Starship Asterisk*

Joe Stieber wrote:I've never seen a Mercury transit. The past three were obscured by clouds in my area. Despite a lot a of cloudy/rainy weather recently, the forecast for tomorrow looks good through the early afternoon, so keeping my fingers crossed, I'll have a chance to see much of it. In my area at 40°N-75°W, sunrise is at 5:50 am, the transit starts at 7:13 am and ends at 2:41 pm local time (topographic prediction).

I spent the month of April preparing for it. I observed Mercury on fourteen (14) evenings between April 3 and April 27, 2016. Initially, I spotted Mercury as it moved eastward away from superior conjunction with the sun, reached maximum elongation, then swung back westward towards the sun and its impending inferior conjunction. I started looking with a scope on the 14th when it was nominally half-illuminated, then saw it narrow to a crescent, although much of the time, the crescent looked like a fat banana due to poor seeing at the low altitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_mark wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Doña María de la Luz Padilla y Cervantes by Miguel Cabrera, c. 1760. Doña María is wearing multiple chiqueadores, or glued false beauty spots made of black velvet.[/color][/b]

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<<A beauty mark or beauty spot is a euphemism for a type of dark facial mole, so named because such birthmarks are sometimes considered an attractive feature. In the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe's beauty mark generated a new vogue.

False beauty marks are sometimes applied to the face as a form of make-up. Beauty marks were particularly highly regarded during the eighteenth century and creating false ones became common, often in fanciful shapes such as hearts or stars. They could be purchased as silk or velvet patches known as "mouches" (flies). Alexander Pope's 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock mentions such patches as indicators of "secular love":

Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.
Now awful Beauty puts on all its Arms;
The Fair each moment rises in her Charms,
Repairs her Smiles, awakens ev'ry Grace,
And calls forth all the Wonders of her Face;

In the conclusion of the book The Silence of the Lambs, the heroine Clarice Starling gains an artificial beauty mark when burnt gunpowder gets lodged in the flesh of her cheek. >>

ta152h0 wrote:Can one use welding mask to look at the sun ?

astroguyz wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Phobos-Earth-Moon Transit
November 10th, 2084(Teaser).

<<A brief video simulation depicting a transit of Phobos during a simultaneous transit of Earth and the Moon, a very rare event! Expect an expanded video post with explanations to be forth coming.>>