Turns out there are as many as ways to photograph an eclipse as there are to watch it. With a bit of preparation and the generosity of strangers, I got to experience five of them during Sunday's annular eclipse.

My husband and I drove from the Bay Area up to Mt. Hirz near Lake Shasta which was smack in the middle of the optimal eclipse viewing path. About a mile from the top, we ran into an amateur astronomer named Ben who'd scoped the whole mountain the previous day and decided this was the best spot. He had a telescope, so we stayed with him.

A bit of cloud cover when the eclipse started had us all chewing our fingernails, but then it cleared up–and what a view!

Although I am an admirer of photography, I am not the most skilled practitioner. Flickr, however, is a treasure trove of beautiful images. All the pictures in this post are from photographers kind enough to share their work openly, for the enjoyment of the masses.

To make a hokey pinhole camera like I did, cut a square out of a piece of cardbord, tape aluminum foil over the empty square, and poke a hole in the foil with a pin. Stand with your back to the sun and hold the cardboard so the sun shines directly through the pinhole onto a piece of white paper. (This photographer made three holes, one of which was obviously best.)

photo by stevendamron

A better technique is to replace the pinhole with a pair of binoculars like my husband did. You keep your back to the sun and hold the binoculars in the same position as the pinhole camera and you get a larger, clearer view of the sun on the paper.

photo by jinxmcc

Astronomer Ben's wife had a pair of eclipse viewing glasses that were the best way to see color–the "ring of fire" when the moon is totally inside the sun. You can put these glasses–or a really thick filter, which is the same thing–in front of a camera as well as in front of your eyes. But the sun looks really small.

photo by °Florian

Best of all is an actual telescope. Then you can see sunspots!

photo by Mark Langridge

The fifth, final, and possibly my favorite way to see/photograph the eclipse requires no equipment at all–just some trees. When the sun is a crescent, it shines through the leaves to create hundreds of little crescents on the ground or wall.

photo by niiicedave

Photographing the sun is one thing. But the full mood of an eclipse, with its cool air and dusky light, is difficult to capture. Here's one picture (not from the path of full annularity) that really pulled it off:

photo by jimnista

Hypothetical exoplanet of a brown dwarf star--similar to a future Earth? Credit: Jeff Bryant

Every now and then, when seeing fresh examples of the world's problems, local or global, I take a deep breath, sigh, and think, "In a million years, what difference will it all make?" It may sound fatalistic, and of course current events do matter to our short-timer existences on Earth, but the thought gives me an odd sense of peace and gets me to thinking about the future—the far distant future—of the Earth. It's hard to imagine what the future will bring in ten, a hundred, or even a thousand million years. Where will evolution take life on Earth—including us? How far will human civilization stretch, and what turns will it take? What exciting twists and cliffhangers are in store for the climate? What will be on television?

Some things are a bit easier to predict: what the Sun will do and how the Earth and the Earth-Moon relationship will change.

I ran across a web version of the H.G. Wells novel "The Time Machine" a couple of weeks ago, and re-reading Chapter 11 I was reminded how insightful the story is with regard to visualizing future possibilities. In this chapter, the Time Traveler probes forward in time, going millions of years into the future and arriving in a tidally-locked Earth under a bloated, reddened Sun, with no Moon in the sky. The ocean was calm and cold, sporting only gentle, lazy swells, and the air was considerably less stocked with oxygen than today. Snow peppered the land and ice fringed the sea, and the only ubiquitous sign that life still existed was a green slime that coated the rocks of the shore.

"All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over."

An alien, cold, and pessimistic view of the future? Well—it can hardly be classified as pessimistic; pessimism is an emotion based on the seeming unchangeability of things we can in fact change. But the Earth's future is commanded by forces scarcely within our power to affect.

For one, the Earth's rotation is slowing down. It used to spin much faster—maybe three times as much—but tidal effects of the Moon and Sun have been slowing it down for four and a half billion years. Imagine an eight-hour day, with the Sun crossing from horizon to horizon in about four. Wake up, it's only a couple of hours until lunchtime, and another two ‘til dinner. I got a whole three hours of sleep last night! Ahh!

Where is Earth's spin going? Shakespeare had the answer: "The Moon's an arrant thief…." The momentum of Earth's spin is being slowly siphoned off by the Moon through tidal interaction, which is simultaneously causing the Moon to move farther from the Earth. Once much closer to Earth, even today the Moon continues to inch away into space–quite literally, at less than two inches per year.

So in the very distant future, we can project that the Moon will have moved much farther from the Earth, and the Earth's rotation will have slowed down even more. At some point the Earth's rotation would match the Moon's orbital period and the Earth will become tidally locked with the Moon, always keeping the same face to it, just as the Moon is currently tidal-locked to the Earth.

In H.G. Wells' vision, the far distant future Earth is tidally locked to the Sun, and the Moon is apparently gone. Would this happen? Will there ever be an Earth with an unending day and unending moonless night (depending on your address)? That could happen, but the Moon would have to leave the picture first, perhaps wandering far enough out that a chance gravitational disturbance by another planet would knock it off the edge of its orbit.

The Sun is changing too—has changed, and will continue to change—as the dynamics of its nuclear fuel supply mix shifts. As atomic fusion converts hydrogen into helium, helium to carbon, and so forth, the availability of easily released energy will diminish, causing the core to shrink and heat up, in turn causing the outer layers to inflate, becoming more expansive but also cooler and redder. In the very long run, the outer layers will expand beyond Earth's present orbit.

So there is a future out there that we can be more certain of than the future shaped by human affairs. It's further out in time than the decades or centuries ahead—and frankly further out than H. G. Wells penned in at 30 million years (little will have changed with the length of a day and the mile markers to the Moon in that time, and I believe the Sun won't make much of a fuss for at least a billion, or more).

In the meantime, it's captivating to think what the scenery may be like around the place I stand today, a million or a billion years hence.

The view from inside the Oakland Fire Department's burn trailer during a rollover fire. Photograph courtesy of Kara Platoni.

Looking back, the only field trip that stands out from my grade school days was our trip to the San Francisco Exploratorium. What I remember best is the tactile dome. I entered into total darkness and spent the next hour feeling, crawling and sliding my way through a 3-D maze.

That excursion was fairly tame compared to the exploits Kara Platoni, Eric Simons, and Casey Miner take on for their podcast series, The Field Trip, which broadcasts their science adventures out in the real world. For their first series that debuted last year, they explored fermentation by visiting the Cultured Pickle Shop, climbed into the Oakland Fire Department’s burn trailer for a kitchen fire simulation, interviewed a commercial salmon fisherman on his boat in the Berkeley Marina and followed a NASA crew at the bottom of a lakebed in Canada for their research study on Mars. To add a little more intellectual rigor to their adventures, they also interviewed an expert guest in their radio studio for each episode.

“We think our strong suit is going places, learning new things and being a proxy for the listener,” explained Kara Platoni. “We didn’t know of any other show where it was about going out and having a science adventure.”

As friends and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism colleagues, the genuine personal chemistry of this trio is evident in their podcasts and blogs. They're definitely having fun on their adventures while taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge and opportunities offered by scientists in the Bay Area — and the listener is invited to tag along.

The studio interview segments are loosely scripted, but the field trips are taped live. The key to making this work is the trio’s insatiable curiosity for science. After lots of preparation, they just go out and ask the questions that interest them in a humorous and spontaneous way that engages their listeners.

When selecting topics for their episodes, they focus on stories that take science out of the laboratory. “Our ideal narrator for the field trip is someone whose life just embodies science everyday. It is part of their job, hobby and home,” explained Platoni, “so we can show people how science is something that happens in your everyday life, not just something that happens in school.” Casey Miner added, “And it should be fun, interesting, weird or gross.”

Their field trips will continue with a second series this spring and cover the diverse topics of coffee, taxidermy, telescopes and local inventors. One upcoming episode on telescopes will visit the Chabot Space & Science Center Observatory and feature a studio interview with UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy. Beginning today, a new episode will air weekly each Monday through June 4. You can listen to a preview of their new season here.

Free episodes are available on their website, iTunes, Public Radio Exchange and Sound Cloud. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Phoebe and Saturn. Credit: NASA/Cassini

Who's Phoebe? That quirky blonde from Friends? The mysteriously magical nanny from that old sitcom? A bird? A plant? All that–but the one I'm talking about is the moon of Saturn, once thought to be a captured comet, and now believed by some scientists to be something much rarer: a captured planetesimal.

Phoebe: a bit more than 120 miles across—and more potato-shaped than spherical—with a surface gravity approximately 200 times weaker than Earth's (yes, I'd weigh about one pound standing on the surface), Phoebe is not of the stature of its larger, rounder fellow moons of greater fame: Luna, Ganymede, Titan, and the rest.

We've known of Phoebe's existence since 1899, when it was discovered by astronomer W. H. Pickering, and from the start Phoebe was observed to be different from Saturn's "mainline" moons—ones organized into a common orbital plane in close alignment with Saturn's equator, with nice, nearly circular orbits. Phoebe is too much a nonconformist for that; orbiting at a steep, rakish angle from Saturn's equatorial plane, backwards with respect to the conformist crowd, and with great elliptical eccentricity, Phoebe is a fringe radical! And at 30 times the distance from Saturn as our Moon is from Earth, it takes Phoebe longer to orbit Saturn (1.5 years) than Earth does to round the Sun!

All of these peculiarities added up to the hypothesis that Phoebe was not an "indigenous" satellite of Saturn—one that formed with Saturn early in the ages of the solar system—but a solar system object that was captured by Saturn at some point, and since has remained in orbit. And due to its low density (little more than one and a half times as dense as water ice), Phoebe was assumed to be a former comet. Comets passing close to gas giant planets like Saturn are sometimes flung in different directions, sometimes broken up, and sometimes even crash into the planet. But they can also be captured into orbit, as probably many of Jupiter's smaller satellites, and Mars' brood of two, were: former asteroids from the neighboring asteroid belt.

But a comet is a bit of material—ice and rock—left over from the formation of the solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago, pristine and barely altered from its original state. Recently, NASA's Cassini mission has suggested a different origination story for Phoebe, based on imagery and data obtained from our first up-close look at this object by the Cassini spacecraft, in 2004.

Phoebe may be a "planetesimal"—an object that formed in the young solar system, coalescing from dust and ice into a larger and larger body. Evidence suggests that Phoebe was warmed enough during its formation, and perhaps afterward by decay of radioactive materials, to have achieved a spherical shape, a differentiated rocky core and outer shell of lighter material and ices, and possibly even to have harbored liquid water—all very planet-like qualities. As well, it may have remained in this state for quite some time before cooling down and freezing.

Possibly originating in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune's orbit, Phoebe would have migrated inward and eventually been captured when passing too close to Saturn — at the same time avoiding the typical fate of planetesimals, which is to merge with a forming planet. Planetesimals, once the bread and butter of the young solar system, are the building blocks of planets.

Phoebe, then, may be a very remarkable object–a quirky, mysteriously magical moon; a vision of the early solar system that once swarmed with such objects, even before the planets themselves appeared. It's a messenger from the past, possibly carrying within it evidence that could tell us where we came from.

When QUEST first started production on the television story, “Amateur Rocketeers Reach for the Stars”, I had no idea that the amateur or experimental rocketry was so popular today. Before the producer of the story, Chris Bauer, pitched the idea, if someone had mentioned rocket-building to me, I probably would have imagined a young boy putting together a cardboard rocket and propelling it into the sky with some baking soda and vinegar.

Photo credit: Christopher Bauer

I certainly would not have conjured the images of high school students (boys AND girls) working in a lab together for weeks on end to design, build and program rockets that can reach the edges of space in order to do real scientific research. This is exactly what the some of the folks featured in Chris’s story are doing with the Rocket Mavericks program.

The official name of the organization is Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation and on the spectrum of civilian rocket building, they are all the way to the hard-core technical end. According to their website, the group strives “to enable the common man to build vehicles and conduct space exploration missions independently, launching the personalization of access to space.”

One of the main things that Rocket Mavericks director Tom Atchison is focused on is creating the next generation of rocket scientists by establishing the Explorers Program in high schools in order to inspire students to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines and careers. And from the looks of concentration and excitement on the faces of the kids who are featured in our story, there’s no doubt that Atchison is succeeding in his mission to inspire these kids through rocketry.

But the other end of the rocketry spectrum and everything in between is just as exciting to learn about. Rocket clubs abound throughout California and the United States. One of the Bay Area rocket clubs featured in our story is LUNAR (Livermore Unit National Association of Rocketry). Like other rocket clubs, LUNAR is “a group of a few hundred model rocket enthusiasts of all ages, genders and cultural backgrounds who gather to learn rocketry, teach rocketry, exchange modeling techniques and of course, fly model and high-powered rockets.”

Photo credit: Christopher Bauer

According to his call sheet for the shoot that day, producer Chris Bauer traveled to a rocket launch site in the “Middle of Nowhere, California” to document the LUNAR club shooting off all kinds and sizes of rockets. One of my favorite shots in the story is that of a young girl running through a fallow field with her rocket that’s designed to look just like a giant pink crayon. That shot really points out to me that there’s something for everyone in rocketry.

Find a rocket club near you:

Rocketry.org: Comprehensive online amateur experimental rocketry resource

National Association of Rocketry

Tripoli Rocketry Association

Unexplained sighting in the night sky. Credit for base image: Nayu Kim

Ever seen something in the sky that was unusual, and which you couldn't explain? I've received calls from some of you and have done my best to suggest explanations. Many of you have thanked me for my second-hand appraisals (second-hand, because I wasn't present to see what you saw). A few have rejected the "mundane" possibilities I offer, insisting what they saw wasn't what I proposed at all.

So this post is a condensed version of, "My Guide To Identifying Unexplained and Unidentified Apparitions in the Night Sky"–just a peek at my process of armchair evaluation of unexplained sightings.

Disclaimer: While I do believe that life is probably common in the universe, and that if one planet (ours) could develop intelligent life that in turn developed a technological, space-faring civilization, so could others. But in my experience as an astronomical observer of the world around me and the sky above, I have never seen anything for which my only possible explanation is a flying saucer. My process is to look for the simplest, most natural or human-related explanations first when possible.

The easiest ones are planets—in particular, Venus and Jupiter. Since planets move around in the sky, they regularly appear in different locations at different times in spots people didn't see them before. And, being so bright at times, these two often get questioned: is it a plane? Is it the International Space Station? Has a star gone supernova?

Fortunately, we know where the planets are at all times, so when I get a call asking about the brilliant white light shining in the west just after sunset, for example, it's easy to finger the culprit.

This happens with some bright stars on occasion, like Sirius. In fact, when I was a teenager, I had the personal experience of walking outside one night, looking up and seeing a brilliant, flickering prismatic apparition that I swore I'd never seen before. It took me some time to figure out that it was merely the brightest star in the night sky and it was supposed to look that way! I always think back to this experience when listening to your descriptions of the fantastic and strange things you've seen in the sky.

By the way, stars twinkle, planets don't (much). That's another way to tell them apart, other than consulting an app on your smart phone.

What about things that move–that is, with speed and direction different from normal "diurnal" motion (motion caused by Earth's rotation)? When you observe something moving, relative to the background stars or horizon, there are generally three (mundane) things it is likely to be: an aircraft, a spacecraft, or a meteor/meteorite.

Spacecraft (let's start with artificial satellites, the International Space Station, and in times of yore the Space Shuttle) can appear to move like a plane, but with the defining feature that they are always a single point of white light. Depending on how far from Earth they orbit they will move at different paces (just like aircraft at different altitudes), but since they are at least 150-200 miles above Earth's surface, they're too small to be seen as anything more than a point of light. And as the light they shine is actually reflected sunlight, they will be white. Some of them may flash, or pulse, as reflective surfaces like solar panels turn in the sunlight. Also, because they are in orbit in a ballistic trajectory, you won't be seeing them change direction.

An aircraft—or more correctly, at night, an aircraft's wing and fuselage lights—can appear as more than a single point of light, and these lights can bear color. Typical aircraft (commercial and private alike) have a lighting configuration in common: green for starboard, red for port, and blinking white at wingtips, tailtop, and tailtip. And if they're heading directly at you with their landing lights on, they may appear to flare up and barely move at all.

The shape the wing and fuselage-lights form (what kind of triangle or diamond they make) depends on the style of aircraft (where the wingtips are relative to the tail, etc.), but I'd say green, red, and flashing white are a dead giveaway for an airplane (or a flying saucer trying to look like one.)

Military aircraft can look unusual, depending on what they are and what kind of maneuvers they're on. They can even fly without lights on at all. In Flagstaff, Arizona, I once saw a simple triangle of steady, white lights fly over and have always assumed it was a stealth fighter on night maneuvers.

Meteors and meteorites (bits of interplanetary metal and rock that burn up in our atmosphere, or that are large enough to hit the ground before burning up completely, respectively) also have their hallmark behaviors and appearances.

Fainter ones will appear white, while brighter ones can show some color—blue, green, orange, depending on their composition and how hot they get. Most leave smooth, straight streaks, but some can exhibit "flame-like" raggedness, like long luminous gashes in the night. Some can even explode. But all of them move very fast, lasting only a couple seconds or typically less, yet crossing a good portion of sky in the process. You'll only see an airplane moving that fast if it passes thirty feet over your head.

If none of this helps you sort out what you've seen aloft, try this chart. And remember, if you're not sure what it is, it doesn't hurt to smile and make no aggressive moves….

Artist's concept of mini planetary system. Credit: NASA

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has been given more time to look for life-supporting planets outside our own solar system. The project, which has found more than 2,000 planets since it was launched in 2009, recently edged out several popular space programs to secure an extension in funding. Geoff Marcy is one of the world’s most prolific planet hunters. He’s an astronomer at UC Berkeley and works on the Kepler project. KQED’s Andrea Kissack asked him for an update and his thoughts on the odds that the project may help find life somewhere else in the universe.

I met with Marcy in his office in the astronomy building on the south side of UC Berkeley. If anyone is going to find alien life, it will be Marcy. He has spotted more extra solar planets than most astronomers and he now has taken on yet another project as the new chair of the SETI program at UC Berkeley. Marcy sees his work with Kepler, and the ground based radio receivers of SETI, dovetailing nicely. As the Kepler project continues to find earth like planets, the next step, he says, will be to see if there are intelligent civilizations out there. The way to do that, Marcy says, is to use Kepler to narrow down the choices and then use SETI to point radio receivers at those specific planets, rather than just listening to broad swaths of the sky.

More on the search for exoplanets

Alex Herwig Project & Photo

51 years ago on April 12th, 1961, the Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history as the first human to enter outer space. Exactly 20 years later, the United States innovated the space age by launching the Space Shuttle (April 12th, 1981).

Yuri’s Night, which commemorates these events, aims to celebrate humanity’s past present and future in space launches Yuri’s Night celebrations this week around the world. The Bay Area has already started festivities with the inaugural San Francisco SpaceUp unconference. There are also options for celebrating Yuri’s Night in the East Bay, San Francisco and San Jose on April 12, 2012 and throughout next week.

SpaceUp

SpaceUp is an unconference all about space exploration. Participants decide event topics, schedule, and structure. I put on my Yuri’s Night hat and attended the first San Francisco installment of SpaceUp over the weekend of March 31st to April 1st and had a great time.

The unconference approach let a great diversity of people engage and network in a way that led to long conversations after the conference as well as intersection points you never would make at a normal conference. Highlights for me were reconnecting to contacts from NightLife, hearing the sheer enthusiasm of the Kepler Center director as he conveyed results of the mission, seeing the results of a moon-bounce, learning how crowdfunding can let the average person tour around space with the website launch of Idreamofspace.com, and understanding how synthetic biology will play its own part in longer missions and settlement.

East Bay

Kid friendly and family activities will be taking place the day of April 12th from 12pm to 4pm at Chabot Space and Science Center. You can find out if you have the right stuff to be an astronaut in their Astronaut Lab and Beyond Blast Off exhibit. Activities include building a rocket and blasting it into space or trying to keep your heart rate down while being subjected to extreme pressure. Hand-eye-brain coordination can also be tested using black hole goggles.

The Yuri’s Night activities are part of Chabot’s Break into Spring programming and more activities for the week can be found on their website. If you want to stare into the further reaches of space, the observatories are open for extended hours for both daytime and evening viewing throughout the week and weekend.

San Francisco

My museum alma mater, the California Academy of Sciences, will once again feature Yuri’s Night programming for the 21+ crowd at the Space Oddities NightLife on April 12th from 6pm to 10pm. Highlights of the night include: music by the San Francisco favorite DJ collective Space Cowboys, meeting researchers from UC Berkeley Space Science Laboratory, hands on activities at the Surfin’ the Solar Wind Booth, a NASA Kepler Mission presentation by Dr. Steve B. Howell at 7:30pm in the Forum Theater, and special showings of Dawn of the Space Age in the Planetarium. I’m sure cameras will be flashing as Yuri’s Night at Cal Academy has a history of inspiring great intergalactic costumes. Loretta Hildago Whitesides who co-created Yuri’s Night came the first year as a very convincing Princess Leia!

San Jose

Until April 15th, The Tech Museum is featuring a temporary exhibit– NASA’s Destination Station. It tells the story of the International Space Station (ISS) within a multimedia exhibit. You can learn about the 24/7/365 space-based research and how that research affects everyday life on Earth. The exhibit has hands-on activities, imagery and audio-visual technology connecting visitors to the destination of space.

If there are other events that should be highlighted, leave them in the comment section below or register them on the Yuri's Night website.

Solar Triple Play: Venus Transit, Solar Eclipse, Partial Lunar Eclipse

Get ready for a celestial sports extravaganza as you've never before seen—not all at once, anyway. Coming up in May and June this year is a matchup of three rare and beautiful celestial events, conveniently scheduled back to back to back for your viewing enjoyment.

Game 1: On May 20th, a solar eclipse will darken our skies and dazzle our eyes. From the Bay Area, it won't appear as a total solar eclipse, but it's not far off from one either. If you want to see the full force of this eclipse, when the Moon's disk lines up perfectly with the Sun's, you'll need to drive north and park within a swath of territory centered on Redwood National Park along the northern California coast, and inland, east and south, across Lassen Volcanic National Park. Here's a play diagram to help guide you.

Within the swath of land following the Moon's deepest shadow track you will experience what is called an annular solar eclipse—the brighter, though less famous sibling of a true total solar eclipse. An annular eclipse occurs when, at the time of this eclipse, the Moon is more distant from Earth than usual, its disk appearing smaller than the Sun's disk. So, even when perfectly positioned in front of the Sun, a rim of sunlight will shine out from all around the edge of the Moon's disk, creating a brilliant ring (or annulus) of golden sunlight for a few minutes. You may even look up at the sight and purr, "My precious…."

Here in the Bay Area, the eclipse will be a partial one—though a significant amount of the Sun will be covered, and Earth and sky will dim noticeably. The eclipse begins for us at 5:15 PM (PDT), when the Moon's disk first touches the edge of the Sun, gradually covering more of it until reaching maximum occlusion at 6:32 PM. The Sun will set while the eclipse is still in progress—but what an unusual sunset we may see!

The second heat of our Solar Triple Play airs two weeks later on June 4: a partial lunar eclipse—a sort of opposite, not-quite-instant replay of the solar eclipse; the yin to its yang. The same close alignment between Sun, Earth, and Moon that produced the solar eclipse produces this lunar eclipse as well, the related events two weeks (or half a lunar orbit) apart.

Set to begin in the wee morning hours on a Monday (as if to mess with our celestial sports viewing schedule), the eclipse technically begins shortly before 2:00 AM—but that's only the penumbral phase when the Earth's partial shadow first contacts the edge of the Full Moon.

The better part of this game gets going a few minutes after 3:00 AM, when the Earth's full, umbral shadow makes contact. Lunar eclipses are a contact sport, so this is when the viewing gets good. At half-time–shortly after 4:00 AM—the eclipse will be at its peak. Being a partial eclipse, only a portion of the Moon is darkened by Earth's umbral shadow at this time, but it's still a beautiful sight! The Moon will actually be setting toward the end of the fourth quarter (game time), so the finale of the Moon being obscured by Earth's shadow will be the Moon obscured by the Earth itself!

And last, but certainly not least in our game line-up: The Venus Transit. In the mid afternoon and early evening hours of Tuesday, June 5th, starting at 3:07 PM PDT, the planet Venus will be making a 300,000 mile dash across the face of the Sun, and we will be sitting in prime stadium seats to see it!

The Venus Transit is both extremely rare and a historic-Hall-of-Fame-worthy celestial event, for it was by observation of Venus crossing the Sun a couple of centuries ago that we were able to calculate the distance between the Sun and the Earth—using, what else? mathematics! By observing the path of Venus across the face of the Sun from different locations on Earth, simple trigonometry was used to triangulate the then unknown Earth-to-Venus and Venus-to-Sun distances—put ‘em both together and you have one Astronomical Unit, the Sun-Earth distance (about 93 million miles!)

And, rarer than the Super Bowl, rarer than the Olympics, the Venus Transit takes place only once in more than a century at alternating intervals of 105 and 120 years. But this phenomenal phenomenon is equipped to provide an instant replay. Well, not quite instant: the century event occurs in pairs, eight years apart. There was a Transit in 2004, so don't miss this one as it's truly a last-in-a-lifetime experience!

We'll be open for observation and fun activities at Chabot Space & Science Center for all three events (click on the Events link below the banner). Hope to see you up here at game time! Meanwhile, keep your eye on the ball, but be sure not to look at the Sun without proper eye protection.

In their new roles, Jupiter will oversee intersolar relations and treaties, and Saturn will oversee domestic and budgetary affairs.

The management change was foreseen by many observers as a natural outgrowth of the coup that removed Pluto from the Planetary Congress in Earth Year 2006. Prior to the ouster, Pluto frequently voted with the once formidable inner circle of rock planets, which has backed efforts to restore Pluto's planetary status.

Planetary Congress' inner circle was initially shaken by Pluto's abrupt departure, briefly deadlocked between the four gas giants and four remaining rock planets, but Venus' swing vote has since tended more gaseous, giving the giants a clear majority.

In the event of a 4-4 vote, the sun, which normally presides over the Planetary Congress in a nonvoting role, is allowed to cast a tie breaking vote. While technically plasma, the sun still leaned gaseous in 75% of prior cases.

One of Jupiter's most controversial campaign promises included demoting Mercury to a "toy planet," a new category of not-quite-planet to be created specifically for objects of approximately Mercury's size and obstinate disposition. This move would leave room in the nine-seat Congress for gas-sympathizers Ganymede and Titan. The Advisory Council has been silent on whether or not such a move would be permissible.

Jupiter has promised to lengthen the years of every planet, but particularly those of the gas giants. In Earth Year 1997, Mars, along with Mercury, Earth, and then-planet Pluto, famously questioned where the funding for these time increases will come from; Jupiter has maintained that the additional time provided per annum will leave ample opportunity for funding strategies to be developed.

While Earth's jobs as Minority Whip and Prime Minister of the Inner Circle High Council remain unthreatened, it could find its political influence eclipsed by the rising gas giants' power.

Europa has, as expected, refrained from comment, consistent with its change in border status in Earth Year 2001.