Four Breathtaking Solar Eclipses You Can See From Other Planets. On August 2. 1st, millions of Earthlings will gather to watch as a total solar eclipse sweeps across the centerline of the United States over the course of 9. For many, it’ll be once- in- a- life- time spectacle.

Working conditions at Amazon.com aren’t any better than they are at Walmart. The difference is you don’t see Amazon's employees.

Human Barbie Topless: Valeria Lukyanova Sparks Plastic Surgery Rumors After Posting Old, Racy Photo. BibMe Free Bibliography & Citation Maker - MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard. Claire and Jamie were separated in the season 2 finale of Outlander Starz The two-hour finale of Outlander season 2 left viewers wanting for more. It ended with. On August 21st, millions of Earthlings will gather to watch as a total solar eclipse sweeps across the centerline of the United States over the course of 90 minutes.

But if you had a spacecraft on hand, you wouldn’t need to wait decades for the next total solar eclipse to arrive at a town near you—you could simply jet off to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, or even Pluto. That’s because there’s a veritable zoo of solar eclipses occurring all across our solar system, all the time. To be fair, none of these extraterrestrial eclipses is quite like the total solar eclipse here on Earth, where a quirk of celestial geometry causes the Moon to stack perfectly over the Sun, leaving a fiery ring of coronal jets to illuminate the sky. Some satellites, like Mars’ moon Phobos, are too small to engulf the Sun from the perspective of an observer on the planet, resulting in what astronomers call a transit. In other cases, like that of Saturn’s moon Titan, the angular size of the satellite in the sky is far greater than that of the Sun, resulting in a solar occultation.

NASA astronaut and biochemist Peggy Whitson will return to Earth as the planet’s new record holder for longest time cumulatively spent on space by an American or a.

But that’s just the basics—eclipses, it turns out, come in all shapes and sizes, and studying them can tell us a lot about our cosmic neighborhood. Tiny transits at Mars.

For most other planets, we have to imagine what a solar eclipse would look like from the surface (or, in the case of a gas giant, the cloud- tops). But when it comes to Mars, we’ve actually seen quite a few. In 2. 00. 4, NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers captured six solar transits events from the surface of Mars—four involving the potato- shaped moon Phobos, another two starring the even runtier satellite Deimos. They were, according to a paper published in Nature the following year, the first direct images of satellites transiting the Sun from the surface of another planet. Phobos eclipses had been observed indirectly even earlier, in data collected by NASA’s Viking lander and Soviet- led missions to Mars.)According to Mark Lemmon, an astronomer at Texas A& M University and co- investigator on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, early solar eclipse observations helped NASA refine the positions of Mars’ moons in the sky. Despite observing Phobos and Deimos for 1.

Earth, they’re small and far away,” Lemmon told Gizmodo. Before NASA’s rovers landed, “the uncertainty about where Phobos would be at any given time was about as big as Phobos.” Once eclipse observations had improved the orbits of the two moons, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter was able to point its camera accurately enough to capture high- res images of both, Lemmon said. Eclipse- watching on Mars has only gotten better, especially since NASA’s Curiosity rover landed in Gale Crater in August 2.

Just look at this footage Curiosity captured in 2. Phobos racing across the Sun, transforming our beloved star into an eerie cyclops monster over the course of 3. I think that’s the best shot of an eclipse [on Mars] we have,” Lemmon said of the Curiosity video, adding that the rover has continued to make solar eclipse observations since, including the eclipse shown below, which occurred this past May. Even though Spirit and Opportunity refined the positions of Mars’ moons more than a decade ago, there’s still plenty we can learn by watching their transits.“Even now, while there’s no missing where Phobos and Deimos are, their orbits are changing all the time due to the push and pull of gravity,” from Mars, Lemmon explained.

In particular, Phobos raises a tiny tide on Mars—a slight displacement of the rock surface, which in turn leads to a gravitational pull on Phobos, changing its orbit. That is why Phobos is spiraling in toward Mars and will eventually be destroyed.”Indeed, eclipses may be critical to figuring out how soon Phobos faces annihilation—and when Deimos will be cast away into deep space. Hazy eclipses at Saturn. With. 62 confirmed moons, Saturn’s skies offer myriad eclipse- viewing opportunities, from tiny solar transits to massive occultations to moons stacked atop other moons. But of all the gas giant’s many satellites, few produce an eclipse as otherworldly as Titan, a massive methane cauldron that challenges our understanding of the kinds of places life might emerge. It was the Voyager 1 spacecraft that spotted the first solar occultation at Titan in 1. The Astrophysical Journal. Watch Hercules Returns Hindi Full Movie more.

As Titan swept across the Sun, Voyager captured some of the light that filtered through its hazy atmosphere, which scientists used to confirm that the moon’s skies are composed mostly of nitrogen. Since NASA’s Cassini probe arrived in orbit around Saturn in 2. Titan eclipses, which we’ve used to probe the chemistry of the moon’s thick haze. Some of what we’ve learned even has implications for understanding planets beyond our solar system. In 2. 01. 4, analyzing visible and infrared spectra collected by Cassini during solar occultations, researchers demonstrated that Titan absorbs, refracts, and scatters sunlight in ways that may obscure information about deeper parts of the atmosphere. This, the researchers wrote in a paper published in PNAS, could have ramifications for elucidating the atmospheres of exoplanets, particularly “super Earths.” “Haze has a dramatic effect on the transit spectra,” the researchers wrote, noting that it “substantially impacts the amount of information that can be gleaned.” This information could prove incredibly useful when the James Webb Space Telescope starts peering into the atmospheres of distant planets over the next few years. But as valuable at the science is, astronomers are mostly drawn to Saturnian eclipses because of their sheer beauty.“In most cases, we imaged eclipses because they are just wondrous events, at Saturn as they are on Earth,” Cassini imaging lead Carolyn Porco told Gizmodo.

It was part of my desire, from the very beginning of the [Cassini] mission, to turn our image- taking responsibilities at Saturn into a video documentary of everything there was to see there, including celestial motion.”The rare, 4. Uranus. Solar eclipses are a fairly common for Jupiter and Saturn, but not so for Uranus, a planet which, in flagrant defiance of celestial convention, circles our Sun tipped over on its side, its spin axis almost perfectly aligned with its orbital plane. Because of Uranus’ funky tilt, its poles are alternately illuminated during its 8.

Sun. The moons, which circle Uranus in the band of rings stretched across the planet’s equator, only align edge- on with the Sun ever 4. Ice Giant. Rare, but not impossible to catch. In 2. 00. 6, just as Uranus was approaching its summer equinox, the Hubble Space Telescope caught a never- before- seen- glimpse of the moon Ariel traversing the face of the ice giant and casting a shadow, or umbra, on the planet’s blue- green cloud tops.

From the “surface” of Uranus, it would have looked like a solar eclipse.“These observations were planned only to study the atmosphere of Uranus – the detection of Ariel and its shadow were purely serendipitous,” Heidi Hammel, Executive Vice President of AURA, who helped analyze the image while working at the Space Science Institute, told Gizmodo. This moon shadow image is more a beauty shot than a science result.”Lawrence Sromovsky, astronomer at the University of Wisconsin- Madison who also helped analyze the image, noted that Ariel’s shadow creates a region of totality about the same size as the moon itself—a very different situation from what we see during an eclipse on Earth, where the area of total eclipse is fairly small, and surrounded by a much larger region of partial eclipse. This, he explained, is due to the fact that at Uranus, Ariel is roughly ten times bigger in the sky than the distant Sun.

As Uranus continued to approach the summer equinox, there were other eclipses of other large moons, including Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon.

Amazon. com's Workers Are Low- Paid, Overworked And Unhappy; Is This The New Employee Model For The Internet Age? This is the second of a three- part series exploring Amazon’s business model.

On Wednesday, we examined the company's lack of profitability relative to its revenue growth. Today, we probe the company’s labor practices. On Friday, we'll look at the company's impact on small retailers. NOTE: This story has been updated to include Amazon. It’s easy to miss Amazon.

Breinigsville, Pa., while traveling along U. S. Route 2. 22. It’s one of several large, nondescript concrete boxes in the Liberty Business Center a mile south of Interstate 7. United States. Inside one of two warehouses Amazon has at the industrial park, a mix of about 1,6. Recently, they began seasonal mandatory overtime of five 1. That pace will continue through the new year before workweeks are dropped back to four 1. After the holidays, hundreds of temporary employees at the facility will return to the ranks of the unemployed.

Dozens of trucks are lined up along one of Amazon's warehouses in Breinigsville, Pa., Nov. A mix of roughly 1,3. The total number of Amazon workers (including temps) at any given time is unknown publicly because of Amazon's heavy reliance on temp recruiters who have offices inside facilities like this. Photo: Angelo Young / IBTimes. Warehouse work isn’t easy in the best conditions, but in recent years the No. Breinigsville - - a spotlight usually reserved for companies like Wal- Mart Stores Inc.

NYSE: WMT), which are favorite targets of labor rights advocates. And increasingly, workers are coming forward to discuss the work culture at the world’s largest online retailer. Amazon’s employees are viewed as a necessary evil. If they could get machines to do this work they would,” Neal Heimbach, who has worked for Amazon in Breinigsville since August 2. Amazon is not happy with 1.

One hundred percent to them is, 'Well, at least you’re doing your job.’”Eastern Pennsylvania’s unemployment and underemployment rate remains above the national and state averages, which means fewer job options for people like Heimbach. Lehigh Valley, which includes Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, as well as many smaller nearby communities such as Trexlertown and Breinigsville, has never really returned to its economic heyday when well- paying, secure jobs were plentiful in mining, steel, rail and textiles, a situation famously chronicled in the song “Allentown” by recording artist Billy Joel in 1. In 2. 00. 9, Allentown lost its last major manufacturer, Mack Trucks Inc., when the Volvo subsidiary relocated to Greensboro, S. C., taking with it 6. But the region’s shedding of decent jobs has been a human resources goldmine for warehousing and distribution companies, and Amazon.

Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has certainly dived right in; Pennsylvania joins Kentucky and Indiana in having the highest concentration of the company’s fulfillment centers. Amazon warehouse employees typically have few choices but to work for $9 to $1. But in return, they endure physically demanding conditions under constant surveillance and an unforgiving computer- based system demerit program, with zero job security. Mary Osako, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the company’s wages for these workers are 3.

And that doesn't even include the stock grants that full- time employees receive,” she added. We also offer full- time benefits including healthcare.”Amazon warehouse employees (or, as the company calls them, “fulfillment center associates”) contend they’re told by Amazon and outsourced managers to meet productivity goals designed to be unattainable for most in an effort to keep them in a perpetual state of insecurity about their continued employment. If they give up or are fired, there’s a legion of temp workers - - recruited by subcontracted labor recruiters who have offices inside the warehouse facility - - waiting to take their turn processing hundreds of packages per hour.

Employee vs. Employer. Amazon, founded in 1. Internet, has only in the past few years become the target of labor- abuse allegations, most recently this year with several U. S.- based lawsuits in five states, including one brought by Heimbach in Pennsylvania. Chief among the complaints, which could soon be consolidated into a nationwide class action lawsuit, is the allegation that Amazon. Aimed at combatting product theft, this process can take up to 2. The suits also contend that while employees get a strictly regimented 3.

The lawsuits also claim the company is so radically fastidious with workers’ time that it requires employees to count the start and end of their two paid 1. If it takes three minutes from the moment the bell rings to get to the break room, now you've only got 1. But then you have to use three minutes to get back to your work area before the next bell rings, so your break is really nine minutes,” Heimbach told International Business Times. And they constantly monitor you with supervisors that look at computer screens.”The complaints allege that if Amazon had to include these tiny increments of time, many workers would top the 4.

Heimbach’s suit asks for at least $5. In its latest earnings report outlining future risks, Amazon said: “We dispute the allegations of wrongdoing and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in these matters.”‘Management By Stress’A 2. Pennsylvania’s Morning Call newspaper chronicled the plight of Amazon warehouse employees in Breinigsville. According to that article, Amazon hires were forced to work in dangerous summertime heat conditions, temps as high as 1. In fact, so many workers ended up in the local hospital that an attending physician reported the case to federal workplace safety regulators. In the wake of the Morning Call investigation, Amazon spent $5.

But apparently the company hasn't lowered the heat on the productivity requirements it sets for employees, goals that are well beyond the industry norm for other warehouse and shipping companies. A source who went undercover at an Amazon sorting center in California for eight weeks this summer as part of academic research into warehouse working conditions told IBTimes that Amazon wanted its employees to pack about 2. A floor manager, with experience at multiple logistics firms, conceded to this source that the industry standard was only about 1. The source spoke only on condition of anonymity because his research is ongoing. Amazon doesn’t publicly disclose the number of packages per hour its warehouse workers are expected to process, but Heimbach’s estimates matched what the source claimed: About 2. CDs.“If you’re 8.

Heimbach said. “The reality of it is they’re primarily concerned about getting product out the door at the fastest rate possible.”Amazon spokesperson Osako said the claims that productivity goals are set to be unattainable for most warehouse employees are “simply inaccurate.” Moreover, Amazon’s productivity numbers are apparently purposely designed to be unattainable for most workers so that the employees feel that they are falling down on the job and push harder to hit the impracticable levels. This strategy, known as management by stress, was described in the book “The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age,” by Simon Head, a fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the U. K.’s Oxford University, as "one in which a significant minority of workers are operating at the margin of inefficiency, so that supervisors can bear down and get them to work faster.”Indeed, the California undercover warehouse worker told IBTimes that his Amazon floor manager admitted to him that the packages- per- hour goals were set higher than was expected from them.

This came up because the worker was able to pack only about 2. Amazon’s.“[The floor manager] and I got friendly a little and he was willing to talk to me openly about these productivity goals,” the source told IBTimes in a recent telephone interview. He was under the impression I was working my way through school.

Don't worry,' he said.