Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Total solar eclipses occur on the average about once every 18 months somewhere on earth. Any given spot should have one once every 360 years. The size of the shadow and hence the rapidity with which it passes a given point vary because, the earth's orbit around the sun and the moon's orbit around the earth being elliptical, the earth-sun and earth-moon distances vary. For a long eclipse, the sun must be near its maximum swing of over 94,000,000 miles (mean distance: 92,900,000 mi.) and the moon near its minimum...
Another factor affecting totality duration is that the shadow travels slowest at noon, fastest near the beginning and end of the eclipse day. Earth rotates eastward at about 1,040 m.p.h. at the Equator. The moon's eastward orbit carries the lunar shadow in the same direction at just about twice that speed, so that it rapidly overtakes the terrestrial rotation. At noon, when the shadow is perpendicular, the speed is 1,060 m.p.h.; earlier and later, when the cone of darkness impinges at an angle, it goes faster-depending on the acuteness of the angle...
...bitter contest between two potent oldsters General Evangeline Booth, 71, and Commissioner Henry W. Mapp; 67-to control the world-wide Salvation Army flared up again last week for perhaps the last time. Tall, ruddy Henry Mapp came within the orbit of the Booth dynasty in India 50 years ago, when he joined the Army under Commissioner Edward Booth-Tucker, son-in-law of Founder William Booth. Mapp moved upward alone, to become the Army's Chief-of-Staff, administrator of some 26,000 officers and candidate for its Generalship when General Edward John Higgins made ready to retire...
Next year intra-mural athletics will no longer pursue the accustomed free and easy course, each House swinging along in its own private orbit. The much needed thorough-going centralization has at last been provided by the adoption of the major part of the recent Student Council "Report on Harvard Athletics...
Despite the creaking and groaning noise heard yesterday as the Undergraduate Athletic Council got up steam, the average student is not impressed. It is true that the deliberations seem to promise that one minor sport, basketball, will enter the major orbit and that the new monthly meetings will put more undergraduate pressure on Quincy Street. Yet the underlying troubles in the current system are untouched...