The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Astronomical

I'm back home, and I've shoved all the Scotland photos out of the way so I could post this:

I didn't notice until I processed the photos from my 7D, but there are two solar storms visible: one at about 3 o'clock and the other, fainter one at about 1 o'clock.

We're already looking into a vacation in Chile in the summer of 2019...

Biggest. Airplane. Ever.

Paul Allen has funded development of an airplane designed to launch satellites into space. It's...huge:

Called Stratolaunch, the plane has some impressive stats: a wingspan of 117 m, or longer than a football field, and a height of 15.24 m. Unfueled, it weighs 226,800 kg. But it can carry 113,400 kg of fuel, and its total weight can reach 590 tonnes.

But, really ... how big is it? It’s so big that it has 28 wheels and six 747 jet engines. It’s so big that it has 96 km of wire coursing through it. It’s so big that the county had to issue special construction permits just for the construction scaffolding.

But why is Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seattle Seahawks, building such a massive plane?

It’s not to carry passengers, but rather rockets. The bigger the plane, the larger the rockets, or the greater the number.

The Post has video. That is a very large airplane indeed:

By Giant_planes_comparison.svg: Clem Tillier (clem AT tillier.net) White_Knight_Two_planform.png: Mwarren us derivative work: Mwarren us (talk) - White_Knight_Two_planform.pngGiant_planes_comparison.svg, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Stuff I'll read later

A little busy today, so I'm putting these down for later consumption:

Now, I must prepare...for Whisky Fest!

The BST of times, BBC style

Author Tim Harford, who wrote The Logic of Life and a few other books I've liked, yesterday published an explanation of what telling time is all about:

Water clocks appear in civilisations from ancient Egypt to medieval Persia. Others kept time from marks on candles. But even the most accurate devices might wander by 15 minutes a day. This didn't matter to a monk wanting to know when to pray.

But there was one increasingly important area of life where the inability to keep accurate time was of huge economic significance: sailing.

By observing the angle of the Sun, sailors could calculate their latitude - where they were from north to south. But their longitude - where they were from east to west - had to be guessed.

Mistakes could - and frequently did - lead to ships hitting land hundreds of miles away from where navigators thought they were, sometimes disastrously.

How could accurate timekeeping help? If you knew when it was midday at Greenwich Observatory - or any other reference point - you could observe the Sun, calculate the time difference, and work out the distance.

But does anybody really know what time it is?

Open tabs at lunchtime

Sigh:

I hope to read these articles sometime this year.

 

A few things have happened

Not exactly a slow news day:

And finally, for those of you living in the new, evidence-free world of today, you'll be happy to know that all of these things may have come about because of the lunar eclipse and comet happening Friday night.