Lunar Eclipses: How do they work?

Yesterday the Sun, Earth and Moon were aligned exactly, with Earth in the middle. In effect sky gazers in much of the world witnessed a total lunar eclipse, said to be the longest in 21th century. Since the moon passed through near-center of the Earth's shadow, the eclipse lasted for a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes. It was visible over Europe and South America after sunset, over Africa and most of Asia, and Australia before sunrise. This was the first of the two lunar eclipses in 2011. Next one is due for December 10 and will be seen in most parts of the world, excluding South America and parts of Western Africa.

New Ideas

A quick update on things.

In the next few days I will be adding 'Tall Tales' from around the World - They will be available here - (Tall Tales page in above menu). The idea is to collect tales from other travelers. As part of it, I will also import my travel stories from my personal blog. They're quite lengthy so I don't think posting them on the main page as individual posts would be a good idea. Instead I will just post an update whenever a new entry will be added to the 'Tall Tales' page.

I have also recently started with topics about Geography. I will be writing about interesting facts about Earth as well as cultural & physical aspects of places I have visited - mainly those. From time to time I will write about places I am yet to visit. I plan to add reviews and brief descriptions of regions / countries / cities too (>something similar to this paragraph about Laos in one of my previous posts). I figured it would go along well with Travel topic. Travel and Geography posts should interchange with every new post - at least that is what I plan to do.

As for the blog appearance. I am gathering ideas for my blog banner - the one I have now is too dark. I need something brighter and colorful to be in contrast to the background. If you have an idea, let me know.

I'm also experimenting with 'like' boxes and promotion of this blog on other "busy sites". It is slowly gaining momentum (I hope so!), but sometimes things do go backwards. For now, you can connect to this blog on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and YouSayToo.

Understanding Geographic Coordinates

Nowadays it seems almost pointless to understand geographic coordinates, let alone calculate the distance between two points on Earth described by them. Even though there is little practical use to an average person who has just recently stumbled upon Earth's coordinates, it remains to be one of the most important tools used in navigation and long distance travel.

Mekong by Speedboat

Earlier this year I went on a speedboat trip down the Mekong river - from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang in Laos.
It was just a small part of my three month trip from Bangkok to Hanoi.

Travel Movies

Whether it's a bicycle trip to the nearest town, or a multi-month tour across continents, travel is a ubiquitous factor in most of the films and it's often enough to inspire us to escape our daily routine and see the world.

Below are the seven travel movies that I recently watched. They are definitely worth seeing if you are nomadic at heart.

List of Travel Songs

Have you ever checked in at the hostel, met all the interesting people, some of which could play a guitar, and then sung songs with a bunch of strangers? What were the most played songs?

Here's a list of the "travel" songs that I've heard most often in such places, either sung or on mp3s. Some of these have found way to my playlist as well.

Airline Travel Myths

ABC News recently listed 6 Airline Travel Myths, including whether opening a door mid-flight can be done and what happens when your luggage is mishandled.

"There are a couple of reasons for this, but the big one is cabin pressure which, in effect, seals the doors shut. Plus many aircraft doors are "plug-type" in design meaning the doors are bigger than the opening (unless they are rotated). Again, though, once cabins begin to pressurize, which occurs as the plane begins to taxi, well - forget it. Those doors are shut."