Puzzle Description:

If an astronaut chose to flip a coin on the moon, the wait for heads or tails would take longer than it would on earth.

#1: CB Paul (cbpaul) on Mar 25, 2021 [SPOILER]

[Not reading comments yet...]
Got the top 13 rows, a bit of the middle, a bit of the bottom. And I'm seeing an astronaut giving a thumbs-up. We'll see...

Yeah! I got the action, but I assumed the dot was a star, not a coin. Good one!

Tough, but logically solvable. At least moderate lookahead needed.

In addition to using some EL, the real breakthrough came in figuring out that R29 C9 could not be part of the black 3 on R29, therefore C18 and C19 of R29 must be black.

After that there was one more tough part, which I got past in figuring out that R32 C3 cannot be part of the black 4 on C3.

I like the picture - nice use of shadows.

Found to be solvable with moderate lookahead by gator.

After the color/line logic, EL on C20 makes R27-28C20 and R32-36C20 dots. LL.

EL on R12 lets you place the 2 clue in R12C3-4. LL.

Two-way logic on R30C20 makes it so that either R29C19 or R31C19 will be black. So the rest of C19 is dots (R27-28 and R32-36). We can also see that R31C18 will always be a dot from the two-way logic. LL.

No matter how you complete the 2 clue in R38, R37C1 will always be black and R37C3 will always be a dot.

Next I did some summing on R26 to figure out that both remaining 2 clues could not be on the left side (C1-7 area). You can see that only 2 black cells can be filled in R27 on the left side and only 1 black cell can be filled in R25. But the columns require that 4 cells be filled in between R25 and R27 since all of the clues are 2 or more. So one of the 2 clues has to go in R26C14-15 since both of them cannot be on the left side. LL.

The 4 clue in C3 cannot start in R25 or R32 without making columns 1 and 2 invalid (2 move lookahead). So R25C3 and R32C3 are dots (but we only need one of them to finish this out). LL to finish.

Nice puzzle!

Flipping a coin is actually a great way to make a decision.

"Whenever you are called upon to make up your mind
And you are hampered by not having any,
The best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find
Is simply by spinning a penny.
No--not so that chance shall decide the affair
While you're passively standing there moping
But the moment the penny is up in the air
You suddenly know what you're hoping."

Wallechinsky and Wallace

It's true, too. I do it often!

Thanks all, for your comments and thanks Bill for the sage advice in poem format.

The puzzle number on this is 20,000 lower than all the other recent puzzles. Gregg, you must have had this under construction for years!

It's true, Valerie. I was going through the "unpublished" puzzles in my list, and saw one of an astronaut on the moon. I added the coin flip theme and the earth in the background and thought it could be published.
By the way, thanks so much for hosting and maintaining this unique site and web community.

Thanks!

Glad you found this one and published it -- it's a neat image!

Great illustration of the caption. Fun to solve. I did guess several times.

Fun puzzle.

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