Rare ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse to dim Africa, Asia

Skywatchers along a narrow band from west Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, India and southern China will witness on Sunday the most dramatic “ring of fire” solar eclipse to shadow the Earth in years.

Annular eclipses occur when the Moon — passing between Earth and the Sun — is not quite close enough to our planet to completely obscure sunlight, leaving a thin ring of the solar disc visible.

They occur every year or two, and can only be seen from a narrow pathway across the planet.



Remarkably, the eclipse on Sunday arrives on the northern hemisphere’s longest day of the year — the summer solstice — when Earth’s north pole is tilted most directly towards the Sun.

The “ring of fire” will first be seen in northeastern Republic of Congo at 5:56 local time (04:56 Greenwich Mean Time Zone) just a few minutes after sunrise.

This is the point of maximum duration, with the blackout lasting 1 minute and 22 seconds.


Arcing eastward across Asia and Africa, it will reach “maximum eclipse” — with a perfect solar halo around the Moon — over Uttarakhand, India near the Sino-Indian border at 12:10 local time (6:40 Greenwich Mean Time Zone).


More spectacular, but less long-lived: the exact alignment of the Earth, Moon and Sun will be visible for only 38 seconds.

“The annular eclipse is visible from about 2% of Earth surface,” Florent Delefie, an astronomer and the Paris Observatory, told Agence France-Presse.

“It’s a bit like switching from a 500-watt to a 30-watt light bulb,” he added. “It’s a cold light, and you don’t see as well.”

Good weather key

Animals can get spooked — birds will sometimes go back to sleep, and cows will return to the barn.

The full eclipse will be visible somewhere on Earth during just under four hours, and one of the last places to see a partially hidden Sun is Taiwan before its path heads out into the Pacific.

People hundreds of kilometers on either side of the centreline across 14 countries will also see light drain from the day, but not the “ring of fire.”

Weather conditions are critical for viewing.

“Good weather is the key to successful eclipse viewing,” astrophysicist Fred Espenak, an expert on eclipse prediction, commented on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Eclipse website. “Better to see a shorter eclipse from clear sky than a longer eclipse under clouds.”

A solar eclipse always occurs about two weeks before or after a lunar eclipse, when the Moon moves into Earth’s shadow. Lunar eclipses are visible from about half of Earth’s surface.

There will be a second solar eclipse in 2020 on Dec. 14 over South America. Because the Moon will be a bit closer to Earth, it will block on the Sun’s light entirely.

It will take less than 100 minutes for the path of this eclipse to move across the continent.

Even if the day has darkened, looking at a solar eclipse with the naked eye is dangerous.

Sunglasses — which don’t filter out Ultraviolet rays — do not offer any protection, Delefie warned.

“The Sun is so bright that even when there’s only a tiny portion visible, it is still dangerous for the eyes,” he said.

Agence France-Presse

Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White dead at 74—brother

Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White, who broke racial barriers by building a wide following for pop takes on funk and R&B, has died. He was 74.

His death is the latest in a string of prominent musicians who have passed away since the start of 2016.

Earth, Wind & Fire triumphed with a string of hits in the 1970s including “September,” “Shining Star,” “After the Love Has Gone” and “Boogie Wonderland.”

White, who suffered for years from Parkinson’s disease, forcing him to stop touring, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, his brother and a representative for the band said.

“My brother, hero and best friend Maurice White passed away peacefully last night in his sleep,” his brother and bandmate Verdine White wrote Thursday on Facebook.

“While the world has lost another great musician and legend, our family asks that our privacy is respected as we start what will be a very difficult and life-changing transition in our lives.”

Maurice White formed Earth, Wind & Fire in Chicago in 1969 and quickly became known for his skill at songwriting as he crafted intricate and readily danceable tunes that borrowed heavily from the city’s R&B scene, but kept a tight structure in line with pop hits.

The band was one of the early acts to break the color barrier in pop music, in 1979 becoming the first African-American act to sell out New York’s Madison Square Garden.

While never disappearing completely, Earth, Wind & Fire enjoyed a career resurgence after the election of President Barack Obama, who invited the band as one of the first performers after he entered the White House in 2009.

The band won acclaim not only for their songwriting but for their energetic live shows, led by a forceful horn section and featuring a kalimba, an African percussion instrument played by plucking metal tines.

White, a tenor, alternated on vocals with Philip Bailey, who offered a quickly recognizable falsetto.

Earth, Wind & Fire sold nearly 100 million albums worldwide and was nominated for 17 Grammy Awards, winning six.

Earth, Wind & Fire was due to be honored this year with a Grammy lifetime achievement award.

Coincidentally, the other honorees include Jefferson Airplane, whose co-founder Paul Kantner died last week, also at 74.

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Google’s Internet-beaming balloons to take off in Indonesia

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Google’s Internet-beaming balloons are ready to take off on the next phase of their mission to deliver online access in regions where most people live offline.

The balloons will begin hovering in the stratosphere above Indonesia in an expansion of the project announced Wednesday. About 250 million people live in the country composed of about 17,000 islands in that part of Southeast Asia, although only 42 million have Internet access, according to the CIA’s estimates.

Google’s 2-year-old “Project Loon” program aims to change that by transmitting high-speed Internet signals from clusters of balloons floating about 60,000 feet above the Earth.


Although the project is still being funded primarily by money that Google makes from digital advertising, it recently became part of an independent lab called X that is run by Google’s new parent company, Alphabet Inc.

Alphabet frames Project’s Loon as a noble endeavor striving to get about 100 million currently unconnected people tapped into the vast reservoir of knowledge, entertainment and conveniences available online. But it could also enrich Google by expanding the potential audience that can query its search engine, watch video on YouTube, correspond through Gmail and click on digital ads.

Project Loon is still testing its technology, so there is still no estimate when it will start selling the Internet service to households and businesses within range of the balloons.


The Internet access will be sold through wireless service providers in Indonesia, where there the number of mobile phones — about 319 million — outnumber people. But most of those phones don’t connect to the Internet because users can’t afford data plans, or more frequently, live in remote or rocky terrains where it’s impractical or too expensive to install the equipment need to deliver high-speed Internet access.

If things pan out as envisioned, Project Loon will deploy hundreds of balloons that serve as cell towers in the sky, invisible to the naked eye. To pull it off, the project’s engineers must choreograph a high-altitude dance, ensuring that as one balloon drifts out of a targeted territory’s Internet-receiving range, another one will float in to fill the void.

The Indonesian expansion follows extensive testing in New Zealand, Australia and remote areas in California and Brazil. Indonesia’s sheer size and geographic sprawl makes it Project Loon’s most ambitious step yet.

Eventually, Project Loon envisions dispatching its balloons to other unconnected regions in the world, ranging from small villages in Africa to the woods of California.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin envisions Project Loon eventually creating millions of jobs around the world to raise the standard of living for now-impoverished people as they are able to get online to educate themselves and make new connections.

“The emotional distance of the world is shrinking, thanks to the communications we enjoy today,” said Brin, who oversees the X lab as Alphabet’s president.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Comet craft takes selfie amid landing fumble

BERLIN—A shadow was cast— literally—across Europe’s historic mission to land on and explore a comet. Scientists said on Thursday the landing craft not only bounced twice, it also came to rest next to a cliff that’s blocking sunlight from its solar panels.

The good news is that the lander Philae is stable and in good health: Its scientific instruments have already begun gathering reams of data to send back to Earth, including the first pictures taken from the surface of a comet.

The bad news is that its useful lifetime may now be much shorter.

With just a day or two left before the lander’s primary battery is exhausted, scientists were considering what acrobatic maneuvers to risk in order to get the solar panels out of the shadows so they can keep Philae going for a few more months.

First photos
The first photos sent back to Earth revealed the comet’s rocky terrain, including an image that showed one of the lander’s three feet in the corner of the frame. They indicate that Philae’s instruments are working properly, said Jean-Pierre Bibring, the lander’s lead scientist at the European Space Agency.

Before deciding whether to try to adjust the lander, scientists will spend the next day or two collecting as much data as possible while its primary battery still has energy.

The lander’s solar panels were designed to provide an extra hour of battery life each day after that, but this may not be possible now.

Cosmic first

“We see that we get less solar power than we planned for,” said Koen Geurts of the lander team.

“This, of course, has an impact on our … capabilities to conduct science for an extended period of time,” he said. “Unfortunately this is not a situation that we were hoping for.”

The lander scored a cosmic first on Wednesday, touching down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a decade-long, 6.4-billion-kilometer (4-billion-mile) journey through space aboard its mother ship, Rosetta.

The comet is streaking through space at 65,983 km (41,000 miles), some 500,505,984 km (311 million miles) from Earth.

Thrusters fail

The landing was beset by a series of problems that began when thrusters meant to push Philae onto the comet failed. Then two harpoons, which should have anchored the lander to the surface, weren’t deployed.

This caused the lander to bounce off the comet and drift through the void for two hours before touching down again.

After a second smaller bounce, scientists believe it came to rest in a shallow crater on the comet’s 4-km-wide body, or nucleus.

Cliff meters away

“We are just in the shadow of a cliff,” Bibring said, adding that photos indicate the cliff could be just a few meters away. “We are in a shadow permanently, and that is part of the problem.”

Bibring and his colleagues stressed that the data they’ll be able to collect with the primary batteries alone will have made the landing worthwhile.

“A lot of science is getting covered now,” he said, noting that soon scientists will get their hands on a tomography of the comet and data showing whether the matter it is made of is magnetized.

Drilling is dangerous

But because the lander is just resting on the comet with nothing but low gravity holding it down, Philae will have to hold off on one of the most important experiments—drilling into the comet to extract some of the material buried beneath the surface.

Scientists want to analyze this material because it has remained almost unchanged for 4.5 billion years, making it something of a cosmic time capsule.

“Drilling without being anchored and without knowing how you are on the surface is dangerous. We might just tip over the lander,” said Stephan Ulamec, head of operations for Philae.

Gravity on the comet is 1/100,000th that of Earth, meaning the washing-machine-sized lander weighs just 1 gram (0.04 ounces) there.

In hibernation

Ground controllers will likely wait until the first big batch of data has been collected before attempting to adjust the lander so that its solar panels can catch the sun and charge its batteries.

Communication with the lander is slow, with signals taking more than 28 minutes to travel between Earth and the Rosetta orbiter flying above the comet.

Even if Philae uses up all its energy, it will remain on the comet in a mode of hibernation for the coming months.

The comet is on a six-and-a-half-year elliptical orbit around the sun, and at the moment it is getting closer. So, in theory, Philae could wake up again if the comet passes the sun in such a way that the solar panels catch more light, Ulamec said.

$1.6-B project

Meanwhile, the Rosetta orbiter will also use its 11 instruments to analyze the comet over the coming months.

Scientists hope the $1.6-billion project will help them better understand comets and other celestial objects, as well as possibly answer questions about the origins of life on Earth. AP

source: technology.inquirer.net

Crimson glory: All you need to know about the rare blood moon

SINGAPORE—Across the world on Wednesday, sky-watchers will be casting their gaze towards the heavens for a glimpse of the rare blood moon — where the moon appears reddish as a result of a total lunar eclipse.

This phenomenal cosmic event begins Wednesday before sunrise in North America, and is a cause for excitement among astronomy enthusiasts all over the world.  



Here are some interesting facts about this once-in-a-red-moon occurrence:

What is a blood moon?

When the Sun, Earth and Moon are aligned, a total lunar eclipse occurs and sees the Moon passing close to the centre of the Earth’s inner shadow – the umbra. The filtering and refracting effect of Earth’s atmosphere creates a blush on the face of the Moon, giving it a reddish hue.

Why is it significant?
Not only is this eclipse one of the most striking astronomical events visible from Earth, the blood moon can also be seen by the naked eye and does not require telescopes.

What’s the difference between lunar and solar eclipses?

For a solar eclipse to occur, the Moon must come between the Earth and Sun; for a lunar eclipse to happen, the Earth must come between the Sun and Moon.

In all instances, all three bodies must be nearly in a straight line.

In total solar eclipses, the Sun is darkened save for some wisps of light around its corona – as though a hairy sackcloth was held up in front of it. It is also termed a “sackcloth sun”.

In total lunar eclipses, the Moon is not completely darkened. Depending on the weather, the Earth’s atmosphere filters out blue rays, and what results is the Moon looking faintly dull orange or red. Hence the term, “blood moon”.

What are some noteworthy lunar eclipse dates?

The longest blood moon took place on July 23, 1888, and lasted one hour and 46 minutes.

The year 2011 marked the longest total lunar eclipse in a decade, lasting one hour and 35 minutes.

The shortest one is projected to occur on Nov 9, 2068, and is estimated to last just 18 minutes.

How often does a blood moon tetrad happen?

Blood moons are rare occurrences, and tonight’s one is even more so because it is one in a set of four eclipses – what astronomers call a tetrad.

Tetrads are so uncommon, that there was reportedly no tetrad for 300 years, between 1600 and 1900.

Tonight’s blood moon is said to be the second in a series that will happen over two years, with the first having taken place earlier this year in April. The third is slated for April 4, 2015, and the fourth on Sept 28, 2015.

The next tetrad is predicted for 2032-2033.

Interestingly, the ongoing 2014-2015 tetrad falls in the Hebrew year 5775 – which runs from September 2014 through September 2015 – and will supposedly fall exactly on four major Hebrew festivals.

Where and what time can it be seen?

Tonight’s celestial show can be watched by sky-gazers in the Americas and Asia.

The full eclipse will begin at 3.25am Pacific Daylight Time (6.25pm Singapore time) and will continue for about an hour.

Recent blood moon occurrences in Singapore

In 2007, Singapore caught only the tail end of a blood moon, although people from places such as the United States, South America and Australia witnessed it in its full glory.

In 2011, some 700 people gathered at the Singapore Science Centre to watch the eclipse, but overcast skies resulted in a failed sighting.

In April 2014, the first eclipse in the current 2014-2015 tetrad took place, but it was not visible in Singapore. Although the moon during this eclipse had an unusual tinge, this was said to be attributed to atmospheric effects, dust or particles.

Where to view the blood moon in Singapore?

The Astronomical Society of Singapore (Tasos) has organised an observation gathering tonight for the rare total lunar eclipse at Labrador Park, near the Tanjong Berlayer Beacon facing Sentosa.

The start of tonight’s total lunar eclipse phase is estimated to be at 6.25pm, and since Singapore’s moonrise is estimated to be at 6.52pm tonight, the moon is expected to be in total eclipse phase from the time of its rising.

How else can we view it?

Watch a  live stream of tonight’s blood moon by Slooh, a company that connects telescopes with the Internet to provide access to the broader public.

Alternatively, US space agency  Nasa is also providing a live feed  to the event tonight.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Satellite likely to hit Earth in unpopulated area

BERLIN – The European Space Agency said that one of its research satellites that ran out of fuel will most likely crash to Earth into the ocean or polar regions.

The agency said Sunday the crash is expected to occur between 1830 GMT Sunday and 0030 GMT on Monday (1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. EST).

It said “with a very high probability, a re-entry over Europe can be excluded.”

Spokeswoman Jocelyne Landeau said the satellite, GOCE, will mostly disintegrate as it comes down and “we will have only a few pieces which could be 90 kilograms at the most.”

ESA said Friday that humans are 250,000 times more likely to win the lottery than to get hit by the debris.

GOCE was launched in 2009 to map the Earth’s gravitational field.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

India counts down to launch of mission to Mars

NEW DELHI— India is counting down to the launch of its first journey to Mars, a complex mission that it hopes will demonstrate and advance technologies for space travel.

Mangalyaan, which means “Mars craft” in Hindi, will ride a powerful rocket first into an elliptical orbit around Earth. There, it will perform a series of technical maneuvers and short burns to raise its orbit before it slingshots toward Mars.

The 1,350-kilogram (3,000-pound) orbiter must travel some 780 million kilometers (485 million miles) over 300 days to reach the red planet next September.

If successful, India would be only the fourth country or group of countries to visit Mars, after the Soviet Union, United States and Europe.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Warming report sees violent, sicker, poorer future

WASHINGTON  — Starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies. They’re likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report forecasts.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report next March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income. A leaked copy of a draft of the summary of the report appeared online Friday on a climate skeptic’s website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft.

“We’ve seen a lot of impacts and they’ve had consequences,” Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “And we will see more in the future.”

Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe’s poorest people.
“Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger,” the report says. “Climate change will exacerbate poverty in low- and lower-middle income countries and create new poverty pockets in upper-middle to high-income countries with increasing inequality.”

For people living in poverty, the report says, “climate-related hazards constitute an additional burden.”

The report says scientists have high confidence especially in what it calls certain “key risks”:

—People dying from warming- and sea rise-related flooding, especially in big cities.
—Famine because of temperature and rain changes, especially for poorer nations.
—Farmers going broke because of lack of water.
—Infrastructure failures because of extreme weather.
—Dangerous and deadly heat waves worsening.
—Certain land and marine ecosystems failing.

“Human interface with the climate system is occurring and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems,” the 29-page summary says.

None of the harms talked about in the report is solely due to global warming nor is climate change even the No. 1 cause, the scientists say. But a warmer world, with bursts of heavy rain and prolonged drought, will worsen some of these existing effects, they say.

For example, in disease, the report says until about 2050 “climate change will impact human health mainly by exacerbating health problems that already exist” and then it will lead to worse health compared to a future with no futher warming.

If emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas continue at current trajectories, “the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year will compromise normal human activities including growing food or working outdoors,” the report says.

Scientists say the global economy may continue to grow, but once the global temperature hits about 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now, it could lead to worldwide economic losses between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income.

One of the more controversial sections of the report involves climate change and war.

“Climate change indirectly increases risks from violent conflict in the form of civil war, inter-group violence and violent protests by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks,” the report says.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the international study team, told the AP that the report’s summary confirms what researchers have known for a long time: “Climate change threatens our health, land, food and water security.”

The summary went through each continent detailing risks and possible ways that countries can adapt to them.

For North America, the highest risks over the long term are from wildfires, heat waves and flooding. Water — too much and too little — and heat are the biggest risks for Europe, South America and Asia, with South America and Asia having to deal with drought-related food shortages. Africa gets those risks and more: starvation, pests and disease. Australia and New Zealand get the unique risk of losing their coral reef ecosystems, and small island nations have to be worried about being inundated by rising seas.

Field said experts paint a dramatic contrast of possible futures, but because countries can lessen some of the harms through reduced fossil fuel emissions and systems to cope with other changes, he said he doesn’t find working on the report depressing.

“The reason I’m not depressed is because I see the difference between a world in which we don’t do anything and a world in which we try hard to get our arms around the problem,” he said.

source: business.inquirer.net

Earth braces for biggest space storm in five years

WASHINGTON - The biggest space weather storm in five years is hurtling toward Earth, threatening to disrupt power grids, GPS systems, satellites and airline flights, experts say.

The brunt of the storm is expected to strike early Thursday and last through Friday, possibly garbling some of Earthlings' most prized gadgets but also giving viewers in parts of Central Asia a prime look at the aurora borealis, or northern lights, when darkness falls on Thursday.

"Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours," said Joseph Kunches, a space weather scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, NASA warned of a "severe" storm event that would impact both the Earth and Mars as well as some key space agency satellites.

The fuss began late Sunday at an active region on the Sun known as 1429, with a big solar flare that was associated with a burst of solar wind and plasma known as a coronal mass ejection that thrust toward the Earth at some four million miles per hour (6.4 million kilometers per hour).

A pair of solar flares and a CME followed overnight Tuesday-Wednesday, setting off a strong geomagnetic and solar radiation storm registering at level three on a five-step scale.

NASA said the first of the two flares on March 6-7 -- classified in the potent X class and facing directly at the Earth -- was the biggest this year and one of the largest of this cycle known as the solar minimum, which began in early 2007.

In fact, it was second only to a stronger one that erupted in August, and the leading edge of the CME it sparked is expected to reach Earth at 0525 GMT on March 8, plus or minus seven hours.

"Such a CME could result in a severe geomagnetic storm, causing aurora at low latitudes, with possible disruption to high frequency radio communication, global positioning systems (GPS) and power grids," NASA said.

The solar flares alone caused brief high frequency radio blackouts that have now passed, according to NOAA.

The storm is likely "the strongest one since December 2006," Kunches said, noting, however, that the Earth experienced a stronger radio blackout last August.

"But en masse, if you put it all together with the geomagnetic effects and the solar radiation effects, I would put it on par with one at the end of the last solar cycle, which was over five years ago."

Satellites, power grids and even astronauts aboard the International Space Station could be affected by the radiation storm, which may cause them to seek shelter in better protected parts of the orbiting lab as they have in the past.

"Flight surgeons in Houston's mission control center have been monitoring the solar activity and will continue to do so," NASA spokesman Mike Curie said.

"They have determined that there presently is no concern for the six crew members aboard the International Space Station."

However, Kunches said some commercial airlines have already taken actions to reroute and fly further away from the poles.

And more such storms could follow in the coming days because region 1429 is expected to stay active, he said.

Geomagnetic and radiation storms are growing more frequent as the Sun leaves its solar minimum period and moves into a solar maximum over the coming years, but people are generally protected by Earth's magnetic field.

"The current increase in the number of X-class flares is part of the Sun's normal 11-year solar cycle, during which activity on the Sun ramps up to solar maximum, which is expected to peak in late 2013," the US space agency said.

However, some experts are concerned that because the world is more reliant on GPS and satellite technology now than it was during the last solar maximum, more disruptions to modern life are likely.

Space storms are not new. The first major solar flare was recorded by British astronomer Richard Carrington in 1859.

Other solar geomagnetic storms have been observed in recent decades. One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the midwestern state of Illinois, NASA said.

Another similar flare in 1989 "provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission" and caused blackouts across the Canadian province of Quebec, according to the US space agency said. — AFP

source: gmanetwork.com