Eclipse

Well, yesterday was the big eclipse. It was way lamer than they said it would be.

That was the sun during the nearest to totality we got around here. No, I’m not actually looking at the sun. I’m not an idiot. I just kind of aimed my phone up and took pictures, then found one that actually looked like something. I had a colander that was pretty good at showing the eclipse from the sun pouring through the holes, but I could never get a good picture of it. Here’s my play by play of the day:

2:00 EDT: Nothing yet.

2:15 EDT: Still no visible change from the colander, although the ambient light was dimmer.

2:36 EDT: Sun is looking a little lopsided there.

2:47 EDT: The half-sun shadow I see is supposed to be the most eclipsed it’s going to be around here. But if anything, it’s brighter outside because the clouds cleared a bit.

2:55 EDT: Still kind of dim, but there’s nothing eclipse-y going on here.

3:15 EDT: Sun back to normal. I’m not sure anything even happened. I’m beginning to think this whole eclipse thing was a scam.

What a total waste. I mean, it was better than working, but not by enough. Did you see anything cool yesterday? Do you know when the next eclipse where you live is?

A Goal I Might Be Able To Keep

Of all the yearly resolutions I made, meaning able to leave the planet is the one I wanted to keep the most but never thought I would.

There are seven planets circling this tiny little barely bigger than Jupiter star, including three that could possibly support life! Plus it’s only forty lightyears away. Which is 235,100,000,000,000 miles. Someone really needs to get to work on making Warp Drive.

Not that living there will be entirely perfect. They might be tidally locked to the sun, like the moon is to the Earth, which means the same side is always facing it. So on one side it’s day all the time and the other is night all the time, with perpetual twilight around the middle. That actually makes for extreme weather conditions, plus the three planets that possibly have water are so hot that they probably don’t have much. Still sounds better than Earth right now, though.

These planets are so cool. All seven of the orbiting planets are closer to their star than Mercury is to the sun, so close in fact that their orbits are mere Earth days. They’re also so near each other that you can see the other planets like we see the moon. Well, probably. They don’t know what the atmospheres are made of. For all we know they’re impossible to see off of.

What do you guys think about the new planets? Any sci-fi-y ideas about what they might be like?