked:
“Can you garnish my wages if I don’t pay?”
“Yes,” said the debt collection rep.
“Can you put a lien on my house?”
“Yes,” they said.
[via gizmodo.com]
If Google is the Borg, Google Toolbar is the Terminator: just when you think you’ve killed it, it comes right back to murderize the Sarah Connor that is your privacy. What a creepy move.
Ben Edelman ran a few tests with the Google Toolbar, and found that, yes, Google keeps tracking your browsing even after you politely ask it not to. They also make it easy to enable certain tracking features and much more difficult to disable the same.
Edelman also found that Google’s disclosures have gotten worse over time, to the point of being downright duplicitous:
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A hole crossed the Sun for a few minutes this month, as seen across a thin swath of planet Earth. The event on January 15 was actually an annular solar eclipse, and the hole was really Earth’s Moon, an object whose dark half may appear even darker when compared to the tremendously bright Sun.
The Moon was too far from Earth to create a total solar eclipse, but instead left well placed observers with a bright surrounding circle called the ring of fire. Pictured above was a complete solar annular eclipse sequence as seen above the Ananda Temple in Bagan, Myanmar.
[via APOD]
What would it be like to coast by Jupiter and watch it rotate? This was just the experience of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approached and flew by Jupiter in 2007. Clicking on the image will bring up a movie of what the robotic spacecraft saw. Visible above in the extensive atmosphere of the Solar System’s largest planet are bands and belts of light and dark clouds, as well as giant rotating storm systems seen as ovals.
[via APOD]
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The Moon’s shadow raced across planet Earth on January 15. Observers within the central shadow track were able to witness an annular solar eclipse as the Moon’s apparent size was too small to completely cover the Sun. A visually dramatic ring of fire, the annular phase lasted up to 11 minutes and 8 seconds depending on location, the longest annular solar eclipse for the next 1,000 years.
[via consumerist.com]
Photo by usblsb
By now you hopefully know that more megapixels don’t necessarily make a better camera. For one thing, you can almost double the megapixels of a camera while only gaining about a 40% increase in resolution. For another thing, it takes a lot more than just sheer number of pixels to produce a decent image. Nevertheless, point-and-shoot cameras with ginormous megapixel stats (now topping 12 MP) continue to hit the market. But Ross at Petavoxel says there’s another reason to avoid huge MP point-and-shoot cameras: something called the Airy disk.
[via APOD]
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Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in this intriguing skyscape. Some 200 million light-years distant toward the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7771 is the large, edge-on spiral near center, about 75,000 light-years across, with two smaller galaxies just below it. Large spiral NGC 7769 is seen face-on to the right. Galaxies of the NGC 7771 group are interacting, making repeated close passages that will ultimately result in galaxy-galaxy mergers on a cosmic timescale.