And the sun was replaced by a black circle — ringed on all sides with gleaming white fire.
As the Great American Eclipse made landfall in the tiny coastal town of Newport, Ore., the rowdy crowd that gathered on its beach was stunned by the sight into an eerie silence.
In Casper, Wyo., a man blew a shofar, as others rang bells and let loose whoops and roars erupted from the crowd. Birds, startled by the darkness, darted in every direction.
“You weren’t kidding about the goosebumps,” one man muttered to another.
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Scenes from the total solar eclipse of 2017
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It’s the Super Bowl of the Solar System! On Monday, August 21st, the moon will obscure the sun. People across the US will travel to the narrow band of land where the sun will be completely blocked out, but even if you’re far away and watching from home you’ll see something special happen in the sky.
The eclipse won’t last long, so you’ll want to be sure you’re ready to watch at the precise time when it will peak. Our friends at Vox made a handy eclipse watching tool that tells you exactly when you should be outside to see the action — just type your zip code into the tool below to see what time to watch and what your eclipse will look like. Just make sure you don’t look at the sun without the proper safety equipment. (Seriously, even if you have to do it yourself, protect your eyes.)
Americans across the country this weekend began a great, if brief, migration, rushing toward a swath of territory stretching from Oregon to South Carolina for a chance to witness a total eclipse of the sun.
By Sunday, roads in many states were jammed as a normally busy summer weekend was overtaken by eclipse mania. But some locations were spared along the 70-mile-wide path of totality, where, weather permitting, viewers on Monday will be able to see the moon completely block the sun for a few minutes. The total eclipse will be the first to touch the mainland United States in nearly four decades.
Wyoming transportation officials reported nearly 20 percent more vehicles on the roads compared with a five-year average for the third weekend in August. They cautioned that the state’s population of 600,000 could double with people heading for the zone of totality, which crosses the state.
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Cars lined up on Sunday to get into Grand Teton National Park outside Jackson, Wyo. People are flocking to the area in anticipation of viewing a total solar eclipse on Monday.Credit George Frey/Getty Images
A man identifying himself as an astronomer had emailed to let him know about two eclipses that would cross the United States — one in 2017, the next in 2024. Carbondale, the small southern Illinois city where Baer was a physics professor, would be the only city at the center of both.
Disbelieving, Baer pulled up a NASA projection of future paths of totality — the places where the moon completely covers the sun during an eclipse. The lines crossed right over his city, like an X on a treasure map, marked by the shadow of the moon.
Three years later, Carbondale residents are still incredulous at their cosmic good fortune. The city has been badly in need of a break, ever since the recession and state budget crises cut enrollment at the local campus of Southern Illinois University nearly in half. With the region’s biggest employer in a tailspin, businesses shuttered and buildings fell into disrepair. The apartment vacancy rate was 35 percent. “This place was depressed,” Baer said.
Five years ago, George Heimpel, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota, travelled to Trinidad in search of insect larvae.He was after several kinds in particular—Philornis downsi, a fly whose parasitic young feed on the hatchlings of tropical birds, and various minuscule wasp species whose own offspring feed on those of the fly. Heimpel hoped that the wasps might solve a problem on the Galápagos Islands, where Philornis has taken a severe toll on native fowl. Those hurt most by the fly, which was likely brought to the archipelago by people, are the Galápagos finches, the songbirds that provided Charles Darwin with some of the earliest evidence of evolution. Currently, eleven of the fourteen finch species are confirmed prey of Philornis larvae, which gorge on the young birds’ blood. With a mortality rate nearing a hundred per cent in some species, the chicks are dropping like, well, flies. The critically endangered mangrove finch is particularly imperilled: if Philornis isn’t stopped, the bird could disappear in a matter of decades, according to mathematical simulations from the University of Utah. It would be the first extinction to befall a Galápagos finch since humans came to the islands, in 1535.
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Galápagos finches, which helped inspire the theory of evolution, are under urgent threat. Will a controversial scientific technique be their deliverance?
Not much about Makoto Koike’s adult life suggests that he would be a farmer. Trained as an engineer, he spent most of his career in a busy urban section of Aichi Prefecture, Japan, near the headquarters of the Toyota Motor Corporation, writing software to control cars. Koike’s longtime hobby is tinkering with electronic kits and machines; he is not naturally an outdoorsy type. Yet, in 2014, at the age of thirty-three, he left his job and city life to move to his parents’ cucumber farm, in the greener prefecture of Shizuoka. “I thought I was getting old,” Koike told me. “I wanted to be close to my home and my family.”
The Koikes have been growing cucumbers in Kosai, a town wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the brackish Lake Hamana, for nearly fifty years. Their crop, which fills three small greenhouses, grows year-round. Koike’s father, Harumi, plants the seeds; Koike oversees their cultivation; and his mother, Masako, sorts the harvest. This last job is particularly important in Japan, which is famously discerning about its produce. Nice strawberries can fetch several dollars apiece in some markets, and a sublime cubic watermelon can go for hundreds. Vegetables hold a less privileged place than fruits, but supermarkets rarely stock produce that is at all irregular in shape or size. The Koikes send their better cucumbers, the ones that are straight and uniform in thickness, to wholesalers. The not-so-perfect ones go to local stands, where they are sold at half price. (“They taste the same,” Koike said.) Masako judges the vegetables one by one, separating them into bins. Though she devotes only half a second to each cucumber, the task takes up most of her work time; on some days, she goes through around four thousand of them.
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For decades, Makoto Koike’s mother has been sorting cucumbers by hand. Now he is trying to teach a machine to replace her.
One of the reasons a total solar eclipse is possible is because of an amazing cosmic coincidence: the Sun is four hundred times larger than the Moon but is also four hundred times farther away. This makes them seem like they are relatively the same size from our perspective here on Earth.
If Isaac Newton suddenly popped out of a time machine, he’d be delighted to see how far physics had come. Things that were deeply mysterious a few centuries ago are now taught in freshman physics classes (the composition of stars is one good example).
Newton would be stunned to see enormous experiments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland — and possibly perturbed to learn that his theory of gravity had been superseded by one dreamed up by some fellow named Einstein. Quantum mechanics would probably strike him as bizarre, though today’s scientists feel the same way.
But once he was up to speed, Newton would no doubt applaud what modern physics has achieved — from the discovery of the nature of light in the 19th Century to determining the structure of the atom in the 20th Century to last year’s discovery of gravitational waves. And yet physicists today are the first to admit they don’t have all the answers. “There are basic facts about the universe that we’re ignorant of,” says Dr. Daniel Whiteson, a University of California physicist and the co-author of the new book “We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe.”
Bill Kramer felt the tip of a machine gun against his back, forcefully guiding him to the back room of an Indonesian airport. It was 1983, 11 years after he saw his first solar eclipse as a boy, and his wife had come along to see her first one, too. A small telescope in his carry-on bag had alarmed customs officials, and he had no idea how to explain that he’d merely brought it to see the moon perfectly aligning with the sun, shrouding the Earth in a magical sort of darkness.
“I’m sweating bullets, and this guy comes in with this big uniform and says in a perfect American accent, ‘Wow, what a nice telescope,’” Kramer, a 58-year-old retired computer scientist now living in Jamaica, recalled in a Skype interview. “The relief I felt was pretty incredible.”
Kramer is an eclipse chaser, and the officials surveying his bag weren’t the first people Kramer encountered who didn’t quite understand his passion. Chasers often make careers of their voyages to see the sun’s glowing corona, or they’re vigorous planners who book remote trips into the path of totality years ahead of time. And those of us who are “eclipse virgins” — a popular term among the chasers — probably won’t understand the appeal until we see one ourselves, they say. To them, eclipse chasing is a core identity, a lifestyle or – at the very least — travel with a purpose.
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A total solar eclipse on March 9, 2016, in Palembang, located in the South Sumatra province of Indonesia.
Here is a quick demo about how to build a pinhole projector to safely view a projection of the eclipsed sun. When looking at the eclipse directly, protective eclipse glasses are necessary to prevent eye damage.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Scenes from the total solar eclipse of 2017
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The Amazing Cosmic Coincidence
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James' World 2 