Another Check off the Bucket List

I got to see the transit of Venus on Tuesday. So happy that I kept the eclipse glasses from the solar eclipse. I didn't get any good pictures this time (since my camera's only got 4x zoom), but I did see it with my "naked" eye. The picture on the left is essentially what I saw.

Considering that a child born for the next 5-25 years (assuming they live to 80) won't see another transit, I'm excited. It's a good time to be alive.

Awesome Stuff on Mars

Last fall, I took a course called Fundamentals of Planetary Geology, taught by Dr. Ronald Greeley, whose death was actually the topic of one of my first posts. The majority of the grade came from a semester-long project focusing on some aspect of geology. I chose to do a review of the literature on potentially alluvial deltas in some craters on Mars. Not particularly exciting stuff, I'll admit.

Another student, Andrew Ryan, chose to study lava flows on Mars. He found strange spiral patterns in the flows. No one had ever seen these types of flows, called lava coils, before on another planet. They have been seen in Hawaii and near the Galapagos rift in the Pacific Ocean.

Ryan made his presentation, and some of the faculty helping to grade the presentations, since this was after Dr. Greeley's death, told him that he should polish up the report and send it into Science to try and get it published.

The SESE Source, a newsletter for the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU, announced that Ryan did indeed get published in Science on 27 April 2012. Here's a link to the article's abstract:
Coils and Polygonal Crust in the Athabasca Valles Region, Mars, as Evidence for a Volcanic History

That lucky bastard.

Ring of Fire

I went to see the solar eclipse today. It was absolutely awesome! My friend Penny and I went up to Flagstaff first. Our first stop was at the Lowell Observatory, but we literally were standing in line when the last solar glasses were sold. I bought myself a patch and a bookmark, and Penny got a couple of stickers, and then we hung out at Barnes & Noble for about an hour before heading up to Wupatki National Monument.

We stopped at the Sunset Crater Visitor Center to find out where we needed to go and buy our passes. It wasn't too expensive, which was nice. We then drove (the long way) to Wupatki. Penny didn't mind since she got to see the lava flows there. The Lowell Observatory had some people out there with some solar telescopes and I got to see some sun spots through them.

The eclipse started at about 5:30 PM. An older couple had an extra pair of solar glasses, so they gave them to us. I got to take a lot of pictures, and at about 6:30 PM, the eclipse reached its peak. Everyone started to cheer. It was amazing. I wanted to try to get a picture of it by projecting it through my dad's binoculars onto a sketchbook, but it didn't work. I did get a picture of it through the solar glasses, and thankfully it wasn't too blurry. We left a little bit after that.

The ride home wasn't too bad, though we didn't get home until about 11:00 PM.