The Electric Boy

"The Electric Boy" is the tenth episode of the American documentary television series "". It premiered on May 11, 2014 on Fox, and aired on May 12, 2014 on National Geographic Channel. The episode was directed by Bill Pope, and written by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter. The episode explores the Earth's magnetic field and the contributions of Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867), which paved the way for high technology and light-speed communication.
Episode summary.
This episode provides an overview of the nature of electromagnetism, as discovered through the work of Michael Faraday. Tyson explains how the idea of another force of nature, similar to gravitational forces, had been postulated by Isaac Newton before. Tyson continues on Faraday, coming from poor beginnings, would end up becoming interested in studying electricity after reading books and seeing lectures by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. Davy would hire Faraday after seeing extensive notes he had taken to act as his secretary and lab assistant.
After Davy and chemist William Hyde Wollaston unsuccessfully tried to build on Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery of the electromagnetic phenomena to harness the ability to create motion from electricity, Faraday was able to create his own device to create the first electric motor by applying electricity aligned along a magnet. Davy, bitter over Faraday's breakthrough, put Faraday on the task of improving the quality of high-quality optical glass, preventing Faraday from continuing his research. Faraday, undeterred, continued to work in the Royal Institution, and created the Christmas Lectures designed to teach science to children. Following Davy's death, Faraday returned to full time efforts studying electromagnetism, creating the first electrical generator by inserting a magnet in a coil of wires.
Tyson continues to note that despite losing some of his mental capacity, Faraday concluded that electricity and magnetism were connected by unseen fields, and postulated that light may also be tied to these forces. Using a sample of the optical glass that Davy had him make, Faraday discovered that an applied magnetic field could affect the polarization of light passing through the glass sample (a dielectric material), leading to what is called the Faraday effect and connecting these three forces. Faraday postulated that these fields existed across the planet, which would later be called Earth's magnetic field generated by the rotating molten iron inner core, as well as the phenomena that caused the planets to rotate around the sun. Faraday's work was initially rejected by the scientific community due to his lack of mathematical support, but James Clerk Maxwell would later come to rework Faraday's theories into the Maxwell's equations that validated Faraday's theories. Their combined efforts created the basis of science that drives the principles of modern communications today.
Episode title.
Faraday can be seen as an "electric boy" because of his electrical discoveries. Also, "The Electric Boy" was an experimental demonstration of static electricity popular in the eighteenth-century. A young man was suspended from the ceiling using insulating silk cords, and electrified, causing his body to act as a magnet. Objects were attracted to him, and close proximity of another person could lead to sparks.
Reception.
The episode received a 1.1/3 in the 18-49 rating/share, with 3.46 million American viewers watching on Fox. It placed third and last in its timeslot behind "The Good Wife" and "Rosemary's Baby"; and eleventh out of fifteenth for the night.


VW Hydri

VW Hydri is a dwarf nova of the SU Ursae Majoris type in the deep southern constellation Hydrus; a star system that consists of a white dwarf and another generally cool star. It is one of the brightest dwarf novae systems in the sky. These systems are characterised by frequent eruptions and less frequent supereruptions. The former are smooth, while the latter exhibit short "superhumps" of heightened activity. The white dwarf sucks matter from the other star onto an accretion disc and periodically erupts, reaching apparent magnitude 8.4 in superoutbursts, 9.0 in normal outbursts and remaining at magnitude 14.4 when quiet. Normal outbursts occur every 27.3 days and last for 1.4 days, while superoutbursts happen 179 days and last for 12.6 days.


List of solar eclipses in the 22nd century


Jack Wisdom

Jack Wisdom (born 1953) is a Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. from Rice University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1981. His research interests are the dynamics of the Solar System.
Wisdom pioneered the study of chaos in the solar system. His 1981 dissertation demonstrated for the first time the theoretical reason for the clearing of the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt. His work has also brought to light the chaotic rotation of Hyperion, chaos in the orbital evolution of Pluto, and the chaotic obliquity of Mars which has important implications for the past Martian climate.
Work with colleague Gerald Sussman using a specially-built computer demonstrated that the solar system as a whole is chaotic on a timescale of about four million years, confirming results from Jacques Laskar. This work was responsible for "shattering the long-held view of the clockwork motion of the planets."
More recently, Wisdom's work has shed light on the complex evolution of the Moon and the tidal heating and dynamics of Enceladus.
In addition, Wisdom is credited with developing "numerous analytical and numerical techniques" that are fundamental to modern celestial mechanics, most notably the symplectic map for the n-body problem (developed together with Matthew J. Holman), which "now forms the core of nearly every solar system dynamics integration scheme in use today."
Jack Wisdom is co-author of "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics". His 2003 paper in "Science" on a new geometric phase effect which Wisdom calls "spacetime swimming" has attracted considerable attention, although it is not yet clear whether this effect has practical utility or even can be used to devise new tests of relativistic gravitation theories.


Recurrent Novae


Daria Guidetti

Daria Guidetti is an Italian astrophysicist linked to the INAF. She studied astronomy at the University of Bologna and is a member of the astronomy club at Montelupo ().
The Minor Planet Center credits her with the co-discovery of two asteroids, 34004 Gregorini and 49443 Marcobondi, discovered at the Montelupo Observatory in 1998 and 2000, in collaboration with Italian astronomers Maura Tombelli and Egisto Masotti, respectively.
At the end of 2016 she made her debut as correspondent at the stadium for the TV show Quelli che il calcio, to follow Empoli Football Club matches.
In 2018 she made her debut as author and presenter of the TV program "Destinazione Spazio" ("Destination Space") on the italian TV station Reteconomy.
In December 2019 she published the volume "Campi Magnetici" ("Magnetic fields") in the series "Viaggio nell'Universo" ("Journey into the universe"), published by Corriere della Sera.


Catherine Heymans

Catherine Heymans is a British astrophysicist and Professor at the University of Edinburgh based at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.
Education.
Heymans received a first class Master of Physics (MPhys) degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2000. In 2003 she received her Doctor of Philosophy from University of Oxford for research supervised by and on gravitational lensing.
Career and research.
She won a series of prestigious fellowships at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Institut d'astrophysique de Paris and University of Edinburgh. In 2009 she was awarded a starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC) and subsequently appointed a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Heymans is best known for her work on using the technique of cosmic weak gravitational lensing to learn more about the Universe. She led the Shear Testing Programme STEP1 competition and co-leads the lensing collaboration of the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey: CFHTLenS.
Heymans is one of the leaders of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) project Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS).
In 2018, she was presented with the "Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award", which is worth €1.5 million and financed by funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The award is presented jointly by the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award will be used to establish the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at the
Ruhr University Bochum.
Heymans teaches on the Massive open online course (MOOC) at Coursera on "AstroTech: The Science and Technology behind Astronomical Discovery". Her research has been funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Awards and honours.
Heymans was awarded the George Darwin Lectureship by the Royal Astronomical Society in 2017. In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).


Astronomy Centre, University of Sussex

The Astronomy Centre at the University of Sussex, UK undertakes research in Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology.
The centre today.
The Astronomy Centre boasts 12 permanent Faculty members and 12 Postdoctoral Research Fellows, as well as many PhD and MSc students.
Their scientific research interests are tightly focused on the early universe, observational cosmology, large-scale structure formation, galaxy clusters and galactic formation and evolution. These problems are examined with a combination of theoretical, numerical and observational techniques.
Members of the Astronomy Centre have been and are involved in many international collaborations including the Dark Energy Survey, Herschel Space Observatory, LOFAR, Square Kilometre Array, Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey, Planck (spacecraft) and POLARBEAR.
History.
The Astronomy Centre began in 1965 with the founding of an MSc course, run jointly with the Royal Greenwich Observatory, then based at Herstmonceux in Sussex . This link contains also a link to an article by Roger Tayler on the first 30 years of astronomy at Sussex.
Alumni.
The Astronomy Centre has a number of famous former and current members;


WASP-39b

WASP-39b is a "hot Jupiter" extrasolar planet discovered in February 2011 by the WASP project, notable for containing a substantial amount of water in its atmosphere. WASP-39b is in the Virgo constellation, and is about 700 light-years from Earth.
As part of the NameExoWorlds campaigns at the 100th anniversary of the IAU, the planet was named Bocaprins, by Aruba. The planet is named after the beach Boca Prins in the Arikok National Park. The star WASP-39 was named Malmok.
Characteristics.
WASP-39b has a mass of about 0.28 times that of Jupiter and a radius about 1.27 times that of Jupiter. The exoplanet orbits WASP-39, its host star, every 4 days. Hot water molecules were found in the atmosphere of WASP-39b in a 2018 study.
WASP-39b is also notable for having an extremely low density, near that of WASP-17b. While WASP-17b has a density of g/cm3, WASP-39b has a slightly higher density of g/cm3.


Solar eclipse of August 24, 2082

A total solar eclipse will occur on August 24, 2082. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is larger than the Sun's, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness. Totality occurs in a narrow path across Earth's surface, with the partial solar eclipse visible over a surrounding region thousands of kilometres wide.
Related eclipses.
Saros 146.
It is a part of Saros cycle 146, repeating every 18 years, 11 days, containing 76 events. The series started with partial solar eclipse on September 19, 1541. It contains total eclipses from May 29, 1938 through October 7, 2154, hybrid eclipses from October 17, 2172 through November 20, 2226, and annular eclipses from December 1, 2244 through August 10, 2659. The series ends at member 76 as a partial eclipse on December 29, 2893. The longest duration of totality was 5 minutes, 21 seconds on June 30, 1992.
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Richard Sher (producer)

Richard Sher (July 18, 1948 – February 9, 2015) was the creator, executive producer, and host of the panel show "Says You!".
Sher graduated from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and worked as an optician. He then got a master's degree in communications from Boston University. He worked as a producer on Boston TV shows "Chronicle" and "Evening Magazine" prior to creating "Says You!"


Oswald Lohse

Wilhelm Oswald Lohse (February 13, 1845 – May 14, 1915) was a German astronomer. He first worked at the private Bothkamp Observatory, and starting in 1874 at the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory, being its Chief Astronomer at the time of his death.
 His main work involved the investigation of the surface features of Mars and Jupiter. After this he explored binary stars, and finally worked on the spectroscopy of stars, which included laboratory experiments regarding the spectra of metals.
Craters on Mars and on the Moon were named in his honor.


Prajval Shastri

Prajval Shastri is an astrophysicist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore and specializes in the area of phenomenology of active galaxies driven by supermassive blackholes using multi-wavelength observations ranging from radio to X-ray wavelengths.
Early life and education.
Shastri was brought up in Mangalore and after her schooling she completed her B.Sc. in Physical Sciences from St. Agnes College Mangalore (University of Mysore). She then went on to pursue M.Sc. in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. She completed her Ph.D. from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India on the topic "Relativistic Beaming in Active Galactic Nuclei" in the year 1989 under the supervision of Vijay Kapahi.
Current Research.
Shastri's current research specialization is the phenomenon of Active Galactic Nuclei. Her present research areas are:
Professional Memberships.
Shastri holds memberships of the following organizations:
List of Publications.
Shastri's complete list of publications can be found here. Some of her papers are:


John Herschel the Younger

Colonel John Herschel (29 October 1837 – 31 May 1921) was an English military engineer, surveyor and astronomer. He was the son of Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet, and grandson of William Herschel.
Biography.
Herschel was born in Claremont, a suburb of Cape Town in the British Cape Colony of South Africa, the third son and the sixth child (of twelve) of Sir John Herschel and his wife Margaret Brodie (née Stewart). His family had travelled to the Cape in late 1833, so that has father could work on an astronomical survey of the southern skies. The family returned to England in 1838, where Herschel was later educated at Clapham Grammar School, and then attended the East India Company Military Seminary at Addiscombe.
Herschel entered the East India Company's service as a cadet to serve in the Bengal Engineers, and on 26 December 1856 was made a local and temporary ensign while under the command of Colonel Sandham, at the Royal Engineer Establishment at Chatham, for instruction in the art of sapping and mining. He was promoted to the local and temporary rank of lieutenant, while still studying at Chatham on 13 August 1858. However, shortly afterwards, on 27 August 1858, with the end of company rule in India, and the assumption of direct administration by the British government, Herschel's regiment was transferred "en masse" to the Royal Engineers.
Herschel travelled out to India, where he joined the Great Trigonometrical Survey and spent the years 1864–1872 engaged in a survey of various parts of Southern India. He married Mary Cornwallis Power (née Lipscomb) in 1867, the daughter of the Reverend F. Lipscomb, Rector of Welbury, Yorkshire, and the widow of D. Power, QC. He was promoted to second captain on 10 November 1869.
Apart from his surveying work he also carried out numerous independent astronomical observations. He made spectroscopic observations of the corona of the sun during the total solar eclipse of 18 August 1868, and studied the Carina Nebula in November, being one of the first to observe the sudden brightening of Eta Carinae. He also conducted a series of experiments with the Cavendish pendulum to calculate the density of the Earth.
John Herschel was married to Mary Cornwallis Herschel, whose memoir of John's great aunt Caroline Herschel was published in 1876.
Herschel returned to England on furlough in late 1873, where he worked on collecting his late father's letters into mid–1874. He was promoted to major on 10 March 1876.
In April 1882 he arrived in the United States, where he spent a year working with Charles Sanders Peirce on the construction of pendulums to conduct gravimetric and geodesic surveys on behalf of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.
Herschel eventually became the Deputy Superintendent of Trigonometrical Survey, before eventually retiring from the army on 10 March 1886 as a major and brevet lieutenant-colonel, with the honorary rank of colonel.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1871 and of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1872. Herschel died, aged 83, in 1921.


Dar al Gani

The Dar al Gani (also known as DaG) is a meteorite field in the Libyan Sahara. The site is a plateau of limestone, about long and at its widest.
Dark-colored meteorites can be easily spotted in this field, where they have also been well preserved due to the arid climate, and favorable geology consisting of basic rocks (clays, dolomites, and limestones) and lacking erosive quartz sand.
As of July 2001, 869 meteorites with a total weight of were retrieved from the site; the largest weighed .
The name "Dar al Gani" was given by the nomenclature committee of the Meteoritical Society. It does not exist in the National Atlas of Libya. However, the name "Dur al Ghani" was given to part of the Sarir al Qattusah plateau in the geological map of Libya.


Giovanni Battista Zupi

Giovanni Battista Zupi or "Zupus" (2 November 1589 – 26 August 1650) was an Italian astronomer, mathematician, and Jesuit priest.
He was born in Catanzaro. In 1639, Giovanni was the first person to discover that the planet Mercury had orbital phases, like those of the Moon and Venus. His observations demonstrated that the planet orbited around the Sun. This occurred thirty years after Galileo's first telescope design, and Zupi's was only slightly more powerful. He died in Naples.
The crater Zupus on the Moon is named after him.


Solar eclipse of August 2, 2065

A partial solar eclipse will occur on Sunday, August 2, 2065. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. A partial solar eclipse occurs in the polar regions of the Earth when the center of the Moon's shadow misses the Earth.


May 2002 lunar eclipse

A penumbral lunar eclipse took place on May 26, 2002, the first of three lunar eclipses in 2002.
Visibility.
The beginning of the penumbral phase visible in most of North America except the northeast, Central America, western South America, extreme northeast Russia, eastern Asia, Australia, most of Antarctica, the Pacific Ocean, and the southeast Indian Ocean; the end visible in southwestern Alaska, Asia except the extreme north, Australia, the eastern Indian Ocean, and most of the Pacific Ocean except the extreme eastern part.
Relation to other lunar eclipses.
Eclipses of 2002.
It is the first of four lunar year cycles, repeating every 354 days.
Saros series.
Lunar Saros 111, repeating every 18 years and 11 days, has a total of 71 lunar eclipse events including 11 total lunar eclipses. The first total lunar eclipse of this series was on April 19, 1353, and last was on August 4, 1533. The longest occurrence of this series was on June 12, 1443 when the totality lasted 106 minutes.
Half-Saros cycle.
A lunar eclipse will be preceded and followed by solar eclipses by 9 years and 5.5 days (a half saros). This lunar eclipse is related to two partial solar eclipses of Solar Saros 118.


Robert James (headmaster)

Robert Leoline James C.B.E. (27 September 1905 – 14 May 1982) was High Master of St Paul's School from 1946 to 1953 and headmaster of Harrow School from 1953 to 1971.
Biography.
James was the son of Henry Lewis James, who was Dean of Bangor from 1934 to 1940. He was educated at Rossall School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree in Literae Humaniores. He was also awarded a doctorate by the University of London. He was a housemaster at St Paul's School and taught classics from 1928 to 1939. In 1939, he became headmaster of Chigwell School before returning to St Paul's as High Master in 1946. In 1953, he became headmaster of Harrow School and on his death it was said that the prestige of the school had "seldom stood higher" than it had during his 18-year period in office. He was regarded as friendly and approachable, and was a traditionalist rather than an innovator. He twice hosted visits to the school by Elizabeth II and was awarded the CBE in 1971. He died on 14 May 1982 in Oxford at the age of 76.
Married 1939 Maud Eliot Gibbons. Two recorded sons.


November 2002 lunar eclipse

A penumbral lunar eclipse took place on November 20, 2002, the last of three lunar eclipses in 2002.
Relation to other lunar eclipses.
Eclipses of 2002.
It is the second of four lunar year cycles, repeating every 354 days.
Half-Saros cycle.
A lunar eclipse will be preceded and followed by solar eclipses by 9 years and 5.5 days (a half saros). This lunar eclipse is related to two partial solar eclipses of Solar Saros 123.


Jupiter LXI

Jupiter LXI, provisionally known as , is a natural satellite of Jupiter. It was discovered by a team of astronomers led by Brett J. Gladman, et al. in 2003.
 is about 2 kilometres in diameter, and orbits Jupiter at an average distance of 22,709 Mm in 699.125 days, at an inclination of 165° to the ecliptic (164° to Jupiter's equator), in a retrograde direction and with an eccentricity of 0.1961.
It belongs to the Carme group, made up of irregular retrograde moons orbiting Jupiter at a distance ranging between 23 and 24 Gm and at an inclination of about 165°.
This moon was lost following its discovery in 2003. It was recovered in 2018 and given its permanent designation that year.


Z Camelopardalis

Z Camelopardalis (Z Cam) is a cataclysmic variable star system in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis. It has an apparent visual magnitude which varies between 9.8 and 14.5. This system is the prototype star for the family of Z Camelopardalis variable stars: dwarf novae with standstills at a brightness intermediate between their maxima and minima. It may be the same bright nova that was recorded by Chinese astrologers in 77 BCE.
Z Camelopardalis was discovered photographically in 1904 by Henry Park Hollis during work for the Astrographic Catalogue. It is surrounded by an extensive shell thought to have been ejected in a nova explosion, the largest known of its type. The size and expansion of this shell sets a firm lower limit since the last eruption of at least 220 years.


Vereinigte Astronomische Gesellschaft

Vereinigte Astronomische Gesellschaft (VAG) was an international astronomical society founded in 1800.
History.
International cooperation in astronomy started with a first meeting of 15 European astronomers in Gotha in 1798. The society was founded two years in Lilienthal, near Bremen, to organize the compilation of ecliptic star charts, with more than half of the members originated from non-German speaking countries. In the same year "Monatliche Correspondenz" (monthly correspondence) was founded in 1800 by Franz Xaver von Zach to publish results.
In 1845, the society published the "Berliner Akademische Sternkarten" (Berlin academic star maps).


Pauline Barmby

Pauline Barmby is a Canadian astronomer currently based at the University of Western Ontario. She studies galaxies, their formation and evolution from an observational standpoint. She studies both nearby galaxies and those at high redshift using telescopes like the Spitzer Space Telescope. She is the co-chair, with Bryan Gaensler, of the Canadian Astronomy 2020 Long Range Plan.
Education.
Barmby obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia in 1995. She received a master's degree in astronomy from Harvard University in 1998, and a PhD degree from Harvard in 2001. Her thesis work was on globular clusters in the Andromeda galaxy, and her supervisor was John P. Huchra.
Career.
From 2001 to 2007, Barmby was an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where she was a member of the Spitzer/IRAC telescope team. She became an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the University of Western Ontario in 2007, and was promoted to associate professor in 2013 and full professor in 2019. She served as associate dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies in the Faculty of Science at Western, and was the Acting Dean of Science in 2017.
Research.
Barmby focuses her scientific investigations on nearby galaxies like the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and other galaxies in our Local Group. She studies various regions within these local galaxies, including star-forming regions and related star formation laws and X-ray emitting star clusters. She studies polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in these galaxies. Her work focuses on astronomical 'big data', and she is active in public outreach about astronomy.


Kavli Institute for Cosmology

The Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge (KICC) is a research establishment set up through collaboration of the University of Cambridge and the Kavli Foundation. It is operated by two of the University's astronomy groups: the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) and the Cavendish Astrophysics Group.
Background.
In August 2006 an agreement was reached between the University of Cambridge and the Kavli Foundation for the establishment of an Institute for cosmology. The Kavli Foundation will support several 5-year senior research fellowships in perpetuity, and the University committed to provide a building to house the Institute. Operation began in October 2008 with the appointment of the first Kavli Institute Fellows. The building was completed in July 2009, and was officially opened 18 November 2009 by Prince Philip as Chancellor of the University in a ceremony with Fred Kavli.
The director of the Institute is Roberto Maiolino; the deputy director is Anthony Challinor. The first director was George Efstathiou of the IoA.
Projects.
KICC researchers are involved in the following projects:
Kavli Building.
The Kavli Building is located adjacent to the Hoyle Building, the main building of the IoA. The two are connected via a raised walkway. The building was designed to encourage the occupants to interact with one another as well as with the occupants of the Hoyle building. It is intended to be similar in architectural style to the Hoyle Building, but to be sufficiently distinctive so as to retain an independent identity. The architects were Annand and Mustoe. The design includes use of ground source heat pumps and a heat exchanger serving under-floor heating to meet City Council requirements that at least 10% of the building's energy is generated on-site.


Angelo Marchetti

Angelo Marchetti (1674 – 1753) was an Italian astronomer from Pistoia.
He was a member of the Accademia degli Arcadi of Rome.


Ruth Stokes

Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes (October 12, 1890 or 1891 – August 27, 1968) was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.
Early life and education.
Stokes was born on October 12, 1890 or 1891 in Mountville, South Carolina, one of six children of William Henry Stokes, a physician and farmer, and his wife Francis Emily Fuller Stokes. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1911 from the Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, a women's college that later became Winthrop University, and began working as a high school mathematics teacher. She was principal of a school in Rock Hill, South Carolina, from 1913 to 1916, and head of mathematics at Synodical College in Fulton, Missouri, from 1916 to 1917. She subsequently held two more teaching positions in South Carolina. During this time she also studied mathematics by correspondence through Columbia University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Chicago.
She returned to graduate study in 1922 at Vanderbilt University, where she earned a master's degree in mathematics in 1923 with a thesis in the history of mathematics on the fundamental theorem of algebra. She became an instructor at Winthrop College, and began taking summer classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, entering more formal doctoral study at Duke University in 1928. She completed her Ph.D. in 1931, supervised by Joseph Miller Thomas, becoming the first person to earn a doctorate in mathematics at Duke. Her dissertation, "A Geometric Theory of Solution of Linear Inequalities", represented pioneering work in linear programming, following on from the work of Lloyd Dines and Hermann Minkowski.
Career and later life.
Stokes expected her position at Winthrop to be waiting for her on the completion of her doctorate, but David Bancroft Johnson, the president of Winthrop with whom she had made this agreement, died in 1928 and the next president did not hold to the agreement. After continuing at Duke as an instructor for a year, Stokes became a mathematics instructor at North Texas State Teachers College (now the University of North Texas) from 1932 until 1935, when she became head of mathematics at Mitchell College in Statesville, North Carolina.
In 1936, Stokes returned once more to Winthrop College where she became a professor of astronomy and mathematics and, later, the head of mathematics. Her astronomical work included an excursion to Florida to observe the solar eclipse of April 7, 1940. As a response to World War II, in 1942, she instituted a program in cryptology, and began teaching navigation and astronomy to pilots in the United States Army Air Corps. During this period at Winthrop she also chaired the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America and was president of the section for mathematics of the South Carolina Education Association.
Stokes had increasingly found herself in dispute with the Winthrop College administration, and in 1946 she moved to Syracuse University as an assistant professor of mathematics and education, promoted to associate professor in 1953. There, she became founding editor of the Pi Mu Epsilon journal in 1949. She also participated in the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1950, exhibiting a collection of mathematical models. She retired from Syracuse as associate professor emerita in 1959, continuing to teach for one more year as an associate professor at Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia.
After retirement, Stokes returned to Mountville, South Carolina. She died on August 27, 1968.
Recognition.
Stokes was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1950.


2687 Tortali


Phil Nicholson

Philip D. Nicholson (born 1951) is an Australian-born professor of astronomy at Cornell University in the Astronomy department specialising in Planetary Sciences. He has been editor-in-chief of the journal "Icarus" since 1998.
Career.
Nicholson received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1979. Nicholson's research centers on two main areas: orbital dynamics in planetary ring systems and infrared observational studies of planets, their satellites, and their rings. His work has included studies of the ring systems of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune via Voyager observations and ground-based stellar occultations; Earth-based observations with the 5-meter Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory of several small moons of Jupiter and Saturn discovered by the Voyager spacecraft; dynamical investigations of the planetary system around the pulsar PSR 1257 + 12, and of the rotational evolution of natural satellites; and studies of the zodiacal dust bands discovered by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1983.
Together with colleagues in Canada and at Harvard, he has been involved in the discovery of numerous outer satellites of Uranus, Saturn and Neptune.
Nicholson is a member of the Visual Infrared Mapping Spectrometer science team on the NASA/ESA Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn, and was the leader of a team of Cornell and Caltech astronomers studying the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter in July 1994 using the Hale Telescope. He has served on the Committees on Planetary and Lunar Exploration and on Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National Research Council, time assignment committees for the Kuiper Airborne Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, and scientific advisory committees for Arecibo and IPAC. He has coauthored review articles on planetary ring dynamics and on the Uranian and Neptunian ring systems.
Honors.
The inner main-belt asteroid 7220 Philnicholson, discovered by Edward Bowell at Anderson Mesa in 1981, was named in his honor. The official naming citation was published on 5 October 1998 ().
Nicholson won the Harold Masursky Award in 2019, "for meritorious service to planetary science" in his role as editor-in-chief of "Icarus".
He was elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020.


List of exoplanets detected by microlensing

This is the list of 20 extrasolar planets detected by microlensing, sorted by projected separations. To find planets using that method, the background star is temporarily magnified by a foreground star because of the gravity that bends light. If the foreground star has a planet, the light from background star would be slightly brighter than the star with no planet. Studying the brightness difference of background star between the foreground star with planets and foreground star with no planets, then mass can be estimated. The projected separation can be determined from how much the light bended.
The most massive planet detected by microlensing is MOA-bin-1b, which masses ; the least massive is MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, which masses or . The widest separation between a planet and a star is MOA-bin-1b, which is 8.3 AU; the shortest separation is MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, which is 0.66 AU.
There are 4 members of multi-planet systems.
List.
"Yellow rows denote the members of multi-planet systems."


June 2076 lunar eclipse

A total lunar eclipse will take place on June 17, 2076. The moon will pass through the center of the Earth's shadow.
Related lunar eclipses.
Half-Saros cycle.
A lunar eclipse will be preceded and followed by solar eclipses by 9 years and 5.5 days (a half saros). This lunar eclipse is related to two annular solar eclipses of Solar Saros 138.


Barbara Ercolano

Barbara Ercolano is an Italian astrophysicist known for her work on interstellar dust, star formation, and protoplanetary disks. She is the Professor for Theoretical Astrophysics in the at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Ercolano is originally from Naples, and studied astrophysics at University College London. After postdoctoral research at University College London, the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the University of Cambridge, she became a lecturer in astrophysics at the University of Exeter. She moved to the University of Munich as a professor in 2010.
Ercolano is the 2010 winner of the Fowler Award in Astronomy of the Royal Astronomical Society.


IIE iron meteorite

The iron meteorites of the IIE chemical type are octahedrites of various coarseness, most of which contain numerous inclusions of recrystallized stony silicates.
Composition and origin.
They have mineral compositions and oxygen isotope ratios very similar to the H chondrites, which makes it probable that they originate from the same parent body. The best candidate for this parent body is the S-type asteroid 6 Hebe. Unlike most iron meteorites, the type IIE are thought to have been melted out of the chondritic surface of the parent asteroid by impacts during its early history.
Rarity.
It is a rare type with 24 known members as of 2020.


Cuckoo Stone

The Cuckoo Stone is a Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stone. The stone, which is now fallen, is in a field near to Woodhenge and Durrington Walls in Wiltshire, England (). It is part of the wider Stonehenge Landscape.
Description.
The Cuckoo Stone is a squat sarsen stone which lies on its side. It is the same type of stone as the largest stones used in the Stonehenge circle. The site of Woodhenge is around 500 metres to the east of the Cuckoo Stone, with Durrington Walls to the northeast. Stonehenge is around 2.5 kilometres to the southwest. The Cuckoo Stone was recorded by Richard Colt-Hoare on his 1810 map of the Stonehenge landscape. The nearest other known sarsen stone is that found within Woodhenge during excavations in 1926-28.
Excavations.
The site was excavated in 2007 as part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The excavations revealed the pit in which the stone once sat immediately to the west. The stone was originally a natural feature, which sometime before 2000 BC, was placed in an upright position. A posthole was found in the pit, indicating that a wooden post had been placed in the hole for a time before being replaced by the upright stone. Around 2000 BC the Cuckoo Stone became the focus for several nearby cremation burials.
In the Roman era a rectangular building was constructed southwest of the Cuckoo Stone. The presence of pits and a scatter of coins suggest that the building was a small shrine.


Grenoble Observatory for Sciences of the Universe

The Grenoble Observatory for Sciences of the Universe (OSUG) () is an astronomical observatory in France that is attached to CNRS-INSU and Grenoble Alpes University.
OSUG engages in scientific studies related to all aspects of the universe, the earth and environmental systems. The OSUG federates 1100 personals in 6 research Units, 5 Associated Research Teams and 2 joint service units federated, mostly located on the Saint-Martin d'Hères Campus near Grenoble.
OSUG was created on 26 November by governmental decree n° 85-1243.
Research fields and Observation services.
OSUG federates six research units (ISTerre, IPAG, IGE, LEGI, LECA, Irstea Grenoble), five associated research teams (FAME/ESRF, CEN/CNRM, Environnements/PACTE, SigmaPhy/Gipsa-Lab, LAME/LIPhy) and two joint service units (UMS OSUG, SAJF). OSUG engages in scientific studies in astrophysics, planetary science, geophysics, geology, climatology, hydrology, glaciology and ecology.
OSUG manages a number of key Observing systems, which contribute to national and international databases. Finally, OSUG, within the University of Grenoble, plays a major role in defining and running higher education programs and provides initial and continuing education in Earth Sciences, sciences of the Universe and environmental sciences.
The OSUG permanent exhibition opened in 2016).


Roger Carmichael Robert Owen

Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Carmichael Robert Owen CMG OBE (1866–1941) was a British Army officer who joined the Sudan service in 1903. He was Sudan Agent in Cairo from 1905 to 1908. Owen was then appointed Governor of Mongalla Province in South Sudan from 1908 to 1918.
Early life.
Owen was born in 1866 in Writtle, Essex, England the son of the local vicar the Reverend Loftus Owen and his wife Emma (née Kenworthy).
He was educated at Rossall School, where he was a noted athlete.
In August 1884 he was commissioned in 3rd Battalion, The King's Shropshire Light Infantry.
In 1888 he transferred to The Oxfordshire Light Infantry.
India.
Owen was Superintendent of Army Signalling with the Manipur Expedition of 1891, and in the same year was also with the Wuntho Expedition in Upper Burma. He served in the First Mohmand Campaign between 1897 and 1898 and the Tirah Expedition which included operations in the Bara Valley and the Khyber Pass. He was severely wounded while fighting in the Khyber Pass.
Egypt.
In 1902 Owen was appointed to the Egyptian Army.
He held various posts in Egypt including being Director of the Intelligence Department of the Egyptian War Office.
In that position, he was asked whether the Bedouin of Sinai would side with Britain or Turkey in the event of a war.
His short-sighted view was "...It matters very little to us which side they take in such a case, as if such a war took place (and no one expects it even will). There would be no fighting in Sinai - it would be somewhere else".
This was ironic in view of the later exploits of T. E. Lawrence in the Arab Revolt against the Turks.
In 1906 Owen was a member of the Sinai Boundary Commission.
He was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) that year.
From 1905 to 1908 Owen was the Sudan Agent in Cairo. In 1905 Owen was approached by a Canadian missionary group for permission to work in Bahr el Ghazal. According to Owen they were "the horrible fanatical canting kind of missionary and undesirable". He painted a bleak picture of conditions in the Sudan and "I even went nearly so far as to suggest they might be served up as missionary mayonnaise". The missionaries dropped their request.
Sudan.
IN 1908 Owen was appointed Governor and Officer Commanding the Military District of Mongalla Province in Sudan.
In February 1910 Theodore Roosevelt visited the province. Owen told Governor General Sir Reginald Wingate that everything would be done for the former president of the United States, but also pointed out that his troops had not even one donkey.
In June 1910 the British Sudanese forces took over the Lado Enclave from the Belgians.
The Anglican and Roman Catholic missionaries asked that Sunday be retained as a sabbath, as it had under the Belgians, rather than Friday as in the rest of the Sudan.
Owen opposed retaining Sunday.
He felt that the more "bigoted" Muslims in the army would object to working on Friday, and noted that all recruits to the army were instructed in the Moslem religion.
A few months later, however, Owen proposed creation of an Equatorial battalion composed entirely of southerners. This force would be taught to follow English commands and to follow Christian observances, forming the basis of a Christian population that would in time connect with that of Uganda and would prevent spread of the Muslim faith farther south. He was against the Moslem faith on the basis that it "may at any time break out into a wave of fanaticism". Owen's plan was approved by Wingate. On 7 December 1917 the last of the northern Sudanese troops were withdrawn from Mongalla, replaced by Equatorial troops.
When Hasan Sharif, son of Khalifa Muhammad Sahif, was exiled to Mongalla in 1915 after taking place in a conspiracy in Ondurman, Governor Owen said "...I told him he is lucky to come and see this part of Sudan for nothing, when tourists pay hundreds of pounds ... I fear he doesn't see the joke...".
Owen was part of the Beir Expedition in 1912 acting as a political officer and was involved in the Expeditionary Force, Lafit and Lokoia Mountains, Southern Sudan.
Owen's administration in Mongalla was ruthless, often using what his superiors considered to be excessive force. This may have stemmed in part from his military background, in part from the endemic violence of the South Sudan after two decades of colonial activity.
After Owen had been governor for almost ten years, Wingate described him as "not of that mentality which is altogether desirable, especially in the more remote districts".
Later career.
Owen retired from his position as governor of Mongalla in 1918 and was given the sinecure position of governor of the Egyptian oases.
Major Cecil Stephen Northcote succeeded him as Governor of Mongala.
Owen was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1919.
He was mentioned in dispatches twice, held the 3rd Class of the Order of the Medjidseh and was a Grand Officer of the Order of the Nile.
Owen died in Cairo on 1 August 1941.
References.
Sources


Winifred Cameron

Winifred Sawtell Cameron (December 3, 1918 – March 29, 2016) was an American astronomer. She worked at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for most of her career, and compiled the Lunar Transient Phenomena (LTP) database. She was involved in the Gemini and Apollo programs.
Early life.
Winifred J. Sawtell was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the daughter of Amos Alexander Sawtell and Mildred Winifred Shields Sawtell. Her father was an accountant. She was a Girl Scout, and graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1936. She earned a bachelor's degree and a teaching credential at Northern Illinois University in 1940, and completed a master's degree in astronomy at Indiana University.
Career.
After college, Winifred Sawtell worked at Weather Forecasts, Inc. in Chicago, from 1943 to 1946, and again from 1949 to 1950. She taught astronomy at Mount Holyoke College from 1950 to 1951. She was a researcher at the United States Naval Observatory from 1951 to 1958, analyzing sunspots.
In 1959, Winifred S. Cameron and her husband both joined NASA's new Goddard Space Flight Center, where Winifred was a lunar expert and head of Data Acquisition and Analysis. She compiled the Lunar Transient Phenomena (LTP) database, still in use. She was astronomer-on-base at Cape Canaveral during two Mercury flights, and an advisor on the Apollo moon landings. She was the only woman scientist in attendance at the international Lunar Geological Field Conference in Oregon in 1965. She gave frequent talks on her work to civic organizations, schools, and amateur astronomers.
In 1974, Cameron was a technologist at the National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She retired from NASA in 1984, but continued working on the LTP database. She was a member of the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers.
Personal life.
Winifred Sawtell married fellow astronomer Robert Curry Cameron in 1953. They had two daughters, Selene and Sheri. Robert died in 1972. Winifred died in 2016, aged 98 years, in Lehigh Acres, Florida. There is an asteroid named 1575 Winifred, after Winifred S. Cameron; and she named a lunar crater Cameron in memory of her husband.


Neil Marten

Sir Harry Neil Marten PC (3 December 1916 – 22 December 1985) was a British Conservative Party politician.
Born in Lambeth, Marten was educated at Rossall School. During World War II he was parachuted into France as part of Operation Jedburgh to work with the French resistance and later served with the Norwegian resistance. He worked in the Foreign Office from 1947 to 1957 and was a solicitor and shipping advisor.
Marten was Member of Parliament for Banbury from 1959 to 1983 and served as a junior aviation minister 1962–64 and Overseas Development minister under Margaret Thatcher. Marten was a leading opponent of the European Economic Community. At the end of his time in Parliament, he was knighted on 6 January 1983. He died in Dorset aged 69.
He was a director of the private shipping and aircraft company Davies and Newman and was in office when it was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1971 and had been associated with the company since 1962.
A keen raconteur, Marten told a story of a tour he took around the Palace of Westminster with his Banbury constituents. Touring through the maze of corridors they turned a corner and met Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, wearing the full regalia of his office. Recognising his Parliamentary colleague in the midst of the Banbury constituents, Hailsham boomed, "Neil". Not needing to be told again, the tour party fell to its knees with some haste.


Projection Planetarium

The Projection Planetarium was a training device housed in the Flight Research Laboratory hangar at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. It consisted of a custom designed star projector surrounded by a diameter sphere constructed from a surplus radome. The star projector was movable in 3 directions while the capsule mockup and its pilots remained static. The system was used in studies of manual control of spacecraft using "out the window" visual information both in orbit and in a launch abort scenario. The planetarium was constructed in 1965 at a cost of $153,103 for research and development and $177,000 for construction and materials. An additional $145,400 worth of surplus materials were made use of in the project.
Described by A.W. Vogeley in a paper presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Winter 1966 meeting entitled "Piloted Space-Flight Simulation at Langley Research Center." the system was used to study Apollo launch-abort problems with a "horizon-to-horizon view of Florida as seen from about 100,000 feet." The inflatable sphere enclosing the projector and fixed Gemini capsule mockup also displayed star images. The star projector was sufficient for testing pilot control problems such as rendezvous because the star field was used "primarily as an attitude reference" but was insufficient for testing navigation issues.
Navigational training of Gemini, Apollo, and some Space Shuttle astronauts was conducted at the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, NC.


WASP-76b

WASP-76b is a hot Jupiter exoplanet discovered during 2013 that can be found in the constellation Pisces. It orbits a F-type star BD+01 316 (WASP-76) and has a size 0.92 that of Jupiter's mass. In March 2020, it was speculated the temperature on the planet could reach on the hot side, hot enough to vaporize neutral iron. If the night side of WASP-76b had temperatures down to at least , the iron may condense then rain down as hot liquid iron on its surface.
The planet equilibrium temperature is , yet measured dayside temperature is still hotter at .
Study shows that WASP-76b seems to be the only planet in its solar system.
In May 2020, it was discovered what the previous spectra of WASP-76b, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, were distorted by the light from a suspected stellar companion. Therefore, updated atmospheric model is cloudy hydrogen-helium envelope, non-detection of alternatively reported neutral iron (including "iron rain"), and only upper limits on oxides of titanium and vanadium. Combination of data from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have allowed to detect titanium oxide and traces of water in atmosphere of WASP-76b though. Later, higher resolution spectrum, has features of ionized Li, Na, Mg, Ca, Mn, K, and Fe, but no ionized Ti, Cr, Ni, or molecular oxides of titanium, vanadium or zirconium were found.
The atmosphere of WASP-76b is cloudy and mostly grey, with a significant amount of thermal incandescence.


Frank Bradshaw Wood

Frank Bradshaw "Brad" Wood FRAS (21 December 1915, Jackson, Tennessee – 10 December 1997, Gainesville, Florida) was an astronomer, specializing in photometry.
Wood graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Florida. He graduated in astronomy from Princeton University with an MA in 1940 and a PhD in 1941. His dissertation, published in 1946, was supervised by Raymond Smith Dugan for three years until Dugan's death in 1940 and then by Henry Norris Russell in 1940–1941. When the United States entered World War II, Wood enlisted in the US Navy, serving in the Pacific and reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. In 1945 he married Elizabeth H. Pepper. In 1946 he was a research assistant at Princeton University. From 1947 to 1950 he was an assistant professor and assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona. At the University of Pennsylvania, Wood was associate professor and executive director of the observatories from 1950 to 1954 and full professor and director of the observatories from 1954 to 1968. He supervised the design and construction of Flower and Cook Observatory at a site about 29 kilometers west of the University of Pennsylvania and recruited faculty for modernizing and expanding the University of Pennsylvania's department of astronomy. He became an international leader in research on close binary stars. At the University of Florida, he was professor and director of the optical observatories from 1968 to 1989 when he retired as professor emeritus.
He was the author or co-author of nearly 100 publications. Among his doctoral students was the famous astrophysicist and science fiction writer Yoji Kondo. The International Astronomical Union dedicated to Professor Wood the book "Algols — Proceedings of the 107th Colloquium" (from the meeting held in August 1988 in Sidney, British Columbia).
Upon his death in 1997 he was survived by his widow, a son, and three daughters.


Frederick Brundrett

Sir Frederick Brundrett, (25 November 1894 – 1 August 1974) was a British civil servant and mathematician who served as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence from 1954 to 1959.
Education and early life.
Frederick Brundrett was born in Sunny Bank, Ebbw Vale, Monmouthshire on 25 November 1894, the oldest child of the seven sons and three daughters of Walter Brundrett, an accountant who worked for the Ebbw Vale Steel, Iron and Coal Company, and his wife Ada Richardson. He was educated at Rossall School, a public school in Fleetwood, Lancashire, where he excelled at sports. Later in life he was said to be the one of the country's oldest first-class field hockey players. Although the school was not renowned for mathematics, Brundrett won a mathematics scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1913. He earned first class honours in the first part of the Mathematical Tripos in 1914 and became a Wrangler in 1916.
Career.
Brundrett joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to participate in World War I. He was slated for duty on patrol boats but came down with mumps and was held in isolation. It was discovered that he was a Wrangler and he was reassigned to the Wireless Experimental Department at , where he spent the rest of the war. Demobilised in 1919, Brundrett, joined the scientific staff of the Royal Naval Signal School. In 1920 he married Enid James; they had one child, a son they named James Edward.
Brundrett remained at the Royal Naval Signal School until 1937, when he was transferred to the headquarters of the Royal Naval Scientific Service in London as Principal Scientific Officer in the Department of Scientific Research and Experiment (DSRE). He became the superintending scientist in 1940, assistant director in 1941 and deputy director in 1943. He created a system for categorising scientists, made arrangements with the Treasury for them to be directly appointed to civil service positions and obtained rapid security clearances for them. He recruited some 10,000 scientists to the war effort at the Admiralty, the War Office, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Supply. His son James, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, was killed in Italy on 30 September 1944. For his wartime work, Brundrett was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 1946 New Year Honours.
When Sir Charles Wright retired in 1947, Brundrett succeeded him as the Chief of the Royal Naval Scientific Service. He chose William Cook as his Director of Physical Research. The year 1947 also saw the formation of the Defence Research Policy Committee (DRPC) to advise the Minister of Defence and the Chiefs of Staff on matters of scientific policy, of which Brundrett became an ex officio member. The DRPC was initially chaired by the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Henry Tizard. Brundrett became deputy chairman in 1950 and chairman in 1954 succeeding, Sir John Cockcroft as Chief Scientific Adviser. He was also Honorary Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Civil Aviation from 1953 to 1959. Brundrett was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1950 New Year Honours and a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the 1956 New Year Honours. He became an honorary fellow of Sidney Sussex College in 1954 and received an honorary DSc from the University of Manchester in 1956.
Brundrett retired from the Ministry of Defence in 1959 and was succeeded by Sir Solly Zuckerman. He was a Civil Service Commissioner from 1960 to 1967, chairman of the Air Traffic Control Board from 1959 to 1974 and chairman of the naval aircraft research committee of the Aeronautical Research Council from 1960 to 1966. He was chairman of the council of the Red and White Friesian Cattle Society, president of the Agricultural Co-operative Association, chairman of trustees for the Rural Industries Bureau from 1961 to 1966, a member of the White Fish Authority from 1961 to 1973 and chairman of the Board of Governors for Houghton Poultry Research Station from 1962 to 1968.
Brundrett died in Southbourne, Sussex on 1 August 1974. His papers are in the Churchill Archives Centre.


Solar eclipse of December 26, 2057

A total solar eclipse will occur on December 26, 2057. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is larger than the Sun's, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness. Totality occurs in a narrow path across Earth's surface, with the partial solar eclipse visible over a surrounding region thousands of kilometres wide.


Eric Bailey (politician)

Eric Alfred George Shackleton Bailey (28 July 1905 – 12 September 1989) was a British Conservative Party politician. He was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Manchester Gorton in the Conservative landslide victory at the 1931 general election, the only time that Labour has lost that seat since 1906. Bailey held Gorton until 1935, when it was regained by Joseph Compton, the Labour MP who he had ousted in 1931.


Coprates quadrangle

 The Coprates quadrangle is one of a series of 30 quadrangle maps of Mars used by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Research Program. The Coprates quadrangle is also referred to as MC-18 (Mars Chart-18). The Coprates quadrangle contains parts of many of the old classical regions of Mars: Sinai Planum, Solis Planum, Thaumasia Planum, Lunae Planum, Noachis Terra, and Xanthe Terra.
The name Coprates refers to an old name for a river in Persia.
The Coprates quadrangle goes from 45° to 90° west longitude and 0° to 30° south latitude on Mars. Coprates quadrangle is famous for depicting the "Grand Canyon of Mars", the Valles Marineris Canyon System. Signs of water exist in this quadrangle, with ancient river valleys and networks of stream channels showing up as inverted terrain and lakes inside of Valles Marineris.
Origin of Name.
Coprates is the name of a telescopic albedo feature located at 15° S and 60° W on Mars. It is named after the Coprates River, an ancient name for the Dez, a tributary of the Karun in modern Iran which empties into the Shatt al-Arab near its Persian Gulf estuary. The name was approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1958.
Valles Marineris canyon system.
Valles Marineris is the largest canyon system in the solar system; this great canyon would go almost all the way across the United States. The name for the whole system of canyons is Valles Marineris. Starting at the west with Noctis Labyrinthus in the Phoenicis Lacus quadrangle, the canyon system ends in the Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle with Capri Chasma and Eos Chasma (in the south). The word Chasma has been designated by the International Astronomical Union to refer to an elongate, steep-sided depression. Valles Marineris was discovered by and named for the Mariner 9 mission. Moving east from Noctis Labyrinthus, the canyon splits into two troughs, Tithonium Chasma and Ius Chasma (in the south). In the middle of the system are the very wide valleys of Ophir Chasma (north), Candor Chasma, and Melas Chasma (south). Going farther to the east, one comes to Coprates Chasma. At the end of Coprates Chasma, the valley gets wider to form Capri Chasma in the north and Eos Chasma in the south. The walls of the canyons often contain many layers. The floors of some of the canyons contain large deposits of layered materials. Some researchers believe that the layers were formed when water once filled the canyons. The canyons are deep as well as long; in places they are 8-10 kilometers deep, much deeper than the Earth's Grand Canyon, which is only 1.6 kilometers deep.
In a study published in the journal Geology in August 2009, a group of scientists led by John Adams of the University of Washington in Seattle proposed that Valles Marineris may have formed from a giant collapse when salts were heated up, thereby releasing water which rushed out carrying mud through underground plumbing. One point that supports this idea is that sulfate salts have been found in the area. These salts contain water which comes off when heated. Heat may have been generated by volcanic processes. After all, a number of huge volcanoes are nearby. Other ideas have been advanced by others to explain the origin of the system.
Interior layered deposits and sulfate.
Parts of the floors of Candor Chasma and Juventae Chasma contain layered deposits that have been termed interior layered deposits (ILD's) and Equatorial Layered Deposits (ELD's). These layers may have formed when the whole area was a giant lake. However, many other ideas have been advanced to explain them. High-resolution structural and geologic mapping in west Candor Chasma, presented in March 2015, showed that the deposits on the floor of the Candor chasma are basin filling sediments that were deposited in a wet playa like setting; hence water was involved in their formation.
Some places on Mars contain hydrated sulfate deposits, including ILD's. Sulfate formation involves the presence of water. The European Space Agency's Mars Express found possible evidence of the sulfates epsomite and kieserite. Scientists want to visit these areas with robotic rovers.
These deposits have been found to contain ferric oxides in the form of crystalline grey hematite.
Layers.
Images of rocks in the canyon walls almost always show layers. Some layers appear tougher than others. In the image below of Ganges Chasma Layers, as seen by HiRISE, one can see that the upper, light-toned deposits are eroding much faster than the lower darker layers. Some cliffs on Mars show a few darker layers standing out and often breaking into large pieces; these are thought to be hard volcanic rock instead of soft ash deposits. An example of hard layers is shown below in the picture of layers in the canyon wall in Coprates, as seen by Mars Global Surveyor. Because of its closeness to the Tharsis volcanic region, the rock layers may be made of layer after layer of lava flows, probably mixed with deposits of volcanic ash that fell out of the air following big eruptions. It is likely the rock strata in the walls preserve a long geological history of Mars. Dark layers may be due to dark lava flows. The dark volcanic rock basalt is common on Mars. However, light-toned deposits may have resulted from rivers, lakes, volcanic ash, or wind blown deposits of sand or dust. The Mars Rovers found light-toned rocks to contain sulfates. Probably having been formed in water, sulfate deposits are of great interest to scientists because they may contain traces of ancient life. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument found opaline silica in certain strata along and within the Valles Marineris canyon system. Because Iron sulfates were sometimes found near the opaline silica, it is thought that the two deposits were formed with an acid fluid.
Hebes Chasma and hydrated deposits.
Hebes Chasma, a large enclosed valley, may have once held water. Hydrated minerals have been found there. It is thought that large-scale underground springs of groundwater at different times burst to the surface to form deposits called Light Toned Deposits (LTD's). Some suggest present or fossilized life forms may be found there because the deposits are relatively young.
Nirgal Vallis and sapping.
Nirgal Vallis is one of the longest valley networks on Mars. It is so large that it is found on more than one quadrangle. Scientists do not know how all the ancient river valleys were formed. There is evidence that instead of rain or snow, the water that formed the valleys originated underground. One mechanism that has been advanced is sapping. In sapping, the ground just gives away as water comes out. Sapping is common in some desert areas in America's Southwest. Sapping forms alcoves and stubby tributaries. These features are visible in the picture below of Nigal Vallis taken with Mars Odyssey's THEMIS.
Water from Nirgal Vallis contributed to a great flood that went through the rim of Holden Crater and helped form a lake in the crater. It's estimated that Nirgal Vallis had a discharge of 4800 cubic meters/second. Water from Nirgal Vallis was inbounded in Uzboi Vallis because the rim of Holden Crater blocked the flow. At a certain point the stored water broke through the rim of Holden and created a lake 200–250 m deep. Water with a depth of at least 50 m entered Holden at a rate that 5-10 times the discharge of the Mississippi River. Terraces and the presence of large rocks (tens of meters across) support these high discharge rates.
Inverted relief.
Some areas of Mars show inverted relief, where features that were once depressions, like streams, are now instead above the surface. These may have been formed when materials, like large rocks, were deposited in low-lying areas, then left behind after erosion (perhaps wind which can not move large rocks) removed much of the surface layers. Other ways of making inverted relief might be lava flowing down a stream bed or materials being cemented by minerals dissolved in water. On Earth, materials cemented by silica are highly resistant to all kinds of erosional forces. Inverted relief in the shape of streams are further evidence of water flowing on the Martian surface in past times. There are many examples of inverted channels near Juventae Chasma; some are shown in the image of Juventae Chasma below.
Vallis.
Vallis (plural "valles") is the Latin word for "valley". It is used in planetary geology for the naming of landform features on other planets.
Vallis was used for old river valleys that were discovered on Mars, when probes were first sent to Mars. The Viking Orbiters caused a revolution in our ideas about water on Mars; huge river valleys were found in many areas. Space craft cameras showed that floods of water broke through dams, carved deep valleys, eroded grooves into bedrock, and traveled thousands of kilometers.
Recurrent slope lineae.
Recurrent slope lineae (RSL) are small dark streaks on slopes that elongate in warm seasons. They may be evidence of liquid water.


Henri-Alexandre Deslandres

Henri Alexandre Deslandres (24 July 1853 – 15 January 1948) was a French astronomer, director of the Meudon and Paris Observatories, who carried out intensive studies on the behaviour of the atmosphere of the Sun.
Biography.
Deslandres' undergraduate years at the École Polytechnique were played out against the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the chaos of the Paris Commune so, on graduation in 1874, he responded to the continuing military tension with the emerging Germany by embarking on a military career. Rising to the rank of captain in the engineers, he became increasingly interested in physics and, in 1881, resigned his commission to join Alfred Cornu's laboratory at the École Polytechnique, working on spectroscopy. He continued his spectroscopic work at the Sorbonne, earning his doctorate in 1888 and finding numerical patterns in spectral lines that paralleled the work of Johann Balmer and were to catalyse the development of quantum mechanics in the 20th century.
In 1868, Pierre Janssen's solar observations had led him to report to the Académie des Sciences that "It is no longer geometry and mechanics which dominate [in astronomy] but physics and chemistry." Such advice was sternly rejected by director of the Paris Observatory Urbain Le Verrier and the French government awarded Janssen a grant to establish an astrophysical observatory at Meudon on the outskirts of Paris with Janssen as the sole astronomer. In 1889, Le Verrier was succeeded by Amédée Mouchez who set to work to bring astrophysics into the mainstream by hiring Deslandres. Deslandres developed the spectroheliograph simultaneously with George Hale.
In 1898, he joined Janssen at Meudon, increasing the scientific staff by 100%. On Janssen's death in 1907, Deslandres became director and embarked on a programme of expansion. Deslandres was the President of the Société Astronomique de France (SAF), the French astronomical society, from 1907-1909. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, though already in his 60s, he returned to active service in the engineers as a major and later lieutenant colonel. In 1918, following the armistice, he resumed his office at Meudon until 1926 when its administration merged with that of the Paris Observatory, Mouchez assuming the role of director of both institutions until his retirement in 1929.
He remained active in research right up until his death. Fellow astronomer Raymond Michard observed that "In his bearing, his character and his style of life Deslandres always remained more akin to the soldier (and the officer) than to the scholar."
Honours.
Awards
Named after him


Tabetha S. Boyajian

Tabetha "Tabby" Suzanne Boyajian (born 1980) is an American astronomer of Armenian descent and astrophysicist on faculty at Louisiana State University. She was a post-doctoral fellow 2012–16 at Yale University, working with Debra Fischer. Boyajian is active in the astronomical fields of stellar interferometry, stellar spectroscopy, exoplanet research, and high angular resolution astronomy, all particularly at optical and infrared wavelengths. She was the lead author of the September 2015 paper "Where's the Flux?", which investigated the highly unusual light curve of KIC 8462852; the star is colloquially known as Tabby's Star in her honor.
Background.
Boyajian received a BS degree in Physics with concentration in Astronomy from the College of Charleston in 2003, an MS degree in Physics from Georgia State University in 2005, and a PhD degree in Astronomy from the same university in 2009. She studied the sizes of nearby stars similar to the Sun, using the University's CHARA array, a long-baseline optical and infrared interferometer located at Mount Wilson Observatory. Boyajian was awarded a Hubble Fellowship, and stayed at Georgia State University to study sizes of nearby stars much smaller than the Sun and stars with planets. Fellow astronomer Sarah Ballard has described this as "truly remarkable" work and has used what she calls this "precious sample" of data on nearby small stars for the "characterization by proxy" method to help investigate the far more distant exoplanet Kepler-61b.
Boyajian cowrote "Extrasolar Planets and Their Host Stars" in 2017 with Kaspar von Braun .
, Boyajian is secretary and steering committee member of Division G Stars and Stellar Physics of the International Astronomical Union.
Boyajian is also manager of the Planet Hunters project in which amateurs analyze data from the "Kepler" space observatory.
Tabby's Star.
On 14 October 2015, a strange pattern of light from star KIC 8462852, nicknamed "Tabby's Star" after Boyajian – the lead researcher who discovered the irregular light fluctuation – was captured by the Kepler Space Telescope, and raised speculation that a Dyson sphere may have been discovered.
In February 2016, Boyajian gave a TED talk where she explained why she and others thought they had possibly discovered a massive alien structure and speculation on Dyson's Spheres:
Wanting to understand the strange light pattern, Boyajian put several hypotheses to the test. Everyone's first thought was an exoplanet detected around this massive star, but the dips in light lasted anywhere from 5 to 80 days and were erratically spaced apart thus ruling out any kind of an orbit for one celestial object. A dust cloud was proposed but the star showed no signs of being young so a dust cloud was highly improbable. Lastly, a comet shower was hypothesized. However as Boyajian pointed out in her TED talk this was the most likely out of all the hypotheses and yet was still highly improbable.
So after all the natural explanations turned up weak, her team decided to send off their research to SETI (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence) to rule out aliens. After reviewing the research the SETI Institute was so intrigued that they decided to study the star themselves and pointed their Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the star "with hopes of catching a tell-tale signal that might reveal a technological civilization."
The SETI Institute mentioned what caught their eye and made them take on the research themselves: "Even more interesting, the timing of the present dip (in light) suggests that whatever this material is, it is situated at just the right distance from the star to be in the 'habitable zone,' where we believe life like ours could develop as it has on Earth."
Being as skeptical as Boyajian was, she took SETI's approach and allowed herself to have a bit of fun in hypothesizing what the light pattern could have been. In her Ted Talk she joked:
The search for answers to KIC 8462852 is still ongoing, with two papers published in the summer of 2019 offering plausible scientific scenarios, involving larger moons being stripped from their planets.


Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope

The Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope, also known as the Mayall 4-meter Telescope, is a four-meter (158 inches) reflector telescope located at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and named after Nicholas U. Mayall. It saw first light on February 27, 1973, and was the second-largest telescope in the world at that time. Initial observers included David Crawford, Nicholas Mayall, and Arthur Hoag. It was dedicated on June 20, 1973 after Mayall's retirement as director. The mirror has an f/2.7 hyperboloidal shape. It is made from a two-foot () thick fused quartz disk that is supported in an advanced-design mirror cell. The prime focus has a field of view six times larger than that of the Hale reflector. It is host to the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. The identical Victor M. Blanco Telescope was later built at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, in Chile.
The telescope was dedicated in the summer of 1973, at which time it was the second largest telescope by aperture in the world. The telescope was named after Mayall who was the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory (of the United States) for over a decade.
The telescope primary mirror is designed to function as the first element in a Ritchey-Chretien optical design. The telescope was originally designed with three focal point options: the prime focus, a wide-field R/C focus, and a coude focus.
In 1961, after work had moved forward on other telescopes, Mayall proposed an even larger 150-inch mirror telescope for Kitt Peak. Site construction began in 1968, and by 1971 the mirror was delivered to the site. The mirror was made by Owens-Illinois.
The mirror was made of fused quartz, valued for its low coefficient of thermal expansion, and the blank was ground at the Kitt Peak optical lab.
Instruments.
Examples of instruments over its lifetime include various spectrographs, Cryogenic Camera, the Phoenix spectrometer, and the DLIRIM.
The KNPO Mosaic camera was installed in 1998, and was designed for the prime focus. This camera had eight 2048 × 4096 CCD sensors. This led to another camera Mosaic II for the CTIO 4-m telescope in the southern hemisphere.
Mosaic3 was an imaging camera for the Mayall telescope. This prime focus camera was used for a 3-band survey in support of the upcoming DESI instrument.
One instrument used with telescope was the Fourier Transform Spectrograph. The FTS was used between 1975 and 1995, creating an archive of recorded spectra. It was noted for collecting infrared spectrum before the advent of infrared imaging arrays.
Over the time of its operation 10,000 spectra were taken of 800 different astronomical targets, and these were made available in the SpArc data archive in the early 21st century.
An instrument designed to help understand dark energy, installation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) was completed in late 2019. Very little is known about dark energy, the supposed pressure responsible for the accelerating expansion rate of the universe.
DESI has five thousand fiber optic sensors, each one being robotically targetable at the focal plane. Planned to examine the nature of millions of galaxies and quasars, the instrument has been a decade in construction and features contributions from hundreds of researchers.
The telescope control software was also upgraded in the 2010s to prepare for DESI.
DESI achieved first light in 2019 and was commissioned in March of 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, full operations have been delayed until mid-2021.
Discoveries & Observations.
In 1976 the Mayall Telescope was used to discover methane ice on planet Pluto.
The FTS on Mayall was also used to study methane in the outer solar system in the 1980s. The study included observation of monodeutered methane on Titan, a moon of Saturn noted for its thick atmosphere.
The Mayall was also one of several large telescopes that was part of a study of the Andromeda galaxy. The observations helped understand the history of that Galaxy, which turn helps understand Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way.
Contemporaries on commissioning.
The Mayall was the second-largest telescope when inaugurated, between the Hale (5 m) and Shane (3 m).
Largest telescopes 1973:
Here is the dedication of the telescope with its namesake at the eyepiece:


Michael Neander

Michael Neander (originally Neumann) (April 3, 1529 – October 23, 1581) was a German teacher, mathematician, medical academic, and astronomer.
He was born in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, and was educated at the University of Wittenberg, receiving his B.A. in 1549 and M.A. in 1550.
From 1551 until 1561 he taught mathematics and astronomy in Jena, Germany. He became a professor in 1558 when the school where he taught became a university. From 1560 until his death he was a professor of medicine at the University of Jena.
He died in Jena, Germany. The crater Neander on the Moon is named after him.


Theodore Wirgman

 Augustus Theodore Wirgman, DD (- 18 October 1917) was an Anglican priest in the second half of the Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth, most notably Archdeacon of Port Elizabeth from 1907 until his death.
Wirgman was born in Bradbourne. He was educated at Rossall School; Magdalene College, Cambridge; and the University of the Cape. He was ordained deacon in 1870, and priest in 1871. After curacies in Hartington, Alton and Handsworth he went out to South Africa in 1873.He was for many years the incumbent at St Mary, Port Elizabeth.
He was the author of "The Blessed Virgin and All the Company of Heaven" (Oxford: A. R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd, 1905; London: Cope & Fenwick, 1905; Milwaukee: The Young Churchman, 1913).


St. Thomas Observatory

The St. Thomas Observatory is an astronomical observatory operated by the Department of Physics on the main campus of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. The observatory consists of an automated dome and a fully robotic 17-inch (0.43 m) corrected Dall-Kirkham reflecting telescope coupled with a 10.7-megapixel CCD camera. The observatory is used for public observing events and facilitates student research projects.


Arthur Mostyn Field

Admiral Sir Arthur Mostyn Field, (27 June 1855 – 3 July 1950) was a senior officer in the Royal Navy who served as Hydrographer of the Navy from 1904 to 1909.
Biography.
Field was born in Braybrooke, Northamptonshire, the youngest son of Captain John Bousquet Field of the Royal Navy and his wife Cecilia Mostyn. He was educated at Lymington and enlisted in 1868 as a cadet in the Royal Navy, where he joined the training ship .
After two years basic training Field was appointed in succession to HMS "Trafalgar" and HMS "Narcissus" as a midshipman. After further courses of instruction. he was promoted lieutenant in 1875. The following year he was posted to the newly converted survey ship, , spending the next four years in the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the east coast of Africa, followed by a survey mission to the Oil Rivers of West Africa. In 1882 he went in HMS "Sylvia" to survey the Straits of Magellan.
Field was promoted commander in 1889, and served from 1890 to 1894 on around Borneo. Made captain in 1895, he was given command of and commissioned to survey islands in the south west Pacific (1896–99). For the next few years, he worked taking depth soundings in home waters, based on the survey vessel . He was appointed Hydrographer of the Navy in August 1904.
Field was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1905 as a "distinguished hydrographic surveyor". His application citation referred to "Marine Surveys in command of HM Ships from 1886 to 1904 in Australia, Pacific Islands, China Seas, and British Islands", and said he had done much for the scientific explorations of the deep oceans.
Field was promoted to the rank of rear admiral in 1906, vice admiral in 1910, and placed on the retired list later that year. He was made Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the 1911 Coronation Honours, and advanced to the rank of admiral on the Retired List on 4 June 1913.
Field wrote on surveying, expanding the textbook "Hydrographical Surveying" written by Admiral Sir William Wharton.
Field had a daughter, Cecilia, who went on to study at Somerville College, Oxford. He died in Christchurch, Hampshire in 1950. His son, Midshipman T. M. Field, was killed in the battlecruiser at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.


Buehler Planetarium and Observatory

The Buehler Planetarium and Observatory is a 40-foot in diameter, domed theater. The planetarium uses the Definiti fulldome video system. It is located at the A.Hugh Adams central campus of Broward College in Davie, Florida. It is the only public planetarium in Broward County.
Shows are held on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Admission costs $4 during the week and $6 during the weekend. Admission is free for Broward College students with ID. The observatory patio houses 20 telescopes, which are free to use and are available from 8-10 pm on these three show nights.
Renovation update: Telescope observation nights are currently limited to Wednesday nights, from 7-10 pm, while the planetarium undergoes renovations.
History.
The planetarium was opened in 1965 and was funded by a donation by the Emil Buehler Trust.


Polish Astronomical Society

The Polish Astronomical Society (Polish: "Polskie Towarzystwo Astronomiczne, PTA") is science society in Poland, founded in 1923, with headquarters in Warsaw. Members of PTA are professional astronomers. Purpose of the association is promoting the development of astronomical science, their teaching and outreach in community. PTA is involved in publishing astronomical books, as well as popular science magazine Urania - Postępy Astronomii. PTA is also a producer of a TV series Astronarium about astronomy and space. The society organizes conferences and contests. Current President of PTA is Marek Sarna and number of members is around 280. Polish Astronomical Society is a member of the European Astronomical Society.
Since 2003, the Polish Astronomical Society has been presenting scientists with the Bohdan Paczyński Medal for significant contributions to astronomy and astrophysics as well as the Włodzimierz Zonn Prize (since 1983) for popularizing the knowledge of the universe.


Longtaitou Festival

The Longtaitou Festival (), also known as the Eryue'er Festival（二月二）, is a traditional Chinese festival held on the second day of the second month of the Chinese calendar. Its name means "Dragon raising its head" because the dragon was regarded as the deity in charge of rain, an important factor in ancient agriculture. The festival is sometimes simply called "2 Month 2" (Er Yue Er, 二月二) for short.
The festival is celebrated around the time of Jingzhe, one of the 24 solar terms (節氣). The phrase Jing Zhe (驚蟄) has the meaning of awakening of the hibernated (implying insects). Jing (驚) is startling, and Zhe (蟄) is hibernated (insects). This is the time during which the hibernating insects begun to wake up at the beginning of early spring, which is often accompanied by the arrival of the first rains, meaning the weather is getting warm. Longtaitou Festival is an important worship ritual of wishing for good harvest in the coming months. In addition to paying homage to the Dragon King, Tu Di Gong is also worshipped. Another ancient practice to celebrate Longtaitou Festival was to get rid of insect pests in homes via fumigation by burning various herbs with recognized insect repellent effects.
Today, Longtaitou Festival is celebrated in various ways, most of which are still identical to those practiced in the ancient times, including eating Chinese pancakes (春饼) and dragon beard noodles. It is an auspicious day for people to get a haircut, after month-long time without cutting hair in January for Lunar New Year. Women and children carry Perfume bags filled with the powder of ground fragrant herbs for good fortune, though they are no longer used as insect repellent as in ancient times.
Another ancient celebration still practiced today is that Longtaitou Festival is the first day of the Taihao (太昊) temple fair that lasts until the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar. The fair is a celebration of ancestral deities Fuxi and Nüwa, and the Longtaitou Festival marks the beginning of this celebration.
There were ancient traditions practiced during the festival that are no longer part of the modern celebrations, including:
The Zhonghe Festival was an official festival and holiday in the Tang and Song Dynasties, celebrated on the day before the Longtaitou Festival: on the first day of the second month of the Chinese calendar.


Heavenly Stems

The ten Heavenly Stems or Celestial Stems () are a Chinese system of ordinals that first appear during the Shang dynasty, c. 1250 BC, as the names of the ten days of the week. They were also used in Shang-period ritual as names for dead family members, who were offered sacrifices on the corresponding day of the Shang week. The Heavenly Stems were used in combination with the Earthly Branches, a similar cycle of twelve days, to produce a compound cycle of sixty days. Subsequently, the Heavenly Stems lost their original function as names for days of the week and dead kin, and acquired many other uses, the most prominent and long lasting of which was their use together with the Earthly Branches as a 60-year calendrical cycle. The system is used throughout East Asia.
Table.
The Japanese names of the Heavenly Stems are based on their corresponding Wu Xing elements, while their Manchu names are based on their respective elements' colors.
Origin.
The Shang people believed that there were ten suns, each of which appeared in order in a ten-day cycle (旬; xún). The Heavenly Stems ("tiāngān" 天干) were the names of the ten suns, which may have designated world ages as did the Five Suns and the Six Ages of the World of Saint Augustine. They were found in the given names of the kings of the Shang in their Temple Names. These consisted of a relational term (Father, Mother, Grandfather, Grandmother) to which was added one of the ten "gān" names ("e.g." Grandfather Jia). These names are often found on Shang bronzes designating whom the bronze was honoring (and on which day of the week their rites would have been performed, that day matching the day designated by their name). David Keightley, a leading scholar of ancient China and its bronzes, believes that the "gān" names were chosen posthumously through divination. Some historians think the ruling class of the Shang had ten clans, but it is not clear whether their society reflected the myth or vice versa. The associations with Yin-Yang and the Five Elements developed later, after the collapse of the Shang Dynasty.
The literal meanings of the characters were, and are now, roughly as follows. Among the modern meanings, those deriving from the characters' position in the sequence of Heavenly Stems are in italics.
Current usage.
The Stems are still commonly used nowadays in East Asian counting systems similar to the way the alphabet is used in English. For example:


Katarche

Katarche ("καταρχή") is an ancient Greek word meaning a "beginning" or "inception."
One of the older applications of the term was within the context of religious rituals to refer to the moment when the sacrifice was first offered, or when the beginning or inception of the sacrifice took place. (See Homer, Odyssey, Chapter III.)
The main application of the term "katarche" in the Hellenistic and Roman period was to the branch of astrology now called electional astrology, or the art of choosing an auspicious time to begin a venture or an enterprise. Also included in this practice were techniques for analyzing an astrological chart drawn up for the beginning moment of an event that had already taken place, in order to foretell the likely success of a venture, or the timing of its development.
Recently, in the late 20th century, some astrologers began to extend the use of the word "katarche" to interrogations or horary astrology, where a chart is cast for the moment that a question is posed to an astrologer. According to this modern interpretation there is a fluid connection between the notions of electional and horary astrology. This view, which is primarily advocated by Geoffrey Cornelius, is that the origins of the concept and core meaning of the term "katarche" lie in the ritual, sacrificial and divinitory connotations of the term, and that the later application of the term in the Hellenistic and Roman periods strictly to elections and inceptions were a result of some sort of decay in the understanding of the term.


Richard Green (astronomer)

Richard Green is an American astronomer, former director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, UKIRT and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory.
Career.
He was awarded a bachelor’s degree in astronomy by Harvard University in 1971 and a Ph.D. by California Institute of Technology in 1977.
He worked at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) for over 20 years, being promoted deputy director of NOAO in 1992.
He was appointed Director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in 1997 after which he moved in 2005 to become Director of the Large Binocular Telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory in southeast Arizona.
He was also an adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona where he was Director of the University of Arizona/United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Observatory. He was also a member of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph instrument team for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Nuker Team and the NASA Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission science team.
In 2017 he was appointed Division Director in the Division of Astronomical Sciences, National Science Foundation.
His main research interest is in the area of active galaxies and quasars. He was elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020


Lunar mare

The lunar maria (singular: mare ) are large, dark, basaltic plains on Earth's Moon, formed by ancient volcanic eruptions. They were dubbed "maria", Latin for "seas", by early astronomers who mistook them for actual seas. They are less reflective than the "highlands" as a result of their iron-rich composition, and hence appear dark to the naked eye. The maria cover about 16% of the lunar surface, mostly on the side visible from Earth. The few maria on the far side are much smaller, residing mostly in very large craters. The traditional nomenclature for the Moon also includes one "oceanus" (ocean), as well as features with the names "lacus" (lake), "palus" (marsh), and "sinus" (bay). The last three are smaller than maria, but have the same nature and characteristics.
The names of maria refer to sea features (Mare Humorum, Mare Imbrium, Mare Insularum, Mare Nubium, Mare Spumans, Mare Undarum, Mare Vaporum, Oceanus Procellarum, Mare Frigoris), sea attributes (Mare Australe, Mare Orientale, Mare Cognitum, Mare Marginis), or states of mind (Mare Crisium, Mare Ingenii, Mare Serenitatis, Mare Tranquillitatis). Mare Humboldtianum and Mare Smythii were established before the final nomenclature, that of states of mind, was accepted, and do not follow this pattern. When Mare Moscoviense was discovered by the Luna 3, and the name was proposed by the Soviet Union, it was only accepted by the International Astronomical Union with the justification that Moscow is a state of mind.
Ages.
The ages of the mare basalts have been determined both by direct radiometric dating and by the technique of crater counting. The radiometric ages range from about 3.16 to 4.2 billion years old (Ga), whereas the youngest ages determined from crater counting are about 1.2 Ga. Nevertheless, the majority of mare basalts appear to have erupted between about 3 and 3.5 Ga. The few basaltic eruptions that occurred on the far side are old, whereas the youngest flows are found within Oceanus Procellarum on the nearside. While many of the basalts either erupted within, or flowed into, low-lying impact basins, the largest expanse of volcanic units, Oceanus Procellarum, does not correspond to any known impact basin.
Distribution of mare basalts.
There are many common misconceptions concerning the spatial distribution of mare basalts.
The reason that the mare basalts are predominantly located on the near-side hemisphere of the Moon is still being debated by the scientific community. Based on data obtained from the Lunar Prospector mission, it appears that a large proportion of the Moon's inventory of heat producing elements (in the form of KREEP) is located within the regions of Oceanus Procellarum and the Imbrium basin, a unique geochemical province now referred to as the Procellarum KREEP Terrane. While the enhancement in heat production within the Procellarum KREEP Terrane is most certainly related to the longevity and intensity of volcanism found there, the mechanism by which KREEP became concentrated within this region is not agreed upon.
Composition.
Using terrestrial classification schemes, all mare basalts are classified as tholeiitic, but specific subclassifications have been invented to further describe the population of lunar basalts. Mare basalts are generally grouped into three series based on their major element chemistry: "high-Ti basalts", "low-Ti basalts", and "very-low-Ti (VLT) basalts". While these groups were once thought to be distinct based on the Apollo samples, global remote sensing data from the Clementine mission now shows that there is a continuum of titanium concentrations between these end members, and that the high-titanium concentrations are the least abundant. TiO2 abundances can reach up to 15 wt.% for mare basalts, whereas most terrestrial basalts have abundances much less than 4 wt.%. A special group of lunar basalts is the KREEP basalts, which are abnormally rich in potassium (K), rare-earth elements (REE), and phosphorus (P). A major difference between terrestrial and lunar basalts is the near-total absence of water in any form in the lunar basalts. Lunar basalts do not contain hydrogen-bearing minerals like the amphiboles and phyllosilicates that are common in terrestrial basalts due to alteration or metamorphism.


Roger Williams Park Museum of Natural History and Planetarium

Roger Williams Park Museum of Natural History and Planetarium is a natural history museum and planetarium within Roger Williams Park in Providence, Rhode Island.
History.
The park and museum are named after Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island, and are located on land donated by Williams family. The museum is part of the Providence Parks. It was founded in 1896. The building was designed in late 1893 by Martin & Hall, and construction began the following year. in 1914-15 a northern wing was added, also to the designs of Martin & Hall.
Exhibits.
The Cormack Planetarium offers regular showings and the Natural History Museum contains a vast array of scientific specimens.