A citizen scientist validates General Relativity.

[Tobie]

Very cool:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy...xperiment/


But, for those who do not want to read the whole article (or, part of it), here's the first paragraph:

And, an image:

I find it utterly impossible to believe this experiment was not successfully performed emany times, either directly or incidentally, in the intervening 100 years.

If that were indeed the case, then eddington’s original experiment would have been dismissed as a fluke.

Also, distinguishing a positional difference of 1.7 arc seconds is not trivial with amateur equipment and i wonder whether it was relativity or wistfulness that underlie this particular observation.

---

For this, nothing better than a german Physicist....

Whatever happened to Alex K? Last I heard he was busy with teaching teenagers physics. Hmmm can't imagine a tougher job

Teaching teenagers physics is easily done.  Just drop two of them out of a window and they learn Doppler effect, constant gravitation acceleration, interchange of kinetic and potential energy, and inelastic collisions, all in just a few seconds.

I'm fairly sure this principle is used to measure the mass of "invisible" space objects, since their effect on the space time is to focus photons from more distance sources of light.