Category Archives: Astronomy

Celestial mechanics. It truly is like clockwork.

Take a moon a quarter the size of it’s primary planet, put it out a quarter million miles, let angular momentum and four and a half billion years roll by, and it ends up right there tonight, headed for right THERE in twelve days and thirteen hours. Mix in an atmosphere, some haze and fog, diffraction, refraction, Reyleigh scattering, and you end up with a weird looking arc of bright orange peeking over the horizon.

Whip out that cell phone, hold really, REALLY still, and maybe you see this.

Wonders abound, all around us.

Simple messages:

1) Be careful to watch the partial phases of the eclipse carefully and protect your eyes!
2) If you don’t already have safe eclipse glasses and you’re going to watch the eclipse, get them now! They’ll sell out quickly.

Never look at the Sun without protection except for when it’s 100% fully eclipsed. For those 4:24 you’re going to see one of the most amazing sights in the entire Universe and you can whip those glasses off and see it in all of its naked eye glory. But for the partial phases for a couple hours before totality and for a couple of hours after totality, you MUST have protection for your eyes.

And NEVER look at the uneclipsed Sun with binoculars or any kind of magnification without special solar filters designed specifically for that instrument. You can cause permanent vision damage or loss in just seconds.

When shopping for eclipse glasses, make sure you only buy from reputable sources and manufacturers. There are reports already of many sellers on Amazon and elsewhere that are are pushing knock off glasses that don’t meet the proper standards for protecting your vision. I got mine from 2024eclipse.org. (For a package of ten I paid $27, including tax and shipping, so that should give you a good baseline for how much you should be paying.)

At the end of the day, if you can’t get certified eclipse glasses and April 8th comes and you still need a way to look at the partial phases of the eclipse, there are other options that don’t involve looking directly at the Sun. We’ll get to those another time.

Order now, be safe!

See that Sun? We’re only one day away from the new moon, so somewhere in this view is also that Moon, even if you can’t see it. (It’s probably about where the tops of those palm trees are, about 15º-ish west of the sun.)

You can’t see the Moon because it’s being seriously backlit by a freakin’ bright star, but it’s still there, creeping in its orbit closer and closer to an alignment which is perfect… But this month, they’ll miss. No part of the Sun will be blocked by the Moon from our viewpoint, and conversely, no part of the Moon’s shadow will touch the Earth.

Next month, on the other hand…

In 28 days, on April 8th, the alignment will be absolutely perfect and the shadow of the moon will swing in an arc from the Pacific Ocean toward the northeast across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, before heading out over the Canadian maritime provinces.

(Map from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio)

Yes, I’ll be there. With my son living in San Antonio, I’ll be headed to Kerrville, TX as my base, sitting right on the centerline of the path of totality with 4:24 of totality.

Yes, you’ll be hearing about it here. Probably just about every day once we get into April.

If anyone has questions, feel free to drop them into the comments. I’ll try to answer them all.

Clear skies!!!

Remember when I went to the NASA Social at Palmdale and got to see the SOFIA aircraft?

This was in 2015, nine years ago, and they’ve unfortunately retired her now. But that big door in side, just forward of the tail, would open up inside to expose a huge infrared telescope.

Inside, folks would attach their equipment and experiments (like this one from a group at Cornell Universaity) and the mirror and experiments would seemingly bounce and dance around as the plane flew above a big chunk of the atmosphere. But in fact the telescope tracking systems were keeping the telescope perfectly still with astonishing precision, while the plane bounced and moved around it.

Amazing!