Word: solar
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Other news concerning the growth of plants came last week from Harvard University, which announced receipt of a gift of $615,773 for a long-range research program to increase the rate at which plants convert solar energy into stores of energy available to man. Donor was Godfrey Lowell Cabot, Boston's blueblooded 76-year-old carbon black manufacturer who graduated from Harvard in 1882, magna cum laude. In memory of his late wife Mr. Cabot designated his gift the Maria Moors Cabot Foundation for Botanical Research...
...totality had begun. Overhead appeared the brilliantly clear, greyish-black disk of the moon and around it the sun's corona. At least seven prominent streamers were apparent, as well as several smaller ones. The longest extended about twice the moon's diameter. Four spots of red solar prominences appeared plainly during the eclipse. The planet Venus, which appeared even before totality, shone; also Mercury and several stars of first magnitude. The sky appeared a deep blue as did the water even at the beginning of the eclipse. I could see to the west all the way under...
...many astronomers, the most precious moments in the stream of time are the fleeting minutes and seconds of a total solar eclipse, during which they must make their photographs and observations. It is theoretically possible for an occultation of the sun by the moon to last as long as 7 min. 30 sec., but most are several minutes shorter than that. Last year's June eclipse, for example, whose shadow path across Asia was studded with astronomers' observation camps (TIME, June 22), lasted only 2 min. 31½ sec. at maximum. There was a tragic irony about...
...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...
...temperature of the sun's atmosphere has been placed now at about 4500 degrees Centigrade, while the surface, where the sunlight originates, has a solar radiation to which astronomers have given a value of about 6000 degrees Centigrade...