I hope you both have an awesome time and I look forward to seeing you in San Antonio!
Yeah, let’s. On my way to Pasadena today we (me and da wife / da boss) plan to stop by the flooded (last year) Tulare Lake, to see how much it has receded. Apparently it has receded a lot.
I will probably drive every mile of the 5,000 on this road trip. She is still recovering from her health scare in November, so she’ll be sleeping and otherwise resting.
ETA ➜ The flooded disaster that is Tulare Lake in California’s Central Valley - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board ⇨ the thread with pics I posted a year ago. This shortened URL is safe. I created it.
Assuming the weather is clear - if I’m on a high point of land or in a tall building within the totality zone, should I be able to see the shadow moving across the ground? Would there be a sharp contrast between the shadow and the sunlit area, or would it be more gradual? From a plane, you can see the sharp contrast between light and dark on the clouds below, but how about from an observer a few hundred feet above the ground?
And today, both of my students had to call off unexpectedly, and I had to give a quiz for a couple of students during that time, but we still managed to continue the distribution. Out of the 1000 pairs we had, we gave out close to 900, which I’m pretty satisfied with: We didn’t have to turn anyone away, we didn’t have too many surplus, and we’ll still have some to distribute on the day of, if need be.
It’ll be pretty gradual, even from a plane. On the ground, not that noticeable unless you are looking out for it, and at that point you will be waiting for the diamond ring!
I’ll keep an eye out for those on our drive north! My husband got some, but it couldn’t hurt to have a spare or two in case of carelessness.
We’re taking 2 cars, since there will be 6 people plus luggage plus non-perishable groceries for a week. We’ll likely be taking the thruway part of the drive. I-81 then US 11 is slightly more direct if we take my preferred Pennsylvania-based route (we loathe the MD / NJ / NY Metro variant, and with the bridge collapse, I really want to avoid Baltimore traffic). But my daughter is going to get herself to Albany, and we’ll fetch her there en route, so one of our cars will go that way.
I won’t bore you all, as our route is pretty unexciting. One long driving day, over roads with little to recommend them. Hopefully we won’t run into much bad weather; traffic shouldn’t be an issue because a) it’s a weekday, and b) the largest city we will be near is Albany, but there’ve been times where the weather was pretty horrid. In 2018, I was driving up to Vermont, through Pennsylvania, and had to stop for the night by 5 PM as visibility was so poor. We’ll have multiple drivers in each car, which will help.
Merry Good Friday! (is that the right term?)
So sometime in late 1960, the director Richard Flieisher (Soylent Green and lots of others) is directing Barrabas starring Anthony Quinn and produced by Dino de Laurentis. He’s in Verona, Italy and someone in the production crew finds out there’s a Total Solar Eclipse in a week or so somewhere else in Italy. So yeah, let’s hold off prouction, change the end of the movie with Christ on the cross during a 2 minute 50 eclipse. You’re gonna get one take and as I understand it they did it in the one with no SFX.
(not gonna post via the work-around so search on youtube for The Crucifixion Of Jesus Christ | Barabbas | Silver Scenes)
“Who is turning out the lights?” Yeah back then only scholars would even know of Solar Eclipses and Edmund Halley was the first to accurately predict a a TSE using silly Newtonian math (and even so there were sceptics about his prediction of the comet named for him that sadly he didn’t live to see).
Anyways, Corona means Crown and it is absolutely a splendid coincidence that the Moon sometimes almost exactly covers the disc of the Sun, and we can predict when and where it’ll all go down.
Article on how to use smartphones to snap photos:
I have a question, and this seems a good place to ask it.
Obviously, we know in advance when a solar eclipse will happen. We know the inclination and rotation of the Earth, its path around the sun, the orbit of the moon around the Earth; all the periods, inclinations, and eccentricities. just project those numbers into the future, figure out where the moon’s shadow is, and you can predict the next eclipse.
Is it possible to predict the location of the next eclipse empirically, without all the 3-D geometry? To put it another way, suppose I know that one eclipse happened on a certain day and time, and at a certain latitude and longitude. And I know that the next one happened 572 days and three hours later, and 24 degrees further west, can I use that to extrapolate the next eclipse, 572 days and 24 degrees later?
I suspect the simple answer is ‘no’. How 'bout if I have more data to work from? If I know the times and places of the last 20 eclipses, or the last 50, are there repeating patterns tell me when the next eclipse will be?
Yes, there is a pattern, called the Saros cycle. Every 18 years plus 11 days after an eclipse, conditions are right for another similar eclipse, although not in the same place on Earth (actually about 1/3 of the way around the planet from the previous one).
I looked up a list of upcoming solar eclipses.
Iceland or Spain in 2026 - both sound good. 2027 has one that is mostly in northern Africa, though it seems like it might touch part of Spain. And 2028 has one hitting Australia and New Zealand.
I’d better start saving up for the airfare!
2027, the best place to see it will be the Red Sea, probably Egypt. And it is a very long one as well!
My geophysics feed this morning had a few eclipse-related articles that might be interesting to folks of a popular science+ mindset. With links to the real science for those inclined to dig deeper. The first article includes ways you can participate as a citizen scientist using your phone to gather data while you watch the eclipse yourself.
Very interesting; many thanks for sharing that.
Solar eclipses, of course, happen more often than every 18 years. There are multiple cycles overlapping each other. It must have taken some extreme cleverness to suss out the signal from the noise.
Yes, very impressive that despite the extreme rarity of eclipses at any one place on Earth and despite the difficulty of long-distance communication, the Saros cycle was recognized over 2000 years ago.
That last one might explain why, when we were in South Carolina in 2017, the skies cleared just as the eclipse was beginning. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the same will happen in 10 days!
We did an Astronomy on Tap event last night specific to the eclipse; one of the speakers was a news radio meteorologist. Of course we’re a way out & things can (& do change) but he was shocked at how awful the forecast was for how much the path of totality for so much of the US was.
However, refer to my comment in post #509
Article on eye damage from eclipse viewing:
Well you’ll be going right by my hometown, Latham NY, so it’s pretty exciting to me!
Mine is turning into a “Comic Books, Trains and Ribs” trip (a natural, as soon as my wife said she didn’t want to come). I’m heading south through Illinois, and was excited to see Metropolis. A Superman Museum (and multiple gift shops, I’ll bet). Then I saw that in Normal, IL there’s a local comic book shop annnd an offshoot of my favorite: Graham Cracker Comics (between two record shops, yet)!
And the Wabash Railroad Model Train Museum in Forest, IL, with a Model Railroad Ride nearby. Might detour to follow some of the route of the Wabash Cannonball… you can drive across some of the old railroad bridges.
The ribs’ll be in Champaign, at the Black Dog Smoke & Ale House.