Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
eclipsefan.org
eclipsefan.org
While I don't want to dismiss partial eclipses entirely, please don't think that partial eclipses are "almost the same" as total eclipses. One is a curiosity, the other is a memorable life event.
Total solar eclipses are magical.
The sun turns into a gleaming jewel and all of nature around you enters another dimension. The animals freak out, the temperature of the air around you drops dramatically, your shadows morph and multiply into weird shapes, it feels like midnight with an ethereal glow.
You see the atmosphere of the sun glow in all chromatic glory.
You'll never witness anything else like it.
- I saw a child start laughing uncontrollably at 99.9% and then go completely silent and literally fall over at 100%
- A grown woman began sobbing
Occurred to me that we humans are among those animals that "start acting strangely" when this event occurs. Even when we know what's happening!
For me personally, it was the first and only time in my life that I felt, in a spatial awareness sense, that I was on a rock flying through space. The immensity, scale, anciency, and inevitability of the whole system just really hit me in the face in a way that is impossible to describe.
In fact I had a flight booked to Spain to see this one which I unfortunately won't be able to make anymore.
It is literally night and day. Total eclipses are absolutely profound.
With a partial eclipse, shadows look odd and the sunlight "feels" noticeably dimmer and more muted, but if you're not paying attention you might not notice much out of the ordinary.
An annular eclipse is much more dramatic and unmistakable. It's not as striking as totality, and of course you can't directly observe it without eye protection, but the "ring of fire" is beautiful in its own way.
The whole of Northern Europa driving back up, me included.
To bad it was cloudy, not sun to be see. I saw the 2017 one in Oregon though, it was scorching hot but no cloud to be seen.
A total eclipse is just on a whole different level.
BTW, you can't photograph a partial eclipse with your phone directly but you can snap a picture of the reflection in the lenses. https://imgur.com/a/partial-solar-eclipse-europe-march-2015-...
Just be careful while looking towards the sun even if you're concentrating on the screen. Even though it's not as strong as normal it's still strong enough to potentially damage your eyes. Some kind of shade is advised.
2. Don't let your partial experience this week check off the "see an eclipse" box and then not try to see totality – totality is an absolute must-see event
After the total eclipse was over, I watched a single honeybee re-orient itself, having temporarily lost its heliocentric bearings (bees "see" the sun's polarity, which helps keep them oriented).
Having also witnessed the 2017 total eclipse, certainly these are memorable events worth traveling into their totalities (could not say the same for partial eclipses).
> having temporarily lost its heliocentric bearings (bees "see" the sun's polarity, which helps keep them oriented).
Thanks for sharing that, I knew bees see different colors but not the sun’s polarity, I just spent two hours down the rabbit hole reading and watching bees stuff, till I ended up with hornets killing the whole beehives so had to stop!
My first roadtrip in my first hybrid, who knew a Camry could fjord a creek in some backroad national forest. Beautiful. Then we had tacos (instead of sitting in immediate-post traffic) and laughed some more at people, ourselves.
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>they all lined up asking me to see
I was in an area with >4m of totality, so I definitely shared my single pair of binoculars (my small group was really respectful, I got over 2 minutes zoomed in)... because I had kept my eyes closed for several minutes (before totality), I immediately was able to point out to others three red solar flares (for some reason I initially saw flashes of green, but whoTFknows).
I'm glad I shared, because that's when I first noticed Miss Lone Bee. As a then-beekeeper, I made sure to pay attention when the heliosphere returned to Her little part of this incredible world.
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>till I ended up with hornets killing the whole beehives so had to stop!
There's an entire subculture of hornet-murdering inventions (some clever, some which actually work!) to protect hive entrances. But my favorite has to be: the guy who kills them with a tennis racket.
It's a fascinating learning experience. Birds fall silent and the temperature drops quickly. Our species is too inconsiderate of Sol and nature.
> bees "see" the sun's polarity, which helps keep them oriented.
For those who share the interest, here is an article about bees' eyes:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/how-bees-use...
I’m @sneak.07 on Signal, let’s meet up.
Will be in Saragossa on Wednesday and gonna use Canon binos with image stabilization, the partial phase with filter and then some precious seconds without (a scary moment, I'll rely on an alarm to prevent my eyes to get damaged when the totality is over). Some people generally advised to skip any instruments and just enjoy it with your own eyes for the first time, but I'm too curious about corona details to let this opportunity pass.
Found an app called SunSurveyor that lets you see the position of the sun in the sky at a specific time from either your location via AR or google street view. Its been enormously helpful in ruling out potential spots.
If I want to talk about "Seattle" and use "Siadol" a lot of people are not going to understand.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The outputs, rather than the source code, are said to be under this CC-BY-NC-SA licensing.
I am not familiar with Polyform, but my cursory research indicates that this family of licenses is deliberately and consistently non-open-source.
https://polyformproject.org/about
It is profoundly deceptive to post this headlining as "Open-source" when it is deliberately not.
What makes this eclipse VERY different is the low angle (3-4 degress), so the viewpoints need to be planned well.
Also the clouds further to the west are extremely important, for Spain there is
https://www.aemet.es/es/eltiempo/prediccion/destacados/p5_t?...
as well as
Made me yearn for a more heroic time.
They kept being thwarted by weather, clouds etc and eventually scientists worked out the theory could be easily proven by the red shift of stars by direct observation.
> scientists worked out the theory could be easily proven
Theories aren't proven.
Einstein, working from previous theories and models, wrote his hypothesis or proposal of General Relativity. This, too, gained consensus and gave rise to mathematical models. The models made predictions, and the predictions have been largely confirmed to date. It has proven to be a robust theory without notable falsification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
Therefore, the theory enjoys popularity and prominence, and a good reputation in the scientific consensus. There is no "proving a theory" but the models had predicted the gravitational lensing phenomenon, and empirical observations confirmed these predictions as reality, and science marches on.
I think this tool is super neat. I love the shadow simulation for the terrain. Very well done!
Hoping the weather forecast will shift (as often happens here)!
We have a hotel in þingeyri on eclipse day. We're at 1min50s at our hotel.
As of tonight it splits sharply. Iceland is largely a write-off: Reykjavik and the Westman Islands are both 98% cloud at eclipse hour and flat all evening, so it isn't a timing problem you can wait out. The Westfjords are the exception — Ísafjörður is 75%, still poor but the best number in the country by a wide margin, and it's inside totality at about 1m33s.
Northern Spain is the good half: Burgos 8%, Zaragoza 8%, Bilbao 11%, Tarragona 13%. Palma de Mallorca is at 1% and it's in the path; Madrid and Lisbon, just outside it, are 1% too.
It's one commercial model four days out, so treat it as a second opinion. Where it disagrees with AEMET or the Met Office, believe them. We refresh it each morning until Wednesday.
Let's not forget who makes all these open-source interactive projects possible: Works by the US Government and Military are in the Public Domain by law. All the maps and data you got, NASA and the Naval Observatory generated it with their systems, their sensors, their satellites, their employees and enlisted men.
The site credits many more European sources than American.