Transit of Mercury
Last week my boss forwarded around the 'Geek Test'. I was 38% geek, which isn't too bad, considering I had colleagues who got 68%. I'm pretty sure husband lied on his test cos he was only 35%.
If there had been the question: "Would you come into work early to watch the transit of Mercury across the Sun through a Sunscope", I would have had to answer 'yes' today, and thus raised my geek levels (probably a considerable amount).
The image here is a projection of the sun through a Sun Spotter. The tiny dot inside the red circle in Mercury. The larger dot inside the square is a giant sun spot (probably bigger than Earth).
The Sunscopes (a telescope that cuts out all light except for a very small red bandwidth) allowed us to actually look at the Sun itself - I know the sun is a big ball of gas, but it was awesome actually seeing it in reality. We could see small solar flares coming off the surface, and the dimple around the sun spot caused by its magnetic field.
If there had been the question: "Would you come into work early to watch the transit of Mercury across the Sun through a Sunscope", I would have had to answer 'yes' today, and thus raised my geek levels (probably a considerable amount).
The image here is a projection of the sun through a Sun Spotter. The tiny dot inside the red circle in Mercury. The larger dot inside the square is a giant sun spot (probably bigger than Earth).The Sunscopes (a telescope that cuts out all light except for a very small red bandwidth) allowed us to actually look at the Sun itself - I know the sun is a big ball of gas, but it was awesome actually seeing it in reality. We could see small solar flares coming off the surface, and the dimple around the sun spot caused by its magnetic field.
posted by Miff at
9:25 am
1 Comments:
Geek or no geek (8% thanks very much..) that is cool.
There are times when I miss working in a science centre because you get to do/see cool stuff I normally would have no idea about. But then I remember the work that goes around the cool stuff...
By
Anonymous, at 5:49 pm
Post a Comment
<< Home