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The Googolplex

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Time to laugh a little. The googolplex is a famous number so large that it cannot be written out in a conventional manner. The number of digits in a googolplex exceeds the space available to put them in, even if you printed each digit at the size of an atom and used all the space in the known universe. A googolplex is unimaginably larger than a googol, which can be written out as a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes, or 10 to the power of 100. Let me write that out (with some help from cutting and pasting): 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Another way to write it out is as 10 to the power of 100, which is 10 multiplied by itself in a string that includes a hundred instances of "10". 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x ...
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Pleiades eclipsed

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Through a cloudy sky, I got a few brief glimpses tonight of the Moon passing over the stars of the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters). This is a snapshot at 7:27 pm New York time, with Alcyone, the brightest of the cluster, only 27 minutes before the moon's dark limb caught up to it and covered it. Very close to the moon, near the lower left of the lunar disk and much dimmer than Alcyone, is a star called Maia. This shot at 8:34 p.m. captures, going counterclockwise from the star closest to the Moon's limb, Merope, Electra, Taygeta and Maia. Alcyone was then behind the Moon. Finally, this shot at 8:56 captures Alcyone hanging above the Moon's bright limb like a rocket taking off from the lunar surface, just two minutes after the star reappeared on that side. Before tonight I had never seen a star at the instant that it "winked" out and got eclipsed, or watched one while it winked back into view. Tonight I did get to see one such event, through murky clouds almost dark e...
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The Conjunction Project

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For those who remember the Moon-Venus-Jupiter conjunction of September 2005, this will be a treat: below I've collected a few links to photos of that event as seen over the course of four days from various places around the world. 111 links to be precise, from 96 photographers in 21 countries. I've organized the links so that you can check out the photos in roughly the order that they were taken. As the Earth turned in an eastwardly direction, photographers farther to the west got to see the conjunction when dusk fell on their part of their world. So the links are ordered according to the longitudes of the photographers (to the best of my information). This does not produce an exact chronological order, as I discuss in the essay that follows, but it suffices to give a sense of the Moon moving across the sky in its monthlong orbit around the Earth. On each of the four days of the conjunction, the Moon appears in a new place with relation to Jupiter and Venus, as in the two phot...
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