Physics stuff from the week 14-20/5/12

[video] Don't miss the transit of Venus on the 5th June - it won't happen again until 2117!
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-transit-venus.html

Did you notice that asteroid, last Monday? No? It came incredibly close. Admit it - you were cacking yourselves!
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-haircut-asteroid-ju.html

A great picture of an annular eclipse, which happens when the moon's too close to fully obscure the sun. This happened for the same reason as the recent 'supermoons' - perigee - where the moon's closest in its elliptical orbit around the Earth
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120519.html  

Another great picture of a partial (annular) eclipse, seen from Manila Bay, in 2009
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120520.html

Blazars - black holes that emit high-energy gamma rays - are heating up galactic dust, in some places to temperatures 100 times hotter than expected!
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-astrophysicists-source-cosmological-formation.html

180 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, Earth's magnetic field flipped. This was one of the best-recorded geomagnetic flips, set, quite literally, in stone, in the rocks of South Africa
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-tracking-jurassic-reversal-earth-magnetic.html

A wonderful picture of Cygnus X
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120517.html