Skip to main content

Beautiful Conspiracies by Nature - Part 1

In this blog, I will try to illustrate beautiful natural wonders, which are the way because nature wanted us to see them that way...no other reason long or short....

Let's call our roll list,

  1. Solar Eclipse
We all know that solar eclipse are occur because moon obstructs sun's light or in a more layman's term, moon casts it's shadow on earth when it transits between earth and sun. But few might have pondered upon the fact that the mystic diamond ring and total solar eclipse (when it virtually becomes dark, in a small part of earth) have a more subtle origin.

These happen because from earth surface, lunar and solar discs looks of same size, and that's the reason why moon exactly covers the solar disc during eclipse. The exactness is more crucial in the formation of diamond ring during eclipse.
In case, somebody is wondering, this is Diamond Ring.
But isn't sun and moon incomparable in sizes? Then how come they have similar sized discs?
Yes, sun and moon are like a football field and a small marble, but moon's proximity to earth makes it much bigger or in other words, sun's remoteness makes it smaller to appear from earth. This figure below illustrates this better...

Notice that the angle subtended by moon and sun are same on earth. This angle is also called as "angular spread". Do some simple mathematics and you would get a relation between diameter of sun, moon and distance between earth and both.

r_sun/d_sun = r_moon/d_moon

where, r_sun and r_moon are distances between earth and sun and moon respectively, while d_sun and d_moon are the diameters of sun and moon respectively.
Now, what causes this phenomenon? 
Nothing, simple chance. Nature wanted us to feast on this spectacular event every year.

What would have happened, if not this?
Well, then we would be able to see solar eclipse in it's present glory. If moon would have been a bit more smaller or a bit more nearer to us, it would block sun completely thus rendering us incapable from watching diamond ring. 

ON the other hand, if it would have been a bit more smaller or a bit more farther from us, then it would have deprived us of the total solar eclipse...Rays of light would escape and reach to earth even when moon is exactly in between earth and sun.

But anyway, this is going to happen in the next million or so year, as moon is going farther and farther from earth, and that would have more drastic effects than depriving us of a beautiful natural phenomenon.


To be continued...

Labels:
Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Multimaster replication with Symmetric DS

Symmetric DS is an awesome tool for trigger based replication whcih works for all major database vendors, including but not limited to PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle and many others. Symmetric-DS is a java application and can execute on any platform on whcih JRE is available including Windows and Linux. Trigger based replication, in constrast to disk based (eg. DRBD ) or transaction log file shipping based or statement based , works by registering triggers on DMLs and sending the data thus generated to remote machines. Another very popular trigger based DB replication tool is Slony . Symmetric-DS in addition to being database agnostic also supports multi-master replication (MMR). MMR usecase involves multiple database nodes, connected in a pool with DML updates coming from any of them. This is different from the normal master-slave replication, where slaves are not expected to generate any data events, and the sole authority of database is the master. MMR requirement causes d...
1 comment
Read more

RabbitMQ and SSL

RabbitMQ is an AMQP provider i.e. it can reliably queue, service and maintain messages according to a range of policies and parameters. By default, it listens to plain old TCP connections and sends and receives messages over plaintext. This feature just works "out of the box". For users who wish to use SSL over TCP aka TLS, it requires a bit more work on their part. First, let's create a bunch of certificates and sign them with our own CA. For this, we'll use easyrsa3 . Easyrsa is a CLI tool to create, sign and manage your own certification authorities. It's maintained by OpenVPN team. Download easyrsa using your native package manager i.e. yum or apt-get $cp -Rp /usr/share/easy-rsa ~/easy-rsa-3   $cd ~/easy-rsa-3 $./easyrsa init-pki $./easyrsa build-ca $./easyrsa build-server-full broker [nopass] $./easyrsa build-client-full client1 [nopass] This creates three entities (collection of private keys, public keys and certificates) for a CA, a s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Motorola XT502 Custom ROMs

I purchased an Android Phone in the early days of it coming to Indian market and I able to afford it ( just got a job), during mid 2010. The recent and popular version was Éclairs. I just went up to the shop and bought a nice and shiny Motorola Quench XT3 (XT502). When in other places XT502 was having Andriod Donut, I got as a special offer Éclairs. I was happy as hell. The Droid A couple of year passes, and newer versions of Android came from Éclairs to Froyo to Gingerbread then to the bigger version upgrades like Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich and then Jelly Bean. By the end of 2012, I was literally surviving on my Motorola with Éclairs. I had to upgrade, anyhow. Now more that Motorola denied any upgrades for Quench XT3 . A trivia, Android version names are taken from sugary desserts with lexicographic sequencing. So, I did up-gradation from Éclairs to Gingerbread using a custom ROM from Cyanogenmod . An excellent community of enthusiast who develop their own custom ROMs oft...
5 comments
Read more