Eclipse Day! Finally here! My very first total eclipse. Many in our group have seen 5 or more. My roommate is on his 7th. I never thought much of going halfway around the world to see something that lasted in this case, a mere 2 minutes, 9 seconds. People who do this are called “eclipse chasers”. But finally had some sense knocked into me when I realized that the eclipse is just a part of an otherwise fascinating journey. Each spot in the world...

Hi All, your intrepid app author here now on station in Cairns along the north coast of Australia (inhabited by an entire population of former convicts not to mention some newcomers trying to escape forthcoming confiscatory tax policies of Washington… (but I digress)… for Wednesday’s sunrise total solar eclipse. I do the dirty work so you don’t have to. Consider it really good QA as I need to, uh, “test”...

Just a quickie look at how Distant Suns handled June 5’s transit. I need an otherwise lame post like this to get something to show in the slide show. meh.

Distant Sun’s Headquarters for World Domination has temporarily moved from Silicon Valley to Kona, Hawaii for five days. I am here to catch the much ballyhooed (not to be confused with Bollywood), Transit of Venus.A transit is like an eclipse, except by a planet. Venusian transits are very rare, happening only in pairs with each pair over 100 years apart. So we had one about 8 years ago, but only visible in europe, now this one visible from...

You may have heard that it is possible to see Venus during broad daylight if you know exactly where to look. And as it is near it’s maximum brilliancy and near a more visible object, today was a perfect time to amaze your friends with your eagle-sharp eyesight. The moon serves as a marker of sorts to bring you to the vicinity, while a pair of binoculars will help you zoom in on the target. Today, Venus was about 5 moon diameters away in the 5...

NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are a pair of colliding spiral galaxies about 80 million light-years away in the constellation Canis Major. Both galaxies were discovered by John Herschel in 1835. So far three supernovae have been observed in NGC 2207.