.::REALITYRECALL::.

Earlier today Europe, Asia, and Africa got to see a nice partial solar eclipse as the Moon passed in front of the Sun, blocking as much as 85% of the solar surface. The extraordinarily talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault traveled from his native France to the Sultanate of Oman to take pictures of the eclipse. Why there, of all places? Heh heh heh. It’ll be more clear when you see this ridiculously awesome picture he took:

Holy solar transits! Click to embiggen, which you really really should do.

Can you see why he traveled so far to get this shot? The silhouette of the Moon taking a dark bite out of the Sun is obvious enough, as are some interesting sunspots on the Sun’s face… but wait a sec… that one spot isn’t a spot at all, it’s the International Space Station! This was a double eclipse!

That’s why Thierry sojourned to Oman; due to the geometry of the ISS orbit, it was from there that he had the best chance of getting a picture of the station as it passed in front of the Sun during the relatively brief duration of the actual solar eclipse. But talk about brief; the ISS was in front of the Sun for less than second, so not only did he have one chance at getting this spectacular once-in-a-lifetime shot, but he had only a fraction of a second to snap it!

To give you an overall idea of what you’re seeing here: the Sun is 147 million kilometers away (less than usual because this eclipse happened, coincidentally, very close to perihelion, when Earth was closest to the Sun). The Moon is 390,000 kilometers away. The Sun is about 400 times bigger than the Moon, but also about 400 times farther away, making them look about the same size in the sky. If you’re still having a hard time picturing the scale, take a look at the dark sunspot in the lower right of the big picture: it’s about twice the size of the Earth!

The space station, on the other hand, is 100 meters across (the size of a football field) and orbits about 350 km (210 miles) above the Earth’s surface. So the Moon was very roughly 1000 times farther away than the ISS when this picture was taken, and the Sun 400,000 times more distant. Yet all three lined up just right to make this extraordinary photograph possible.

Thierry has taken some of the most amazing pictures of the station passing in front of the Sun and Moon I’ve ever seen — his shot of the ISS and the Moon shortly before last week’s lunar eclipse was beautiful — but this one really stands out. It took an extraordinary amount of planning, scheduling, travel, and plain old good thinking to make this picture happen. Congratulations to him for getting it, and I thank him for sending it to me!

[More eclipse pictures can be found linked from Stuart’s Astronomy Blog as well as on the BBC’s Sky at Night Flickr pool of pictures.]

“I don’t pretend to know what love is for everyone, but I can tell you what it is for me; love…

Android: If you still can’t decide between ADWLauncher and LauncherPro for Android, you might want to check out Go, which brings the best features of each (like gestures, extra screens, and customizable docks) to your phone in one Launcher. More »

We've known AMD's Fusion GPU/CPU hybrid has been incoming, but now we know exactly what to expect from the tiny chips—clean(er) video, low energy, and the size of a fingernail. More »

A blood test so sensitive that it can spot a single cancer cell lurking among a billion healthy ones is moving a step closer to being available at your doctor’s office.

PrimeSense, the guys who helped make Microsoft’s Kinect, are now teaming with Asus to make the same thing basically…except it’s for the PC. Unfortunately, they’re calling it the WAVI Xtion. More »

If Bobby Cha of Enspert is to be believed, Google’s upcoming Android 3.0 release, Honeycomb, will only work on devices with dual-core processors. Oh, and 1280×720 resolution screens will also be a must. More »

Chrome closes out the year with ten percent browser share, gains at expense of IE originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just because you’ve only got two speakers and a subwoofer doesn’t mean you should just place the speakers wherever there’s space. Audio firm Dolby offers an interactive app that shows the best speaker setups, angles, and distances for your living room. More »

Yeesh. What manner of ungodly sum is Facebook worth these days? $5 Billion, thanks to a new investment from the deep pockets at Goldman Sachs, who plunked down $500 million for the social networking site.

Remember how shocked everyone was when AOL bought Time Warner back in 2000–and not the other way around? Well, you might want to sit down for this–the new valuation puts Facebook’s valuation at more than Time Warner, Yahoo, and eBay.

A number of folks are speculating that such a valuation might end up convincing the company to go public with its stocks earlier than planned. At present, however, it doesn’t appear that Zuckerberg’s company has any plans to do so at least until 2012.

Ever get the urge to edit some audio but you’re not sure where to start? Settle in with this HTG guide to the free audio editor Audacity that’s written for beginners but caters to geeks of all levels.

Note: this is the first article in a multi-part series that we’ll be covering over the next few weeks

Many Hotmail users across the world reported over the weekend that their e-mails had been mysteriously deleted. Over the past couple of days, Microsoft’s official forums were filled with complaints from users claiming that their inboxes and all of their folders had been emptied, with some suspecting that their accounts had been hacked. Microsoft’s Hotmail technical team has acknowledged that it’s aware of the issue, and that it’s working to restore access for those affected. A Microsoft spokeswoman, however, told the BBC that the problem was not widespread. Check out DownloadSquad for more.

Continue reading Hotmail’s Mysterious Disappearing E-Mails Returning to Users’ Inboxes

Hotmail’s Mysterious Disappearing E-Mails Returning to Users’ Inboxes originally appeared on Switched on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Because the read-things-on-devices market isn’t crowded enough, the Wall Street Journal claims Google is looking into a “digital newsstand” to deliver major print media outlets onto Android-powered devices. A subscription-based news model would put Google in direct competition with similar efforts by Amazon and Apple, none of which have been overwhelmingly successful, but competition in the field and the likely lower resulting prices couldn’t hurt news outlets’ chances at gaining wider acceptance. Do you want your news delivered to your Android, app-style? [Wall Street Journal via CNET] More »

Can’t say we’re surprised — after all, last time we checked in the tally was hovering around 9.3 million — but now Samsung has officially met its goal of 10 million Galaxy S phones sold around the globe. That’s less than seven months since the device first hit the market, which by Sammy’s fuzzy math averages to about one unit for every two seconds it’s been on sale. According to Samsung Tomorrow, North America contributed the most with 4 million in sales, followed by Europe at 2.5 million. Let there be cake, and once that’s over, let there be progress on those Froyo updates.

Samsung reaches goal: 10 million Galaxy S phones sold worldwide originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 05:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let the Tegra 2-powered, Android Honeycomb tablet announcements begin! Apparently (and understandably) staying away from a Folio 2 moniker, Toshiba is kicking off CES with its new unnamed 10.1-inch Android tablet, and we have to say from our brief look at a non-working unit a few weeks ago, it may just have what it takes to stick out from the rest.. at least on the spec and manufacturing quality front. The tablet has a capacitive, high 1280 x 800-resolution display along with an accelerometer and ambient light sensor (or what Toshiba has dubbed as Adaptive Display technology). It also has a 5 megapixel rear camera as well as a 2 megapixel front-facing one. Yep, this one is well stocked and just a quick look at the pictures below will show that the slab has got full sized USB and HDMI jacks, a single mini-USB socket, and an SD card slot.

While we couldn’t turn on the dual-core Tegra 2-powered tablet, which will eventually run “the next version of Android designed for tablets” aka Honeycomb, we have to say the EasyGrip, spill-resistant, rubberized back felt really solid in hand and the 1.7-pound, .6-inch thick tablet felt comparable to the iPad in terms of portability. Oh, and did we mention that the aforementioned rear cover is swappable, so not only can you change its color but you can replace the battery? We told you it had some of the ingredients to make it go far, but we’re obviously lacking quite a bit of information here to make any further decisions. Toshiba’s maintaining that the tablet will be released in the first half of 2011 (it obviously has to wait until Honeycomb has been made official) and the pricing will be competitive, but we’ll be digging for more when we get to Vegas and hopefully reporting back with some impressions of a working unit.

Toshiba announces unnamed Tegra 2-powered Android tablet, waits only for Honeycomb originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 03:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Many iPhone customers had some explaining to do after they overslept to start the new year, due to a glitch in the gadget’s alarm clock feature.