It’s an interactive morning here in the eastern US, one in which partial solar eclipses can be viewed from more or less anywhere on the planet, asteroids can be chased by school children using data from automatic telescopes in Hawaii, and exoplanet discoveries can be made by gas workers in South Yorkshire. Let’s start with the eclipse, as seen in the image at left that was fed into the Twitterstream by space journalist extraordinaire Daniel Fischer. The accompanying tweet tells us that Fischer was in Aachen with a German TV crew when the photo was made. Those with unlimited cash can chase eclipses physically, and there is a certain romance in the act, but the real world is made up mostly of those of us who can’t be in the right place at the right time, which is why webcasts from Barcelona to Lahore were worth watching as they covered the event, or tried to. This eclipse was visible to those in Europe, northern Africa and western Asia whose local skies cleared in time to make it...

If you charted the appearance of certain stars in books through the last two centuries, which ones would get the most hits? It's an interesting question that Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) ponders on his systemic site, using Google's Ngram viewer as his tool. Ngram lets you plug in the terms of your choice and chart their appearance, using the vast collection scanned into Google Books. When Laughlin plugged in Alpha Centauri, it seemed a safe term to use. The closest star(s) to our own are always going to get a fair amount of attention. He added Proxima Centauri, Beta Pictoris, 51 Pegasi and 61 Cygni. The chart (shown below) is a bit startling when you realize that the blue spike at its left represents not Alpha Centauri but 61 Cygni, but everything becomes clear when you add in the fact that 61 Cygni was the first star other than the Sun to have its distance measured, making it a major player in 19th Century astronomical references. Greg also reminds us of the Scottish polymath...