The first rock that NASA's Curiosity rover will touch for science's sake on Mars is a pyramid-shaped chunk that's been named in honor of a top engineer who worked on every one of NASA's rover missions — but passed away just days after Curiosity's landing.

Curiosity's study of the rock, dubbed "Jake Matijevic," will dominate the next few days of the rover's operations on Mars, just as its observations of Martian mini-eclipses dominated the past few days.

Jake the rock, which measures about 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall and 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide, isn't all that exotic. It seems to consist of garden-variety basalt, similar to the first Martian rock that NASA's Spirit rover examined eight and a half years ago. And that's exactly the point, according to Caltech's John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Curiosity mission. Jake will provide a good yardstick for sophisticated instruments such as the Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer, or APXS, and the laser-zapping ChemCam analyzer.

By matching up the chemical readings from the different instruments, Curiosity's science team will be able to confirm that the findings from the fancy-schmancy ChemCam are consistent with the readings from the APXS, an upgraded version of a device that was included on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Grotzinger told reporters today that it's an opportunity to compare "something which is tried and true with the latest and greatest new technology."

ChemCam can focus on areas that are less than a millimeter (0.04 inch) wide, while the APXS' best resolution ranges around 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inch).

Grotzinger estimated that the testing could begin on Friday — which is the Martian day, or sol, after tomorrow ("solorrow," he quipped). It could take a couple of sols for the rover to reach out its 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) robotic arm and use the APXS as well as the fine-resolution Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. The rover might have to back up a bit to give the rock a proper zapping with ChemCam's laser. The flashes of light from the tiny laser blasts will be analyzed by an onboard spectrometer to determine the rock's elemental composition.

Remembering Jake
Richard Cook, project manager for the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission, said the rock's name pays tribute to Jacob Matijevic, a leading engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was involved in NASA's rover missions since Mars Pathfinder and the Sojourner rover in 1997. Matijevic was a Chicago native who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics and came up with the Matijevic Theorem, which was once described as "one of the most beautiful results of recent years in commutative algebra."

Matijevic's obituary in the Chicago Tribune notes that he came to JPL in 1981 and took on a variety of assignments. Eventually, he came to specialize in systems engineering for the Mars rover designs as well as rover surface operations. "He was probably one of the top one or two experts on surface operations here at JPL," Cook said.

Matijevic played a key role in the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions, which were originally planned to last just 90 days on Mars. Grotzinger recalled that Matijevic once said "if this rover lasts six months, it'll probably last six years."

"He seems to have come pretty close," Grotzinger observed.

The engineer switched over from Opportunity to the Mars Science Laboratory mission, but passed away at the age of 64 on Aug. 20, after battling respiratory problems, the Tribune reported.

Grotzinger said Matijevic would have loved dealing with the complexities involved in studying the rock that's named after him. "All that activity and all those considerations are what honor Jake Matijevic so well," he said.

The chief aim of Curiosity's two-year primary mission is to analyze Mars' geology and surface chemistry and determine whether the planet could have been potentially habitable in ancient times. After studying Jake's memorial rock, Curiosity is due to move on to an area known as Glenelg, where three types of geological formations come together.

Since its landing on Mars on Aug. 5, the six-wheeled rover has covered more than half of the quarter-mile (400-meter) distance to Glenelg, and its cameras are getting a better view of the place. Grotzinger said the pictures show thin bands of dark rock that appear to alternate with lighter-toned rock. "As we get closer in to the Glenelg area, we'll understand better and better what these areas are," Grotzinger said. Curiosity is expected to get to the area in a couple of weeks, he said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.

This map shows the route driven by the Curiosity rover through the mission's 43rd Martian day, or sol (Sept. 19). By Sol 43, Curiosity had driven about 950 feet (290 meters). The area known as Glenelg is indicated by a red dot and label.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

A scan of the Martian terrain looking toward Glenelg reveals areas of light and dark rock.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS An animated GIF image shows Phobos crossing over the sun, as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover.

Messages from mini-eclipses
The Curiosity team is also planning to receive more pictures of the partial solar eclipses that the rover's high-resolution Mastcam system has observed over the past week. Mark Lemmon, a science team co-investigator from Texas A&M University, said close analysis of the imagery could provide insights into the interior structure of Mars and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Mastcam took hundreds of pictures when Phobos made two passes over the sun's disk, and again when Deimos made one pass. Such transits occur multiple times during a short season, and then they don't occur again for nearly one Earth year. Lemmon explained that the timing of the eclipses could be compared with past sightings to produce precise measurements of how the moons' orbits have changed due to Mars' gravitational tides.

"We can't go inside Mars, but we can use these to tell how much Mars is deformed when the moons go by," Lemmon said. "So we measure the transits very precisely [and] we get information on Mars' interior structure."

Some high-resolution images from Phobos' first transit were sent down to Earth over the weekend, but most of the imagery is still saved in the rover's computer memory on Mars, awaiting the right opportunity for transmission, Lemmon said.

Phobos and Deimos have irregular shapes, and the prevailing wisdom is that they're both asteroids that were pulled into orbit by Mars' gravitational pull. Phobos averages 14 miles (22.2 kilometers) in width, and Deimos is roughly 8 miles (12.6 kilometers) wide. Deimos circles Mars at a distance of 14,580 miles (23,460 kilometers), while Phobos is much closer (5,800 miles, or 9,400 kilometers). Phobos is gradually coming even closer to Mars, which makes the moon's orbit unstable over the long term: One of these days, it will break up into pieces and perhaps produce a ring of debris around the Red Planet.

Fortunately, that day isn't expected to come for 10 million to 15 million years. "Curiosity will be safe for a little while," Lemmon said.

More about Mars:

• How a rover on Mars is blazing a trail on Earth
• Martian moon bites into the sun
• Spheres spark new Martian mystery
• Cosmic Log archive on the Curiosity mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

A filtered photo from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the Martian moon Phobos passing across the left edge of the sun. The raw photo has been enlarged to twice its original size.

NASA's Curiosity rover has caught sight of its first solar eclipse from the surface of Mars — a slight bite taken out of the sun by the Martian moon Phobos, as seen from the rover's vantage point in Gale Crater on Thursday.

Curiosity's Mastcam imaging system captured this image of the partial mini-eclipse through a neutral density filter that reduced the sunlight to a thousandth of its natural intensity. After all, you wouldn't want Curiosity to blow out its camera on Mars, any more than you would want to damage your own eyes by staring at the sun without eclipse-viewing glasses. The bright spots in the darkness surrounding the sun may look like stars, but Keri Bean, a member of Curiosity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me they're just "hot pixels" — flaws in the raw image data.

The rover was programmed to take hundreds of high-resolution images during the transit on Sol 37 of the mission, and eventually they could be transmitted and assembled into Curiosity's first eclipse movie. But that may take a while, due to the limited data-transmission bandwidth and the $2.5 billion mission's other priorities. Meanwhile, Curiosity has two more opportunities over the next couple of days to watch solar transits by Phobos and Mars' smaller moon, Deimos.

More about Martian moons and eclipses:

• Watch an eclipse and a sunset on Mars
• Deimos passes over sun while rover watches
• Martian moons seen together for first time
• Phobos takes the spotlight

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Thierry Legault / Astrophoto.fr

French astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured this view of the Hubble Space Telescope passing over the sun's disk during this week's transit of Venus. The circles highlight the Hubble on multiple exposures taken every tenth of a second during the telescope's 0.9-second transit.

Over the past few days, we've seen lots of amazing photos showing Venus' last-in-a-lifetime crossing of the sun, but this shot of the Hubble Space Telescope zooming past Venus may be the only picture of its kind.

It's actually a combination of photographs, snapped every tenth of a second by master astrophotographer Thierry Legault. Nine speck-sized images of Hubble are highlighted with circles in the image. Legault, who is famed for his pictures of spacecraft transits across the sun, traveled from his home base in France to northern Australia for the shot.

After conducting the calculations with CalSky software, Legault made sure he was in Queensland at 01:42:25 UTC June 6, pointing his Takahashi FSQ-106ED telescope at the sun with the proper filters attached. "Thanks to the continuous shooting mode of the Nikon D4 DSLR running at 10 fps [frames per second], nine images of the HST were recorded during its 0.9s transit (1/8000s, 100 iso, raw mode). Turbulence was moderate to high," Legault reported on his website.

You read that right: While it took Venus more than six hours to inch its way in front of the solar disk, the Hubble Space Telescope zipped across in just nine-tenths of a second. Imagine how disappointing it would have been to have a cloud in the way at that moment!

Legault is promising more pictures of Venus, taken during the transit and afterward. But it'll be hard to match this one. The next transit of Venus won't occur until the year 2117, and even though Hubble has long outlasted its projected lifetime, the space telescope will surely be sent down to its fiery doom by then. So chances are this is the only picture that will ever be taken of Hubble and Venus simultaneously silhouetted by the sun.

By the way, Hubble was conducting its own transit tasks during Venus' crossing. Hubble focused on the moon and analyzed  the reflected sunlight to find out how easy it will be for future telescopes to pick out the spectral signature of Earthlike planets passing over alien suns. Stay tuned for more about the results of that experiment.

Where in the Cosmos
This picture served as today's photo puzzle for our "Where in the Cosmos" contest, open to Cosmic Log Facebook followers. It took just a couple of minutes for Ollie Nanyes to tell me what those little specks represented. For being so quick on the draw, I'm sending Nanyes a pair of 3-D glasses donated by Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project. Kent Avery, the runner-up in the guessing game, is getting 3-D specs as well. (Microsoft is a partner along with NBC Universal in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

The cardboard-and-cellophane glasses I'm sending Nanyes and Avery will be wrapped up in a 3-D picture of yours truly, but there are other, more interesting 3-D space pictures online. This Cosmic Log 3-D archive points you to some stunners. Click the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and you too may be eligible for some 3-D glasses goodness in the weeks to come. Just for fun, go full-screen on this simulated 3-D view of the transit from the National Solar Observatory Integrated Synoptic Program:

More wonders from Thierry Legault:

• Falling satellite seen from Earth
• Last looks at the shuttle in orbit
• Spaceships get their day in the sun
• Sun gets double-crossed
• Still more from Legault's website

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

For the last time in 105 years, Earthlings and astronauts watched the planet Venus creep across the surface of the sun during a nearly seven-hour transit.

The prime viewing zone took in most of the Americas, the Pacific and Asia. But even if you weren't in the transit zone itself, or even if the weather was lousy (as it was for me in the Seattle area), you could get in on the action over the Internet, thanks to NASA and more than a dozen other webcasters. Pictures and videos were streaming in, from around the globe as well as from the orbiting International Space Station. Here's a sampling:

NASA via Reuters

An image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the planet Venus in the midst of crossing over the edge of the sun's disk, as seen from Earth, at the beginning of its last-in-a-lifetime transit.

Don Pettit / NASA

This is one of the first pictures of a transit of Venus taken by an astronaut in outer space. NASA astronaut Don Pettit snapped the picture through a solar filter from the International Space Station. Check Johnson Space Center's Flickr gallery for more views from space.

NASA via Reuters

An extreme ultraviolet picture of the sun from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the planet Venus in transit, as well as dramatic swirls of solar activity.

Andrew Burton / Getty Images

New Yorkers observe the last-in-a-lifetime transit of Venus from the High Line park.

Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images

Clouds partially obscure the sun during the transit of Venus, as seen from New York's Riverside Park.

Andy Clark / Reuters

Astronomer Raminder Samra tries to get the view of Venus crossing the Sun using a shadow on a piece of paper and the telescope at the MacMillan Southam Observatory in Vancouver, British Columbia. Unfortunately, cloud cover prevented a proper view of celestial event.

Submitted by Robert Wetzel / UGC

Robert Wetzel sent in this picture of the Venus transit from San Diego, using msnbc.com's FirstPerson photo-sharing tool. The picture was taken using a Celestron G5 telescope and a Nikon D300 camera with a solar filter. Focal length is approximately 1875mm.

NASA / SDO, HMI

Multiple images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory were combined to produce this picture tracking Venus' path from one side of the sun to the other.

The first scientific observation of a Venus transit took place in 1639, and there have been six other transits since then. Because of the orbital mechanics of our solar system, Venus can be seen crossing the sun's disk from Earth in pairs of occurrences separated by eight years. There are gaps of either 105.5 or 121.5 years between one pair and the next. One transit took place in 2004, and today's crossing was the second transit of the pair. The next transit won't be seen until the year 2117 — thus, this was the last event of its kind that anyone alive today is likely to see.

Scientifically speaking, the most important moments came when Venus crossed the edge of the sun's disk. That's when the sunlight refracted by Venus' atmosphere could be most easily detected, revealing the atmosphere's chemical signature. Astronomers eventually hope to use a similar technique to analyze the atmosphere of Earthlike planets passing across alien suns, so this transit provided a good practice run for the technique. Even the Hubble Space Telescope tried out the method, checking the characteristics of the sunlight reflected by the moon during the transit. We'll be hearing more about the results of those experiments in the weeks ahead.

But there's more than science involved here: Sue Ah Chim, a researcher at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute in South Korea, told The Associated Press that he hoped the transit would lead people to see life from a larger perspective and "not get caught up in their small, everyday problems."

"When you think about it from the context of the universe, 105 years is a very short period of time, and the earth is only a small, pale blue spot," he said.

At Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory, Jamie Jetton and her two nephews from Arizona, aged 6 and 11, sported sun-viewing glasses as the followed the transit. "It's an experience," she told AP. "It's something we'll talk about for the rest of our lives."

More about the transit:

• Last-minute guide to the transit of Venus
• VenusTransit app enables cosmic calculations
• Scientists spread out to watch Venus transit
• Venus transit may help spot alien planets

More places for pictures:

• NASA's Venus Transit Observing Challenge on Flickr
• SpaceWeather.com's real-time image gallery
• Space.com: Transit of Venus gallery

Update for 11:35 a.m. ET: I initially wrote that Pettit's groundbreaking pictures were "the first pictures of a transit of Venus taken from outer space," but Facebook friend Jarin Udom pointed out that several sun-watching probes, including NASA's mighty Solar Dynamics Observatory, have taken plenty of such pictures previously. So it's more accurate to say these were the first pictures taken by a photographer in outer space.

Got pictures? Use the FirstPerson photo upload tool to share your transit photos with us. They may show up in a gallery today or on Wednesday.

Last updated 1:45 a.m. ET June 6.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Exploratorium

Paul Doherty, a senior staff scientist at the Exploratorium, Paul Doherty, sets up telescopes for observations of the 2001 total solar eclipse in Zambia. This year features an annular solar eclipse in May, a transit of Venus in June, and a total solar eclipse in November.

Over the next several weeks, skywatchers will thrill to a couple of astronomical wonders playing out in daytime skies: a solar eclipse on May 20 — and then, on June 5, a "micro-eclipse" of the sun that involves the planet Venus.

As senior staff scientist at San Francisco's Exploratorium, Paul Doherty will be keeping a careful eye on both of those wonders (with appropriate eye protection, of course). He'll let you in on his eclipse-chasing secrets on Wednesday night during a "Virtually Speaking Science" chat on BlogTalkRadio and in the Second Life virtual world. I'll be the host for the hourlong show, starting at 9 p.m. (6 p.m. PT/SLT).

Doherty says the solar eclipse and the micro-eclipse will be well worth chasing.

"By all means, go out of your way to see 'em," he told me this week. "They are rare events ... You'll have things to talk about for years after."

Each event offers a special kind of rarity: This month's eclipse is of the annular variety, which means that the moon's disk isn't quite big enough to cover the sun completely. At its darkest, the moon's black circle will be surrounded by a spectacular "ring of fire." That sight can be seen only along a narrow track running along Earth's surface, from China across the Pacific to the western United States. But a partial solar eclipse will be visible across a much wider swath of territory. It'll take about three and a half hours for the moon's umbral shadow to race across Earth's surface, from 6:06 to 9:39 p.m. ET.

Next month's micro-eclipse, more formally known as a transit of Venus, is even rarer. The planet's tiny black disk will march across the sun over the course of several hours (roughly from 6 p.m. ET June 5 to 12:50 a.m. ET June 6). Most of the world will get in on at least part of the show, but the best viewing will be had once again from the Asia-Pacific region. This will be the last transit of Venus most of us will ever get a chance to see: The next one is due in the year 2117.

Even if you're not in the viewing zone, or the skies are cloudy, you can still get in on these events via online presentations that will be sponsored by a variety of organizations — including the Exploratorium, of course. The combination museum and science center is planning a webcast of the transit as well as a Second Life teach-in timed to coincide with the annular eclipse. Doherty will be in on all the action — in Nevada for the eclipse, and at San Francisco HQ for the transit.

Jeroen Frans

Second Life residents watch a virtual presentation about eclipses on Exploratorium Island, in an image by Jeroen Frans (a.k.a. Frans Charming) of VesuviusGroup.com.

Over the past 40 years, Doherty has been chasing astronomical events in locales ranging from Cape Cod to Zaire. In this first of two postings about the coming attractions, Doherty discusses the appeal of eclipses and transits, plus a little bit of the science behind them. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: You've been in on a number of solar eclipses in your time — what is it that draws someone to become an eclipse-chaser? A lot of people talk about how sun-observing satellites have come so far that eclipses aren't as crucial for scientific observations as they used to be. So what's the appeal?

Paul Doherty: It's certainly true that an eclipse is not a scientifically significant as it was a century ago, but I will tell you there's something special about the experience of an eclipse — even a partial eclipse. You'll be outdoors, looking around, and you'll notice that the light is getting very strange. There's a beautiful clear sky, and it starts to get dim. Your body knows that something really different is happening. It's great for people to know what's causing that feeling: The moon is blocking the sun. (But don't look at it directly with your unprotected eyes.)

Then, for totality, you have the experience of seeing a clear sky go dark at midday, so that the brightest planets and stars are visible. You see that black disk where the sun should be, surrounded by bright rays like big fat spider legs of white around the sun. That will set the hair on your back standing up, even if you're a scientist and you know what this is. It is just so awesome to see it.

So I look at modern eclipses as places for people to come in contact with a great event in our solar system, and it shouldn't be missed.

Q: Do you find that it's an inspirational experience? Do eclipse-chasers go on to "harder drugs" in astronomy?

A: I've met so many eclipse-chasers who are already into the harder stuff. You just can't tell which came first. But I'm sure that the sight of a total eclipse just inspires them. I've seen eight solar eclipses myself, and I keep running across the same people. I know that they're inspired to really take time out of their lives, and take money out of their bank accounts, and invest it in these few minutes of a great experience, surrounded by an hour of interesting shading in the sky, surrounded by days of travel to wonderful places on Earth and meeting people with the same passion they have.

Q: What are the differences between a total solar eclipse like the one in November, and an annular eclipse like the one this month?

A: The moon is in an elliptical orbit around the earth. When the moon is at its farthest point from the earth, its angular size in the sky is a little smaller, and when it's close to the earth, it's a little bigger. Also, the earth is in an elliptical orbit around the sun. It gets smaller and bigger. When the moon is farthest from the earth, it's small enough in the sky that it cannot totally block the bright part of the surface of the sun called the photosphere. That's where the bright light comes from on the sun. At that point, the rim of the photosphere shines around the edge of the moon. That light is so bright that it can damage your eyes if you look at it without eye protection. It overwhelms the dim light coming from the chromosphere and the corona of the sun.

But during a total solar eclipse, the moon is big enough in angular size to block out the photosphere completely, and with your naked eye you can see this million-degree gas glowing in the corona, like rays reaching out quite a ways from the sun. You can see the red chromosphere quite near the edge of the moon. You can even see prominences reaching out from the sun and moving during the course of the eclipse. The total eclipse offers many more things to see than the annular eclipse does.

However, an annular eclipse provides you with a bright circle of the sun. Let's say that sunlight is streaming through the leaves of a tree, and you look at the ground. Normally, you'd see round circles of light at your feet. During an annular eclipse, those all become the letter "O." That is really something, to look at the ground underneath a tree and see it covered with bright Cheerios.

If you're not on the center line of annularity, and it's a partial solar eclipse, then those images become the letter "D," or a really nice letter "C."

There are more total solar eclipses than there are annular eclipses, because it takes this special combination of the moon being a little farther away from the earth than average, and the sun a little closer, to create this annular eclipse opportunity.

Q: It seems as if people in the know are getting as excited about next month's transit of Venus as they are about the eclipse. Why is that?

A: Well, the transit of Venus is a much rarer occurrence. And it is kind of a micro-eclipse. Venus is one-thirtieth the diameter of the sun in angular size, and it's moving across the sun's disk in this stately procession that lasts six hours. It happens in this amazing pattern: There'll be one transit, and then eight years later there'll be another one, and then it's 121.5 years, then eight years, then 105.5 years. It's a really weird pattern.

You wouldn't even notice a transit was happening unless someone told you. The light on the ground is not going to change. You're not going to see anything. But it's different if you know it's happening, like Jeremiah Horrocks did in 1639. He noted that Johannes Kepler, his hero, missed the calculation that Venus was going to transit the face of the sun. Horrocks actually set up a telescope to project the sun's image into his darkened room, and became the first person ever to see a transit of Venus and record it.

Now, knowing what we do, we can tell you that on this day, at this time, if you project an image of the sun safely or use a sun-viewing filter, you can see this tiny black disk going across the face of the sun. That's interesting — but what's really interesting is that in 1761, they used the transit observations to measure the size of the solar system. Good old Halley, of Halley's Comet, figured out how to do that. They did it kind of roughly, during transits.

Q: And even today, astronomers are using alien transits to learn about new planets beyond our solar system...

A: That's right. In 1761, a Russian astronomer named Mikhail Lomonosov discovered the atmosphere of Venus during a transit. He noted that as Venus approached first contact with the sun's disk, it was completely surrounded by a bright glow, which was the sunlight being refracted by Venus' atmosphere and being sent to Earth. That's how scientists first detected Venus' atmosphere. And during the transit eight years ago, scientists used the sunlight going through the atmosphere of Venus to measure its composition.

We're doing that exact same thing with exoplanets. We're studying the light going through the atmosphere of those exoplanets, and we've actually found the constituents of the atmospheres of some of those exoplanets. They've found water vapor, and carbon dioxide, and sodium gas. We're using the very same techniques we used on Venus to study the air of exoplanets.

On Wednesday, we'll talk about some of the best places in America to see this month's annular eclipse, how to pick out an advantageous viewing spot near you, and how to make sure you see the eclipse and the transit safely. Then, be sure to tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on BlogTalkRadio or in Second Life — and bring lots of questions. Paul Doherty (a.k.a. Patio Plasma) and I will be at the StellaNova Small Auditorium, courtesy of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, starting at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) on Wednesday. If you miss the live event, don't worry: It'll be archived by "Virtually Speaking" on BlogTalkRadio as well as iTunes.

On Friday, head on over to the Cosmic Log Facebook page for our weekly "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle. If you're the first to solve the riddle, you'll be eligible to receive a pair of sun-viewing safety glasses for this month's eclipse and next month's transit. In the meantime, check out these podcasts from previous episodes of "Virtually Speaking Science," plus links to eclipse-related resources:

• Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto on spaceflight and Yuri's Night
• JPL's Dave Beaty on the search for life on Mars
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science
• Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

More about eclipses:

• Interactive graphic: What causes a solar eclipse?
• 12 must-see skywatching events in 2012
• All about solar eclipses on msnbc.com

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.