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I have forty years of experience in Astronomy, specifically solar and space physics. My specialties include the physics of solar flares, sunspots, including their effects on Earth and statistics as applied to astronomical investigations.
Astronomy: more than forty years experience starting with construction of my own simple telescopes. Worked at university observatory in college, doing astrographic measurements. M.Phil. degree in Physics/Solar Physics and more than ten years as researcher.
The extent and breadth in the cosmic perspective, and basically 'putting humans in their proper place', disabusing them of an exaggerated sense of self-importance.
To achieve: a computer program that can profile different double layer conditions for solar flares. To learn: anything that I haven't already.
The discovery of Pluto was a pure fluke based on in error in (Percival) Lowell's calculations. (The mass of Pluto was taken to be 6.6 x the Earth's!)It just turned out that Pluto was where Lowell predicted it was- but his calculations were totally wrong! The right result, for the wrong reason.
Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for daring to speculate that life could exist on other worlds, and writing about it.
Hello, Actually - the mass of the Sun is 1.99 x 10^30 kg Anyway, we begin by setting the gravitational force of attraction equal to the centripetal force: where M denotes the Sun's mass, m is
Hello, Unfortunately, there are few genuine scenarios for such an event unless the flare was absolutely humongous - maybe 1 million times more powerful than the August, 1972 flares that eroded more
Hello, I am really not sure what you mean by global warming "affecting the amateur astronomer". Do you mean in terms of cloud cover? Anyway, I will assume that is what you meant for the purposes of
Hello, The "Nibiru" stuff is all basically claptrap. At a Meeting of the AAS Dynamical Astronomy Division I attended in April of 2008, the subject briefly arose in one question period (during which
Hello again, Okay, well I wasn't quite sure what your background was, so preferred to err on the side of caution and being conservative. Before one can go into the geometry of the cosmos, one first
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