Sunday, August 20, 2017

Hopefully the skies will be clear enough tomorrow for me to use this jury rig  to view the 72% eclipse here in Stroudsburg.  I happen to have a 30 power spotting telescope.  I cut out a hole in the Quaker Oats box, fit it over the telescope eyepiece.  By adjusting the focus, a three inch diameter image of the sun is focused on the back of the box.  By looking back through the oval hole, I can observe the sun.  Tried it out today and could resolve four sunspots on the disk of the sun.  So it should work tomorrow as long as the weather cooperates. My neighbor across the street is an amateur astronomer which makes him no less enthusiastic than a professional one.  He met his wife in an astronomy club.  His car is not in his driveway.  Gee, I wonder where he may have gone.  Hope it's clear wherever he went for totality.

21 comments:

  1. I have a 2.4 inch Unitron refractor from my childhood. It actually has a solar eyepiece for direct viewing but it is so old I would not trust it.

    I used to project the image of the sun for sunspots when I was young. I think we had a slight partial eclipse about a decade or so ago. I took it down to the beach and projected the image.

    I guess I am so used to the media hyping everything that I have not been able to get enthusiastic about this one.

    My public radio classical station informed me this evening that they have "eclipse" music all ready for tomorrow. I did use the website that tells you for your exact location the beginning, midpoint, and ending of the eclipse.

    Maybe I will get enthusiastic enough about it tomorrow to bring up my telescope from the basement.

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    1. Jack, what kind of music is eclipse music? Kind of like Hearts of Space?

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    2. Your Classical Soundtrack for the Eclipse is here.

      I guess what I heard last night was this "advertisement" for the link at yourclassical.com. It looks like selections that will be integrated into their regular music programming.

      Your have to click on play at their streaming Your Classical play stream is here

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    3. The same website has two one hour on demand eclipse related streams under Performance Today. You then click on which one you want to hear.

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  2. Just brought in the morning paper. Cloudy, 20% chance of rain in the afternoon. In more than 30 years in sunny Florida, I've been able to see only one "sky event" apart from meteor showers. That one, Hale-Bopp, was less exciting than watching planes land at the airport after dark. Maybe if I can talk my wife into moving to the outer Hebrides...

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  3. We will be 99% totality here. We could drive 20 miles and be 100%, but not going to do it because of the insane amount of traffic which will be on the two lane roads we would have to take. My nephew and his family came out to my dad's from Colorado yesterday. Early this morning they are headed to a cow pasture in Arthur County. Talk about remote. But should be a primo viewing place, smack in the middle of totality. No lights, electric wires, or other people for miles around. Just virgin sandhill prairie.

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  4. Reports of Chinese counterfeit eclipse goggles in the news. Why Chinese? Well, they make everything now, don't they? "Make America blind again".>
    Boys back in the lab took a pair that one guy bought and tested it on the spectrophotometer. Checked out. But the guy who emailed me said he'll still use just one eye.

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  5. of couse. Weather Underground says maximum chance of thunderstorms at maximum eclipse.

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  6. We will get 85% eclipse in Michigan. Last time we had a partial, the shadows went wacky. Clear now, 8:48 EDT, but a crap shoot with partly cloudy forecast.

    My plan today is to write a letter to my descendants in 2099, when there will be a total eclipse here, telling them about Eclipse Day 2017.

    Eclipse music: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6MARHgu7h5k&feature=youtu.be

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    1. Well, we had our eclipse experience and now the sun is getting back to normal. A little anticlimactic, I guess I should have believed those who said anything less than 100% wouldn't give the full experience. The thing I noticed most was a drop in temperature. We had some wispy clouds, but they didnt obscure the sun. I would describe the light as "early twilight" at the point nearest totality. Anyway, I think it was good that it got people's faces out of their electronics for awhile and got them to contemplate our amazing universe.

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  7. Went outside to wait for the peak, sans glasses. Was told to look at the light as it dappled through a tree. So watched light coming through the Christmas palm and hitting the fence. It had the crescent shape predicted. Big deal. Then, just as the crescents were reaching their nadir the light went out. I looked up, and our 46% cloud cover had come between the sun and the palm, tree. My wife came out and asked if anything was happening. It had happened, we guess. This was my third partial and the least of them. As I expected. Maybe in the outer Hebrides... I know Ireland is "standing by" for the partial.

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  9. I took a colander outside. The sky was clear, mostly. If you hold the colander so that the sun shines directly in the center of it, you'll see the little holes are crescents and can monitor progress that way. That's how I watched it with the cat, who seemed unimpressed. It got a little cooler (about 85/87 here and sultry). For 80 percent coverage, though, it didn't even get as dark as twilight. Wrote my letter to the Future. That was fun. Now on to Trump's Big Announcement tonight about the so-far-never-ending war in Afghanistan. I'm thinking the Outer Hebrides are looking pretty good, but not for the same reasons as Tom.

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  10. San Francisco Bay Area: totally overcast. Nada.

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  11. I did something I rarely do anymore, I watched TV. C-Span-1 had the NASA coverage. I also had the NASA coverage on my PC, showed about the same quality image.

    I went outside at the maximum, and was disappointed. It didn't seem very dark. Reality just can't live up to the media hype. It seemed NASA was doing a lot to promote NASA.

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    1. I wish the media hype would ramp up when NASA releases what it learned from the eclipse. Always seems like the event/experience is what gets people geeked up--and it's fun--but would be interesting to know if they learned anything new from their observations.

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  12. Jack, the human eye is just about the worst photometer ever made. Very bad at determining even an order of magnitude difference in brightness. That makes partial eclipses interesting but not breathtaking. I am curious about the sun's coronasphere and if there were some way to convert that power into coherent light. If we could create such a superpowerful laser beam, we could destroy threatening comets and asteroids, or move them, colonize the solar system, terraform bodies, send near speed of light probes to other stars. Downside, yeah, fry countries we don't like.

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    1. "Fry countries we don't like." Yup. ISTM that even "pure" science is often done--or at least prioritized--with some application, usually military, in view. A few times a year, I'll spend an hour watching video that storm chasers put up. Those guys might be boneheads, but they have no motive outside of appreciating how a super cell forms, grows, rotates, and starts ripping off roofs.

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  13. terraform planets. don't know how bodies got in there.

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