Comments on: Solar eclipse. Kinda.

By: StevoR

StevoR — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:31:05 +0000

Martin Lewicki’s site (linked on my name here) also has a great animation of the event as viewed from my home town of Adelaide, South Oz. Its pretty neat and you don’t even burn your eyes out watching it!

Remember folks, always use the solar filter!

Case anyone’s curious its after midnight & still 30+ and we’ve just had our hottest day in 70 years and thrid hottest ever recorded – 45.7 degrees Celscius and tomorrow it’s forecast to be 44 with a string of many more days over 40. Unless other Adelaideans are also online now I imagine this probably makes me the hottest blogee (if that’s the term) here at present?

By: StevoR

StevoR — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:06:08 +0000

A friend of mine photographed it though – click on my name for the link to his eclipse photo.

By: StevoR

StevoR — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:14:57 +0000

D’oh! Missed it.

I should’ve checked this blog earlier .. Didn’t see /hear / read any mention of it or notice anything different here in Adelaide, South Australia.

Would’ve been better today – its 45.3 degrees celscius in Adelaide (well over 100 Fahrenheit) our cities hottest day in 70 years.

Something to block out a bit of sunlight now would be very welcome – one of those days I wish our Sun was a lot more like Alpha Centauri B than Alpha Centauri A ..

(Not Alpha Centauri C a.k.a. Proxima Cen though – that’d be taking things a bit too far! )

By: Santiago Bilinkis

Santiago Bilinkis — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:30:46 +0000

Hi! I live in Argentina and our plates are full. We have a total solar eclipse next year, then a combo platter of two total solar eclipses back to back in 2019 and 2020!

If you care to move South in anticipation we can haelp you find an appartment!!!

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:24:04 +0000

I think this is a very nice photo of the eclipes (from The Big Picture)

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/chinese_new_year_welcoming_the_1.html#photo35

By: Ken B

Ken B — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:33:49 +0000

Speaking of annular eclipses, yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day has a beautiful image from one in 1992.

You mean “annular” doesn’t mean “once a year”?

By: Graey

Graey — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:39:59 +0000

If it were visible here–Longmont, 10 miles from Boulder–there would have been no way to see it. It’s snowing quite thoroughly, and I couldn’t see 15 meters in front of my car on the drive home this morning.

By: Lenny

Lenny — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:45:31 +0000

We can see a reasonable partial eclipse from Perth, right now there is a noticeable bite out of the sun; like Pacman.

By: ZZamboni

ZZamboni — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:44:23 +0000

I lived in Mexico in 1984, when there was an annular eclipse. We lived in the north, so my dad drove us ~8 hours that morning (I got to skip school with parental approval!) to get to where the annular eclipse would be visible (in the rest of the country it was seen as partial). We stopped in a field when the eclipse started, and it was a truly great experience, kind of surreal since the light changes in a very strange way and all the animals start behaving as if it was nighttime. I remember you could see little rings of light in the projected light through the leaves of a tree, as you would see it projected through a pinhole.

By: José

José — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:01:33 +0000

But I thought god put the moon at the precise distance from earth it needed to be in order to barely obscure the sun. Everything I know is a lie!

By: Francois

Francois — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:44:39 +0000

Eh. Its overcast here (Pretoria, South Africa) so can’t see anything.

By: Naomi

Naomi — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:34:12 +0000

We’re barely going to get any on the east coast It’s going to start JUST before sunset, so Sydneysiders (and most others on the coast, which is… the majority of the country) will only get a few minutes of it.

Still! Got my piece of paper and binoculars (to focus the image on the paper, not to look through, I’m not that dumb!) ready!

Oh, and it’s overcast. How lovely. Come on, skies, CLEAR!

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:29:42 +0000

Damn … a bit late for me to look up I guess. Then again I’ve seen so many partial eclipses. If I could at least see the annulus I would probably make an effort to go outside.

Watch the spots of light filtering through the leaves of trees – they’ll be in whatever shape the sun appears to have. So that’ll either be a crescent, or for people in the right places at the right time, rings! If anyone sees these little rings of light on the ground, take a photo.

By: Meng Bomin

Meng Bomin — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:20:40 +0000

So, I take Phil at his word that it’s the Pacific ocean, so I look to the eastern side of the globe and say to myself…wait…California and some of the American West will get some viewing of it. And then I looked closer and realized that it was Indonesia.

By: tacitus

tacitus — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:29:45 +0000

I remember an old Doonesbury cartoon — from all the way back during the Gulf War, I think — where one of the characters was shipping out to Iraq. Another person asked him “Where’s that?” to which he replied, “Dunno, somewhere near Norway, I think.”

By: tacitus

tacitus — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:26:28 +0000

…we do have running water and indoor bathrooms in such places as Texas…

We do? You’d think after living for 12 years in Texas someone would have told me! Now I know why my friends always start shifting their chairs away from me when I sit next to them.

By: Jivlain

Jivlain — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:12:17 +0000

Ooooooh! An excuse to build a pinhole camera!

By: Larian LeQuella

Larian LeQuella — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:02:42 +0000

Sorry, that was meant as a joke mate. I thought the :p (which was supposed to be a ) and the Ambrose Bierce quote would indicate that. My mistake.

Yes, ignorance of many things is worldwide.

By: ccpetersen

ccpetersen — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:58:04 +0000

Larian,

You know, many of us Americans DO know our geography. Why put down your fellow countrypersons that way? Let me turn it around a bit: it’s astonishing how many times I’ve been traveling elsewhere in the world and find myself answering questions like “Does it snow year-round in Denver?” and “Can you drive from New York City to Chicago in an afternoon?” and patiently explaining to confused people in several countries that yes, indeed, we do have running water and indoor bathrooms in such places as Texas and Arizona. Ignorance of geography and customs is a world-wide phenom.

By: Phil Plait

Phil Plait — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:24:19 +0000

Man, that’s weird. Of course that’s the Indian ocean. I know that, yet for some reason I wrote out Pacific when I typed it out. That’s really a bit freaky.

By: Helioprogenus

Helioprogenus — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:21:35 +0000

@ Mark,

Sorry about that, I didn’t see your post before I went ahead with mine.

By: Helioprogenus

Helioprogenus — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:18:56 +0000

Shouldn’t it be the Indian Ocean?

By: andy

andy — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:59:10 +0000

I’d really like to see an annular eclipse some day.

By: DrFlimmer

DrFlimmer — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:52:17 +0000

THAT distant future doesn’t bother me . I want to see a “real” eclipse earlier myself! The last total eclipse in Germany was in 1999 (if I remember correctly). And where I live it was partial – damn it.

By: Larian LeQuella

Larian LeQuella — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:20:41 +0000

By the way, this blog entry would be a perfect place to mention that in the distant future, ALL eclipses will be annular.