Anti-climax. Today we were due to see a total eclipse. Sometime this morning. I had planned to have a look and had even armed myself with a piece of glass that had been coated in soot from a candle. The hazard of getting the flaming candle to deposit smoke without getting third-degree burns on my fingers was far greater than the damage that might be caused to my eyes by looking at the event without the filter. I saw nothing. Cloud? Looking in the wrong place? Who knows. Looking at some of the sites manned by experts that were following the event, it seemed that we were at the far North limit of any sighting. One thing I did gain was the scary detail about hazardous asteroids. Seems there are a number of these things out there that have the potential to make a really scary movie.
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs are on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. Seems that right now there are 710 known PHA out there. Seems that back in August we had a really big one pass by in what the men with pointy heads call a near miss. 6 million kilometres was their estimate. Having seen the Meteor Crater in Arizona, I do not require any movie to show me just what power these things have. The crater is a damned big hole and the rock that struck was only 45 metres. The story of the crater is quite interesting.
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