Probably Texas or Mexico. If you go further north along the eclipse path, there is greater chance of clouds. Alternatively, be prepared to take a road trip to any part of the eclipse path, and decide a few days in advance based on weather forecast. Wherever you go, you want to be as close to the center of the total eclipse path as possible to get the maximum duration.

Not bad. That's 18x magnification.

The aperture (size) of the telescope's main lens or mirror determines how much light it collects. If you use a high magnification, you are taking that finite amount of light and spreading it over a large image, so the image gets dim. This makes it difficult to see dim objects like comets. But if you use too low a magnification, some of the light is wasted, so for example, if you use 8x magnification on an 8-inch telescope, the view is no better than 8x50 binoculars. Worse actually, because you're only using one eye. So for viewing large diffuse objects, binoculars are ideal. If you can afford large astronomical binoculars (like 16x80) those are ideal, but even a common 8x42 works very well (and don't need a tripod).

Comets are large so you need a low magnification. Big telescopes can only work at high magnification - and also, cheap amateur telescopes are designed only for high magnification, because most people just look at the Moon and Saturn and that's about it. Binoculars usually have reasonable low magnification, like 8x to 12x. (Don't buy zoom binoculars that go up to very high magnification like 30x, those are trash.)

Comets are also dim and diffuse, and we can see dim objects much better if we use 2 eyes rather than just 1.

It’s pretty borderline especially for a diffuse object.

A telescope can help if it has very low power.

I thought this one was predicted to be magnitude 5.5. That's not a naked eye comet.

This one will be barely visible to the naked eye, unless it gets much brighter than predicted (always a possibility). You want binoculars.

Hate to say this, but this isn't a very bright comet and there's nothing special about it. Your kid will no doubt have many chances to see brighter comets than this. So don't feel like you should put a lot of effort into viewing this one in particular. Save your money and put it towards a trip to see the total solar eclipse next year.

If you still want to try, as others said, contact your local astronomy club. Or see if any of your friends have good binoculars - maybe you know someone who is into bird watching?

The power output does not scale linearly. The blades interfere with each other, so the more blades you put on a turbine, the less power each blade generates. Same reason nobody builds biplanes anymore - one long wing is more efficient than two shorter ones, one on top of another.

In fact, two blades would be more efficient (but less stable), and there are even examples of single blade turbines out there.

I'd argue the old beam type torque wrenches were more accurate and reliable. They are so simple there's not much that could go wrong with it. They just aren't very convenient to use.

Ice crystals refract light by ~22 deg. There are ice crystals everywere doing this. But you only see the ones that refract light towards you, which are the ones ~22 deg away from the Moon from your vantage point.

Also, you want a larger nozzle at higher altitude (lower ambient pressure). An engine + nozzle optimized for low altitude would be very inefficient at high altitude, so you might as well drop it and switch to the high altitude engine. The Shuttle is an exception as you say, but actually the solid rocket boosters provided about 2/3 of the thrust at liftoff.

A faster ascent does take less energy - not because the gravity is stronger at lower altitude (the difference is pretty minor) but because the rocket spends more time fighting gravity. Think about the extreme case where the rocket is barely moving up - it will use up all fuel before it gets to any meaningful altitude. It's kind of like walking up a downward escalator - you have to expend energy just to stay in one place, and it's actually easier to run up quickly. Once you're at the top (in orbit), you can stay there without using any energy.

But there are limits on how quickly a rocket can accelerate, such as:

• Quick acceleration requires more powerful engines. The engines themselves get heavier. This is mainly an issue with liquid-fuel rockets; solid fuel rockets don't really have an "engine" and you could design it to burn all the fuel very quickly if you want to.
• The quicker you accelerate, the more G force & vibration the payload experiences. This is especially a problem if the "payload" is people.
• If you accelerate hard, you end up traveling very fast through the dense low-altitude atmosphere, which means a lot of mechanical stress & vibration on the rocket.

>Nobody paid SpaceX anything to develop Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, or Starship.

NASA did help fund the development of Falcon-9 through the COTS program and by buying launches before it was ready to fly. NASA is also paying them $3 billion to develop and launch the Starship HLS.

When we say "happen in the next 100 years," we mean "observers on Earth will see it happen in the next 100 years."

Like, supernova 1987a was the one that was visible from Earth in 1987. It actually happened about 168,000 years ago.

Carl Sagan's involvement actually makes me think the main purpose was to educate the public about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, rather than a serious attempt at communicating with them.

The Voyager spacecraft are about 0.0025 light-years away. Seems impolite for them to come so close to Earth and stop short there.

Nobody expected them to be actually found by aliens. It's a public outreach project to make people think about our place in the universe.

One big disadvantage of solar thermal is that it doesn't work when it's cloudy. Conventional (photovoltaic) solar panels work fine with the diffuse light from an overcast sky, but you cannot focus diffuse light to create high temperature.

It's also mechanically complicated. Not only do you need a turbine (or Stirling engine) but you also need a tracking device to adjust the mirror angle continuously. Whereas conventional solar panels have no moving parts at all.