SandBoxBlogs: Steamboat Today "Jimmy Westlake: May’s magnificent ring eclipse"

Jimmy Westlake, all credit for story and photo: 
"Get ready, because here it comes.

Not since May 10, 1994, has a central eclipse of the sun been seen from the 48 contiguous United States. It has been a long eclipse drought, but come May 20, folks living in the southwestern U.S. will have a ringside seat for a spectacular annular eclipse of the sun. This eclipse is an annular, or ring eclipse, because the moon will be a little too far from Earth in its elliptical orbit to completely cover the sun. Instead, a thin annulus — or ring — of sunlight will surround the moon when it is centered on the solar disk...." 
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SandBox Comments: Summit County Citizens Voice "New surveys find plenty of planets in Milky Way"

sigh....sips her tea....sighs again....

....wonder if any of these are capable of sustaining human life and if so, how does one get there?

"SUMMIT COUNTY — The Milky Way likely has a huge number of planets that may be similar to Earth in some ways, according to one of the latest surveys of the galaxy.

“We used to think that the Earth might be unique in our galaxy. But now it seems that there are literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way,” said Daniel Kubas, one of the author of  the research paper published last week in Nature.

The data from six years of research suggests that one in six of the stars studied hosts a planet of similar mass to Jupiter, half have Neptune-mass planets and two thirds have super-Earths...."



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