Tripping Through Time

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

We are all the product of our times and cultures. But our ability to read and write, both history and fiction, gives us the opportunity to look back at other times and cultures. The presuppositions we have come from our culture, but these are always in flux. There is a constant struggle between change and stasis. 

Patris Dies

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

 

Sometimes I seem to have vast holes in my memory. But with Father's Day coming up I've been thinking back to some of the events my Dad and I have shared. My Dad has always had a wide variety of interests. And he helped me develop my wide variety of interests too. 

Venus Transit

The Transit of Venus took place June 5th. A transit is where a planet goes between its star and the observer. So Venus was going to go between us and the Sun.

I still had available the solar observing telescope that was used for the eclipse a couple of weeks ago. This time set up in my backyard here in Tehachapi.

The transit started in the mid afternoon and continued through early evening. The usual Tuesday Poetry group gathered in my backyard and watched the transit. Then went inside and created poems inspired by the event that won't be seen again until 2117.

Here is an image of the transit, projected through the telescope onto the white metal screen of the solar observing system. The black dot on the image of the Sun is Venus.

 The citizen science group planethunters.org uses changing light levels as a way of detecting transits of extra-solar planets, that is, planets around other stars.

(Almost) Sunless Day at the Beach

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

On May 20^th I went up north to try to catch the annular eclipse. Since the eclipse was to start after 4:00 PM we set out at 9:00 AM for the seven hour drive to Lake Tahoe. The GPS was quite confused at first but we headed up the 395 looking for wildflowers and gawking at geology. 

Got 10 Minutes?

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

Just about everyone has a story. And you have, right now, an opportunity to tell it. The Tehachapi Community Theatre Playwright's Festival is entering it's first phase. This is the ten minute play festival that has been going on for the past three years. This year the festival is expanding to two weekends. 

Sunspot 1476

Right now on the Sun is a huge sunspot. This one is designated 1476. Using an inexpensive Tasco Telescope with a solar projection attachement I've gotten an image of the sunspot. (Don't ever look at the sun through a telescope, or even a camera without the correct filters. And if you don't know they are the correct ones they aren't.)

For more information you can check out the article at Space.com.

Annular Event

This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.  

 

Not “annual”. Annular. Though we get both words from the Latin, annual means yearly, annular means in the form of a ring. 

Solar eclipses occur when the Moon moves between the Earth and Sun blocking out the Sun for a brief period of time. As a side note, solar eclipses can only occur during a “new” moon. Which makes sense since the side facing us can't be getting any sunlight.