Where's Saturn? Is that a UFO--or the ISS? What's the name of that star? Get the answers from mySKY--a fun new astronomy helper from Meade. | | | PREPARE FOR PI DAY: Tomorrow, March 14th (3.14) is day--so get ready to celebrate a most compelling and mysterious constant of Nature. Pi appears in equations describing the orbits of planets, the colors of auroras, the structure of DNA. It's part of the fabric of our Universe. Humans have been struggling to calculate for thousands of years. Divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter; the ratio is . Sounds simple, but the devil is in the digits. While the value of is finite (a smidgen more than 3), the decimal number is infinitely long: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795 02884197169399375105820974944592307 81640628620899862803482534211706...more Supercomputers have succeeded in calculating more than 200 billion digits and they're still crunching. The weirdest way to compute : throw needles at a table or frozen hot dogs on the floor. Party time! RUSSIAN AIRSPACE: Last week, on March 8th, spaceweather reader Alan Cheung was drifting to sleep onboard a long night flight from Hong Kong to New York when a solar wind stream hit Earth. He opened his eyes, turned to the window and saw this: Photo details: Canon EOS 20D, ISO800, 10-20s exposure. "We were above the Arctic Circle cruising through Russian airspace at 33100 ft. The auroras danced around us for more than 30 minutes until the sun came up," he says. "The pictures are sort of blurry because the aircraft was moving and I didn't have a tripod. Nevertheless I hope it gives everyone a different view of auroras from the sky." Polar flyers should keep an eye out the window for more auroras tonight. The solar wind continues to blow and NOAA forecasters expect a 40% chance of geomagnetic activity at high latitudes.. March 2008 Aurora Gallery [aurora alerts] [night-sky cameras] UPSIDE DOWN WORLD: With the approach of northern spring, icicles are starting to melt. Find one, examine the tip, and behold--an upside down world: Photographer Lois Reinert sends this picture and others from Tracy, Minnesota. "The water drop acts like a convex lens and inverts any scenery in the background. Images in these droplets are always fun to observe." But look quickly, because you know what happens next! more images: from Iain Petrie of London, England |