"Col" wrote in message
...



I have something of an interest in astronomy but it's all a bit,
well, 'predicatable'. We can predict to the nearest second
when an eclipse of the sun will start thousands of years into
the future, yet we don't know whether Bolton will get rain in
10 days time. It's the unpredicability that makes meteorology interesting.
--
Col

Bolton, Lancashire
160m asl

Of course not all astronomical phenomena are so predictable - we do not
know, for example:

1 - how active the next Perseid shower will be

2 - (see another thread) whether the aurora will been seen even this evening

3 - how the current sunspot cycle will develop

4 - how the appearance of Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt will return to
normal.

Add to these the unexpected appearances of novae and comets, there is plenty
of uncertainty in the sky even for the amateur astronomer.

Even for the predictable events, I would hate to travel to a far-flung spot
in a god-foresaken part of the world only to find that the eclipse was not
going to take place after all. More commonly of course those pesky
meteorologists will arrange for horrible weather to blot out the sun at the
critical time.

Roger