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The moon got in the way between the Earth and the Sun resulting in a total eclipse in Africa and Turkey and many distant areas from the U.S. earlier today, so I didn't "play it up" but for more information CLICK HERE or go to the old standby for astronomy sky events: spaceweather.com Also, my friend, Bruce Goren has provided the link to see the streaming video.
Great satellite shot from earlier Sunday showing the intervals of clouds and sunshine, and a large variety of cloud types. Compare that to TODAY's cloudless skies, an amazing shot. I noticed that Mt. Monadnock in SW NH looked like it was right next store, meaning visibility must be over 100 miles today.
Make sure to click on this image to the right to truly see how hi-res. the satellite photo is, right down to the twists and turns of the Connecticut river, nevermind the Wachusett and Quabbin Reservoirs.
Plan on seeing many more of these this week. Crocuses and even daffodils will start blooming as temperatures move into the 50s. These were taken along Buzzard's Bay.
Also .. as mentioned in another post, the spring peepers, are coming out THIS WEEK, right now..
I noticed it the other day (through special filters) and shrugged it off, but we are at sunspot MINIMUM now, in the roughly 11 year cycle. This is interesting because there were actually NO sunspots to be found on the sun two weeks ago even in telescopes. Now that is what I call a minimum. If you click THIS LINK you will see a loop of what the sun usually looks like. And if you click HERE you will find out why scientists are concerned about sunspots in the next few years! They are storms on the sun, cooler areas that hurl particles and energy Earth-bound.
UPDATE: Image upper left.. click on it to see a few sunspots that have now not only formed, weak as they are, they produced an aurora in Northern New England this past weekend, caught by one of our Todd Gross support members!
A comet is breaking apart and moving very very close to The Earth in May. It will even be BARELY visible to the naked eye.
For MY astrophotos CLICK HERE
If this isn't a hoax, it is one of the biggest pieces of Astronomy News in a long time: A new Red Spot on Jupiter! What is the Great Red Spot? A huge hurricane ever-present storm on Jupiter that has been churning for centuries. Usually smaller "ovals" form, similar, but much smaller to the either red spot (which often look orange and not red at all) but a truly new Red Spot would be amazing, rare, and the big question.. is it there for the long haul. See the NASA link above, I hope this is for real.
Adsense. It tends not to make a lot of money, but it is compensating website owners across the globe for their expenses. What is it? It is called Adsense, those mini-ads on the side of many many web pages that you see today. (Sometimes the ads are built right into the page) Most of these ads are non-obtrusive and can blend in with the content of the page, as they are automatically targeted to the subject the page is about. However, there are so many little things to consider about the "Adsense" program from Google, and related programs (including the inverse Adwords program) that I have started a blog with my thoughts on the subject, just blurting out what I am learning, when I am learning it. Check out MY ADSENSE BLOG
Today is the anniversary of the Blizzard of 1888 which produced between 4 and 5 FEET of snow between March 12th and 14th here in New England, but starting Worcester on west. Eastern Ma. "got the shaft" with a massive rain and snowstorm that produced less than a foot of snow downtown Boston, and mere inches on the Cape.
IMAGE LEFT IS FOR FRIDAY MIDDAY, 500 mb leve, approximately 18,000 feet... lower jet stream level.
CLICK ON IT.
THE LATEST ON FRIDAY: There is a tough call for St. Patrick's Day. The ECMWF computer model still looks fairly aggressive, but we have lost the "look" on the GFS. The image to the left is very important as it shows a short wave trough, the little bump with the X (vorticity) in the Ohio valley running east and out to sea underneath New England. It just does not have enough amplitude and does not come far enough north to spawn a decent low pressure system near the ground level so the corresponding area of positive vorticity advection, and warm advection slide well south and are fairly non impressive. It is still early in the game though, and as I said there is some dissent from the European based computer model... but this could end up to be an out to sea event if things keep going in this direction.
YUP! I could not stand the sight of bare bround this time of year, so I made approximately 30 " of snow in my sideyard. Problem is one of my compressors broke, so I am using a very precise (not much room for error) way of mixing the air and water in the red compressor on the left, and then in order to get a good amount of snow, I need to mix that little bit of snow grains coming out of the red compressor, with pressured-water coming out of the yellow pressure washer on the right. For more information about making YOUR OWN snow, go to snowguns.com !
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CLICK on map to view Station Details
CLICK on map to view Station Details
