so what you're saying is that even though you've been told you're being a dick about it, it's more important that UT gets all of his facts straight for the goddamn image of the day? So, if he slips, that excuses your acting like a know-it-all-douchebag?

just clarifying.

putz

It turns out that APOD and I were right in the first place.

It turns out that what is considered the Sun is a greater area than just what LOOKS like the Sun. The prominence is defined as extending just past the chronosphere. The chronosphere is defined as 10000km out between the photosphere and the corona. The corona is the extension of plasma and radiation well above the sun's actual "sea level".

Off topic (kind of):

Is there a way to ignore the posts of an individual user?

No reason for asking. Wait a minute, maybe nobody will see this because you are all already ignoring me (or maybe I'm just being PARANOID).

Uh...one of your quotations was mistakenly attributed to me , instead of UT, you incredible twit. Good lord, don't you have any html skills at all? I really think that, if you are going to be quoting people, you need to be absolutely certain that you know what you are doing, or people might think you are an idiot. I mean, they might think you are more of an idiot.

Sorry...I just had to respond appropriately, considering the gravity of the mistake.

I just gotta say .. you'd better thank your appropriate God, that we have people like Paranoid to do the exacting, niggly, nit-picking calculations .. so that NASA can get launches off the ground .. so that they can get the likes of the Hubble Telescope up there .. so that they can get great pics of the Sun .. so that we can sit around arguing the toss about distances and dimensions .. :)

If they let journos do the launch calculations, we'd be lucky to get 1 in 1000 launches off the ground .. and only then with accidental accuracy .. :(

Damn!:blush: How silly of me. I divided 300k instead of 50k by 12.8k to get 23 Earths. It should be about 4 Earths not 23, or 50 to 100. Looks like we both need to go back to school. I have to brush up on my math and you have to learn not to post criticisisms based on wild speculations about parallax views.

From paranoids explanation of his numbers, he must have done the original calculations for the hubble mirror. Hardly exacting, niggly, nit-picking calculations but the point is, this is hardly the place for the displayed vitriol over casual comments.:)

We all need some vitriol occasionally .. savage, unwarranted vitriol, rouses us from the torpor of our everyday humdrum existence .. :D :D

If people like Paranoid are doing all the math for our space program, I demand that all science be halted immediately until we can find some more polite nerds to deal with the hard stuff.

Does anyone have Arthur C. Clarke's e-mail? Maybe we should send future solar and flatulence speculations to him first for professional scientific and editorial scrutiny prior to posting.

(Unrelated) Does a pair of noids beat a fools mouth?

“Stephen Hacking”: (def) What you hear when a famous quantum physicist clears his throat.:rolleyes:

Paranoid posted a rebuff to my message which was lost in the corruption problem... I read it this morning before finding the corruption... para, please redo?

Luckily, I still had it in the cache.
It turns out you weren't. :)That what is considered the Sun is a greater volume (not area!) than just what LOOKS like the Sun is correct. Though what is considered the diameter of the Sun (1392000 km) is precisely the diameter of the visible disc (if you dare look at the Sun :) ). The thickness of photosphere (300 km) and chromosphere (14000 km; not chronosphere - it has nothing to do with time, it's called chromosphere because of the red colour hot hydrogen radiates!) is pretty much irrelevant on that scale.

Please tell, what source defines the prominence as "extending just past the chronosphere (sic!)", because it seems you just invented this definition. :) And how could the prominence be 300000 km long in that case?If you'd rather stay an ignorant sheep, just click on the Profile and then "Add paranoid to Your Ignore List".I don't see how forgetting to replace the name in the copied line has anything to do with HTML skills at all. I hope you are joking, though. And I also hope you see the difference between spreading the misconception and making an obvious error in editing the post.

In any case, it appears that the factoid about Earths is a NASA equivalent of the Big Mac - plentiful, but devoid of any real content. Every story about prominences (different ones) that I found contained the same stupid and misleading stock trivia about Earth. Behold:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970127.html
The Earth would easily fit under one of the loops of the prominence shown in the above picture.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040330.html
The Earth would easily fit under the hovering curtain of hot gas.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030223.html
Ten Earths could easily fit in the "claw" of this seemingly solar monster. (note how this one is actually correct - did NASA get a large shipment of clue on that day?)
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030707.html
The Earth would easily fit below the prominence on the left.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000809.html
...the entire Earth could easily fit into its outstretched arms.

As for my personal math skills, they are fine, thank you very much. As is my ability to notice the errors others make. I still stand for my 50-100 estimate, though I agree that it might be 20-150, depending on the location of the prominence relative to the Sun.

P.S. Thanks for the nice words, onetrack!

..throws his arms across his eyes, but is unable to shield himself from the mighty, terrible incandescence of the Nerd-Rays projecting from this argument.

edited because I misspelled incandescence the first time.....

I once farted so much for so long that I put myself into a coma for 12 hours.

Ask Lady Sidhe, she'll verify. She thought I had died in my sleep.

Hey, an error is an error, right? Besides, isn't spreading a misconception about who said what a more personally grievous error than having a somewhat humorous and skewed explanation about a physical phenomenon that, frankly, most of us are intelligent enough to figure out on our own?

Or are you more concerned about facts and less about people in general?