Eclipse over the Great Wall
Credit & Copyright: Mike Simmons (Astronomers Without Borders, TWAN)
Explanation: Contrary to the famous myth, you can't see the Great Wall of China from the Moon ... even during a total solar eclipse. But on August 1 you could see the Moon eclipsing the Sun from the Great Wall. In fact, from this location near the Great Wall's western end, the Moon completely blocked the Sun's overwhelming disk revealing a shimmering solar corona and bright planets in the briefly darkened sky. A main pass, The Great Wall's Jiayuguan Fort, is also silhouetted in the foreground. The pass is the western-most of the wall's passes and the best preserved, initially built around 1372 during the Ming dynasty. The nearby city of Jiayuguan in Gansu Province was an important stop on the Silk Road.
For a panoramic view from Mt. Everest, go here: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080830.html
It's amazing. What a feat! And speaking of athletic feats, the results of yesterday's race can be found online at www.macon.com, but I'll save you the hassle of going through pages and pages of results. My time was 33'18", while John, he of the track star background*, was 27'54". Just think how much faster he might have been had he run off and left me at the start like I encouraged him to do instead of running with me for the first 1/3rd of a mile? Next time I'll urge him to leave me and just go. He's fast, you know.
*John was a track star in high school. Fast. Very, very fast.
I used to be much faster than I am now, but this time I didn't have Mark Nash running back for me and urging me to pick it up and yelling, "Faster!Faster!! She's in your age group!" whenever he thought I might pass someone if I just tried a little more. He didn't care if that woman looked to be 85 and was using a walker, at that moment she was firmly in my age group. He was right, you know. I got a couple of third place finishes in my age group because I did pick up the pace at his urging. Never at a big race like the Labor Day, but at smaller ones in Dublin and Cordele and the like. Thanks, Mark. :0)
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