Sunday, August 21, 2016

1 year to go!!!!



1 year from today, the shadow of the Moon will slam into the Earth at sunrise at a point in the north central Pacific Ocean. 27 minutes later, it will touch the landscape of the United States for the first time in over 38 years. It will take 94 minutes to cross our country. The shadow will swiftly sweep out into the Atlantic, and 195 minutes after it first laid a kiss on the cheek of our planet, after traveling over 8500 miles, it will lift off into space.1
The countdown continues. Years. Months. Weeks. Days. Hours. Minutes.
But the time that it takes for people who have never experienced a total solar eclipse to realize how incredible the experience really is may be much shorter than that.
Consider this quote from an eclipse observer in 1842:
"No degree of partial eclipse up to the last moment of the sun's appearance gave the least idea of a total eclipse." 2
and this other quote from an eclipse in 1998:
“The sun was a thinning crescent. Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury appeared. Shadow bands strobed over the earth– it looked as if I were looking at the planet through the blades of a rotating fan. I looked at the sun through a mylar filter and watched it narrow, narrow, and then it was gone. Around me there was a collective gasp, but the filter was black……. So I dropped the filter, and gaped up at the sun, and I thought to myself, “Oh my Gawwwwwwwd.” In the first fifth of a second I understood why people traveled thousands of miles to see these things. ……. It was the most awesome thing I’d ever seen in Nature.3

Millions of people along the narrow path of totality will be truly be awestruck as they experience the true wonder of a total eclipse of the Sun on August 21, 2017.

Will you be one of them?

Sources:
2. George Airy, remarking on a total eclipse in 1842. (Quote appears in the book “Totality, Eclipses of the Sun” by Mark Littman, Ken Willcox, and Fred Espenak (not sure of original source.))
3. http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/totality-in-curacao.html

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