Recent content by Bandersnatch

For this you can use the small angle approximation, which makes it a simple proportionality - if you start with the size, distance and apparent size of the Moon, then anything e.g. twice the distance looks half as small while anything twice the size looks twice as large. In terms of angular...

Looks like 'sun dogs' with the '22° halo'. Maybe the '46° halo' or the 'supralateral arc' as well, seeing how there is a secondary ring. They're all, in general, the effect of sunlight being reflected off of ice crystals in the atmosphere. Wikipedia has articles on those terms, with pictures and...

This ape lived long and had fun talking to other apes. It was a good ape, worth aping.

Thanks. I'm not familiar with it, so won't be able to help you. Unless you're looking for more general pointers, in which case you'd have to describe in more detail the issues you had. I assume you've read the manual, and looked at the wiki and tutorials provided on the website?

The argument here is that without rotation there could be sufficient difference in temperature between the two sides to either boil off water on the illuminated side, or freeze it on the far side. The issue with freezing here is that provided it's cold enough to freeze any water - all water will...

Late to the party, but I can offer some intuitions. Re.: a&d, these are not questions about physics, but alien biology and technological capabilities. The space of possibilities here is so large that it's impossible at this time to decide what is and isn't possible. Re.: b&c, these are...

Can you point to the software you're talking about?

Old Germanic (s,p) - regular plurals Goose = /go:s, go:si/ Mouse = /mu:s, mu:siz/ Moose = was ist das?* Old/Middle English - i-mutation occurs, causing the root vowel of the plural to be pronounced closer to the vowel of the ending; then loss of the redundant ending (as you now can distinguish...

Japanese schools have about two/two and a half months of total vacation time, usually split between a month/month and a half in summer - duration depending on region - and around a couple weeks each in spring and winter. The three breaks separate the three terms that tend to make up the school...

Laziness might very well have been an Olympic sport all this time. It's just that it's always cancelled, because you don't qualify if you show up.

As you can see in the bit you quoted, flammable comes from Latin flammare, while inflammable comes from Latin inflammare. Same language, no?

While the SKA does list search for alien signals as one of its projects, I'd wager my hat on it being there mainly as a media angle. It is a radio telescope, it's going to be used for radio astronomy.

The only interaction available here is tidal deformation. However, it is generally pretty weak, scales only linearly with mass, and very strongly (third power) with the inverse of the distance. That is a stronger dependence on distance than of the gravitational force. This makes it very hard...

Y'all assuming she misspelled meat, and not mistakenly typed a superfluous 'a'.

But to what extent? Attenuation by 10 or even 90% doesn't preclude detection. It's not all or nothing. You can't just hand-wave it and call it a day. Rather than coming up with fanciful arguments of dubious value (no, the ISM is very much not like the atmosphere in composition or attenuation...