Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 22, 2015

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SOLAR ECLIPSE DARKENS SKIES

by Hazed

It was cloudy in London on Friday morning. The sky was covered in thick grey cloud, and the mist made the city skyscrapers, which I can usually see from my window, invisible.

Nothing unusual about that – it’s often dull and miserable in London. But it was particularly disappointing on that day, because the clouds meant we didn’t get to see the near-total eclipse of the sun in person, and had to content ourselves with watching it on TV or online.

The fact that the moon eclipses the sun entirely is due to a complete fluke of nature. It just so happens that the sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the moon, and the sun is 400 times further away than the moon. That’s why the moon covers the sun so completely, leaving just a sparkling band of light around it.

Of course, as someone joked on Twitter, today the eclipse was “a
celestial phenomenon in which the sun is totally obscured by a cloud the exact size and shape of the sky.”

Here’s some links to reports and pictures of the eclipse:
Live report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-31906556
Pictures: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-31981666
From the International Space Station: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11484849/Solar-eclipse-amazing-picture-from-International-Space-Station-was-photoshopped.html

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