Small Space News Story Roundup 26

It's such a slow news day that's hard to come up with even a couple of small stories.

Here we are on January 4th, soon to be 5th, and there's nothing on ULA's blog about the January 8 Cert-1 flight of their Vulcan Centaur.  As I write, the most recent up date is from December 20th about the system being fully stacked and my post about it was two weeks ago tonight. 

As far as I can tell, the mission is still set for No Earlier Than next Monday, Jan 8, at 2:18 AM EST from SLC-41 on Cape Canaveral SFS.  That will be early morning or late Sunday night, depending on if we stay up or go to bed and set an alarm to watch - and right now, the forecast is for almost complete cloud coverage. 

This mission, as you know, will send the Astrobotic Peregrine lander on its attempt to become the first private mission to land on the moon.   

The private moon lander is slated to touch down in late February, planting its legs at the moon's Sinus Viscositatis (Bay of Stickiness), adjacent to the Gruitheisen Domes. The touchdown target is on the northeast border of Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms).

As an aside, "the Bay of Stickiness"?? WTF??  Highly imaginative for the time when it was named.  It turns out it was named in 2022 not in the 17 or 1800s like I assumed.

While both dates being the same numerically is nothing more than coincidence, don't forget that three 8ths of the month from now is April 8th which brings a total eclipse of the sun, and it's being talked about as "one of the most urban eclipses for decades."  Just check out this list of the 10 most populous cities that the path of totality will cover.

It gets the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolex as well as Austin and (at least parts of) San Antonio, finally covering most of Montreal, Canada before going off into very lightly inhabited  parts of Canada. 

"The total eclipse of the sun next April 8 will envelop many millions of people," Michael Zeiler, eclipse cartographer at GreatAmericanEclipse.com, told Space.com in an email. "31 million people already live inside the path within the U.S., and when you add the millions more Mexicans and Canadians in the path, plus the visitors who come to see totality, between 40 and 50 million people will witness the total solar eclipse."

Much more detail at that Space.com article and its links. 

Having traveled up to Tennessee to see the August 2017 total eclipse, I have to say it's worth some travel if you've never seen one.  Weather is definitely a factor in all eclipse watching, and more for this one in April than the one in August of '17.  The places least likely to be cloudy are in the southwest end of the map, while the northeast end has the highest chances of being cloudy.  As commenter punzdeleon said to my post on traveling to see the eclipse had a great observation:

The sight of a black disc surrounded by glory plucks primal nerves. If you have the chance to see one do so.

---

Pardon my mess, as they say in the construction biz, but it might be a bit messy around here. 

I've been poking around with some minor changes to the blog layout and for the next few days it's likely to be a little weird around here.  You might find you reload the page and things have changed.  Probably nothing major, just tweaks here and there that might get tried then kept or thrown away.  

This started when the silver price graphic stopped working; the one that was just under the top of the right sidebar.  That's gone now, but I'm trying to replace it.  I just haven't found the right magic incantation address to link to.  

This will probably be going on for a few days.