Eclipse of century today

A rare opportunity to see the corona of the sun awaits astronomers on July 22, when a total solar eclipse will occur. It will be visible in India.]

“This will be the longest eclipse of this century with the maximum phase being 6 minutes 39 seconds.

The next total solar eclipse that can be viewed form many parts of India will occur only on June 3, 2114,” according to P. Iyamperumal, Executive Director, Tamil Nadu Science and Technology Centre, Chennai.

Wednesday’s eclipse will also be visible over some of the Japanese Islands, China and South Pacific Ocean.

On July 22 the path of the moon’s darker shadow (umbra) will extend across India. “The central path will begin in India’s Gulf of Khambhat at 6.23 am

The moon will pass through its closest point to the earth several hours earlier and so the path of totality will be unusually wide.”

This shadow will sweep over cities such as Itarsi, Silvasa, Jabalpur, Vaddara, Ujjain, Mirzapur, Gaya, Patna, Muzzaffarpur, Bhagalpur, Siliguri, Darjeeling, Thimpu, Itanagar, Dibrugarh, Gangtok, Surat, Bhopal, Indore and Varanasi.

Traveling across Bhutan, the umbra will touch Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, before reaching China. South Pacific will experience the greatest eclipse at 8.05a.m.

In India, the totality will last for different durations at different locations. At Surat, the totality will be for 3 minute 17 seconds 8 secs, at Itarsi 2 minute 50 seconds. Those in Tamil Nadu would only see a partial eclipse.

In Chennai the sun would rise as an eclipsed one at 5.52 a.m. Only 63 percent of the sun will be obscured by the moon at the time of greatest eclipse at 6.21a.m. If would begin at 5.29a.m. and end at 7.18a.m.

It is dangerous to look at the sun during an eclipse except during the brief period of totality, when its disk is completely covered. Therefore, special protection is required partial of total eclipses.

The safest way to view the disk is by the projection method in which an image of the disk is projected on a white paper using a telescope or binoculars.

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Caught up in samsara

What is the nature of people caught up in samsara? What characterizes them? They are those who do not know themselves, do not know god and know nothing about serving god.

There are those who have the means to be generous, but lack the generosity. There are others who have the willingness to give, but lack the means.

God, however, is one who can give and is also willing to give. But here too, there is a problem. If there is a giver, there must be a receiver.

God is willing to give, but we, caught up in samsaric bonds, are not ready to receive, said Kidambi Narayanan in a lecture.

So it is to make us see that He is a benevolent giver and to make us good recipients of His grace, that God took many avatars and lived in the midst of human beings.

But not all people recognize God even when He is in their midst.

The Vishnu Puranam gives an example to illustrate the ignorance and the self-satisfied nature of ‘samsaris,’ who are under the illusion that their lives will go on without any catastrophe. But no one can afford to be complacent.

When the rainy season ends, the lakes are full of water. Fish therein enjoy the abundance of water and become as fat as elephant calves. They are so stout that they can hardly move. They think this bounty will last forever, but before they know it the water dries up and they die.

Similarly, man thinks that his cosy life will last forever, and he has no thoughts of God. In fact, he has no time to spare for God.

He does not acknowledge that his relatives will be gone one day.

He forgets his own mortality. But loss is a part of life, and one day the man so engrossed in life will also die.

Should we not then think of the Atma, instead of being obsessed with life on this earth? But we are caught in the ocean of ‘samsara,’ and do not know how to get out. In fact, we don’t even try to get out.

That is why Periavachan Pillai said a person who is involved in samsaric life is one who leaves his body in the shade and his soul in the sun.

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Brief History of Life

The fossil record contains the appearances of millions of life forms. There have been some remarkable changes in life on Earth. As described by T.A Conrad: Race after race resigned their fleeting breath-The rocks alone their curious annals save.”

At 3.85 billion years ago, archaea were alive, reproducing and evolving. They obtained energy for their lives by breaking the chemical bonds within molecules such as CO2, H2O, and N2. Archaea are one of the three major branches of life, along with bacteria and eukarya (which includes plants and animals). Archaea today are found down to 3.5 km(2.3mi) below the surface under pressures over 200 atmospheres and at hot springs and deep-ocean spreading centers with temperatures up to 113C (232F), but they are killed by oxygen. These organisms may be relatives of the earliest life forms on Earth.

Over 3.5 billion years ago, photosynthetic bacteria were removing some of the abundant carbon dioxide (C02) from Earth’s atmosphere and combining it with water using the Sun’s energy. The process of photosynthesis gives off oxygen (O2) and thus began the radical transformation of the Earth’s atmosphere that ultimately led to its present composition.

Organisms of these early times reproduced by simple division of their cells. Thus, if a gene had an advantageous mutation, it was limited to a single line of offspring. By I billion years ago, sexual reproduction had appeared. With the arrival of sex, cells could share and mix genetic material and thus speed up evolutionary changes by thousands of times.

During the Earth’s early history, organisms lived primarily below the surface in the oceans and within sediments and rocks. As oxygen (O2) given off during photosynthesis built up to a large volume in the atmosphere, some was altered to ozone (O3), thus building a shield from the Sun’s lethal ultraviolet radiation. With a protective atmospheric shield, more multicellular life could come out into the open. Marine rocks from 670 million years ago contain the oldest known fossils of multicellular animal life, including nearly all the major body plans that exist today.

About 544 million years ago, life on Earth began a 40 million-year-long burst of remarkable evolutionary change. From this time onward, the fossil record improves because many of the new groups of organisms began creating hard parts, such as shells, that preserve well as fossils. The initial development of hard parts has been referred to as “the world’s first arms race” wherein organisms covered their bodies with armor, possibly as protection against predators.

Moving on through time (up the sedimentary rock sequence), the Earth has continued to fill with new forms of life. For example, the waters became home to fishes, while plants moved out of the water and spread across the lands. Later on, vertebrate animals appeared on land-amphibians, then reptiles, and finally the mammals and birds. The evolution and increasing diversity of species is continuing.

Today, life is almost everywhere-in waters ranging from OF to above boiling, on land, in the air, in the soil, in ice, around deep-sea volcanic vents, within the pores of rocks buried several kilometers deep, and inside other organisms. The overall trend has been an increase in the diversity and abundance of life, but there have been major setbacks and reorganizations. Plots the number of families of marine animals with hard skeletons that have lived during the last 600 million years. Over time, there has been an obvious growth in the number of families; this growth reflects the increase in diversity and abundance of marine life. However, there also have been marked die-offs in which more than 50 percent of the families becomes extinct within relatively short time intervals of several million years or less. To better understand these dramatic extinction events, it is necessary to look at events on the species level, which is where the real action takes place.

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