Very cool! Just remember the one truth about solar eclipses: total or nothing.
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.
Partial and annular solar eclipses are interesting.
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.
Just to add onto the strange observations to encourage more people to go:
- 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.
I found the sudden quietness quite a lot more interesting. It was really weird, not like nighttime where you glide into it but sudden like someone flipped a switch and it was done.
It made me think of a movie effect where they do a quick whoosh type of fade to silence rather than just cut as the totality came on. It was one of the most memorable moments of it to me.
This one passes nearby me. I have a 2 hour car drive planned for the day. Trying to convince people, specially with kids, to go to the totallity path, has proven useless: the websites say "eclipse will be at 99.9 something% here", and they are fully convinced it will be close enough.
Total or nothing. The sun is so bright even 0.1% will prevent you from seeing the eclipse directly. With all respect for your family, they are very wrong on this one. I'd beg them to accept the drive if I knew them. I drove 14 hours each way to see the last eclipse and boy it was so worth it.
Agreed, but I'll just add that annular eclipses occupy an intermediate point on that scale.
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.
It’s the one time I remember when the French highway toll booths said F that, let’s just open them up and let everyone pass. The August 11, 1999 solar eclipse.
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.
I got to enjoy the 2024 eclipse from my backyard. It was cloudy right up to totality, and I had serious concerns of not being able to see it. So unless it's raining, it's still worth a look up. Years before that there was a partial eclipse where a group of people left because it was cloudy. I stuck it out and just before sunset it popped out of the clouds to give a great view of ~80%.
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
I saw the one in Canada back in 2024, I don’t think I have ever witnessed such an amazing phenomenon like that before, a white glowing ring in the sky!! I will see if I can catch the 2027.
I brought binoculars to the 2024 event and made sure to keep my eyes closed during the preceding partial solar eclipse (eye acclimation).
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).
I have a telescope and traveled hours just so I can see it, and it’s truly memorable, not just the totality but also the trip and all the details of it, I was standing with my telescope outside on the hill (which is also an old castle) and when people were leaving after the totality, they all lined up asking me to see the partial with the telescope (I had the sun filter), kids, families, tourists, everyone!
> 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!
It was my favorite activity of 2024, easily. Went with my twin [&law] and met lots of very neat people. Learned a little bit about the sun, and lots about humble aweface.
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.
In Spain it's a trio of consecutive eclipses from 2026 to 2028 (the last one annular). To view the second one I don't even need travel anywhere.
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.
I think I will just cross the river and find a better place somewhere in the Parque del Agua Luis Buñuel or Expo. Should be also packed but a bit less then the bridges
I'm maybe thinking about finding a spot along one of the river walks. Will require more planning around finding the right angle but it should naturally allow for more space for people vs the bridges.
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.
"Zaragoza (Spanish: [θaɾaˈɣoθa]), traditionally known in English as Saragossa[7] (/ˌsærəˈɡɒsə/ SARR-ə-GOSS-ə)" according to Wikipedia, originally Caesaraugusta and later Saraqusṭah to be exact
Can we please stop with this nonsense? No matter where you live and which language you speak you never call the majority of places on Earth right. Can we just accept it and move on?
It is not non sense. I am spaniard myself and I did not understood what he was talking about until I saw the correction(is this a club name or something?).
If I want to talk about "Seattle" and use "Siadol" a lot of people are not going to understand.
A name is what something is called. For people it's rude to call them by a name they didn't choose but for non-persons that doesn't matter, if everybody else wants to call it "Siadol" then that is its name.
In the Dwarkesh podcast about relativity they talked about one of the ways to prove einsteins theory was to observe a total eclipse - stars that should not be visible were predicted to bend their light rays and be able to be seen. Explorers launched grand expeditions in the early 1900s to be the first to witness and prove the phenomenon.
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.
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 was able to catch the last solar eclipse in the US, and it was amazing. I'm a little sad I won't be able to catch this one, especially in Mallorca. Seeing the eclipse low in the sky, an hour before sunset. That has got to be a phenomenal view.
I think this tool is super neat. I love the shadow simulation for the terrain. Very well done!
The sea is hitting record high temperatures, we're overrun by tourists and our country is on fire but at least we get like three eclipses in a row, so that's pretty cool :) Jokes aside, life's overall pretty great, and the eclipses are exciting!
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.
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.