Cosmos Computed

On the day after the June 5th Venus transit, which was the last until 2117, we had the first big thunderstorm of the year. Before the storm, it rained. Usually we don't have rain followed by sunshine followed by more rain, so when it stopped raining, I thought that was the end of it. It wasn't. When I looked up at the sky, I saw some gigantic clouds. You know the puffy cumulus kind that float by on a sunny afternoon? Well, these clouds were similar to those, only about 20 times larger. These were cumulonimbus clouds - the most dangerous type of cloud. And they were heading my way. Not long after I went back inside, it started getting dark. Rain began to fall, followed by hail. Lightning flashed again and again as the hail pelted against the windows. I heard that there were 3 tornado warnings. When I looked outside, I couldn't see very far at all, so a tornado could come and I might not even notice until it tore the roof off. I got excited, and started watching very careful...

May 20, 2012 was a day for which I'd been waiting for more than 2 years. I had never seen a solar eclipse before, and this one would be visible from right where I lived - who could ask for anything better than that? I didn't worry about how to view the eclipse until the day before the event. Up until then, I thought I could view it through a telescope with a solar filter, or maybe with a pair of eclipse glasses - but on the night before the event I still had nothing, and it was too late to get anything shipped from Amazon on time. I had to come up with another plan. I knew I'd definitely be able to view it with a pinhole projector (a fancy name for a board with a tiny hole in it), but I knew from experience the image of the sun would be either small or faint. I wanted something better. I couldn't use my dad's telescope to project the image; the first time I tried that, I ended up melting the lens from the powerful focused rays. I started thinking of how I could use ...