The URL for this page is http://russillo.weebly.com/bull-eclipse-2017.html
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Obviously this event has passed, but (perhaps just as obviously) I'm leaving this page up. I plan on commenting often here about my experience, and in fact already have in several places below.
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NW HORIZONS ECLIPSE ARTICLE, 9/11/17 - https://www.northwesthorizons.com/top-stories/2017/09/11/russillo-chases-transformational-eclipse/
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Obviously this event has passed, but (perhaps just as obviously) I'm leaving this page up. I plan on commenting often here about my experience, and in fact already have in several places below.
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NW HORIZONS ECLIPSE ARTICLE, 9/11/17 - https://www.northwesthorizons.com/top-stories/2017/09/11/russillo-chases-transformational-eclipse/
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IF YOU WANT TO GET RIGHT TO THE IMPORTANT INFO, THEN HERE'S THE NITTY GRITTY:
I. FOLLOW THIS LINK to see the actual eclipse path and find out the best place for you to go. (IF YOU STAY IN THE TRIAD, you will not see a total eclipse, but the deepest part of the partial eclipse will be at 2:40-2:43 PM EDT. By way of comparison, in Nashville TN, totality occurs from about 2:25 - 2:30 PM, and Charleston, SC it's 2:45 - 2:50.)
II. FORGET ABOUT HOTELS (they're all full) just use the above map link and this weather link, and drive on Monday morning.
III. FORGET ABOUT TELESCOPES, especially if you have never used one before. Just a pair of decent eclipse glasses or a rudimentary pinhole camera will do you. (For the times before and after darkness when the sun will bake your retinas.)
IV. CHECK WEATHER FORECASTS for all potential viewing locations (weather.com, Intellicast, if you like, but my link will zero you in on the path itself. I know that's the third weather link since the start of the page: it's that important.)
V. DON'T FORGET THE PARTIAL ECLIPSE. The three minutes of totality will be bookended by 90 minutes of "partiality" before, then 90 more minutes after.
VI. BUT, BUT, BUT...WHAT IF IT'S CLOUDY? It's looking like it might be, but if you want a full total solar eclipse experience, and you don't have access to a jet, then you simply have to drive on Monday morning. Period.
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For more detail (a lot more) scroll on down. Seriously, I've been waxing rhapsodic about this eclipse to my students since I first had students in 2001, and if you'd told me back in 1999 (when I first learned about it) that, on eclipse day, I will have been an Astronomy teacher for 6+ years--a subject I'd never heard of having been taught in any high school--I'd've asked you what the h*ll you were smoking. No kidding: I haven't been able to shut up about this eclipse since for 18 years, so if you dare, read on.
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WHAT EVEN IS THIS?
On Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, the moon will pass directly between the sun and the earth creating a 70 mile wide circular shadow on the earth's surface (aka a total solar eclipse) which will spend an hour and a half cruising across the continental United States, from the Oregon to South Carolina coasts. More specifically: At 10:16 AM Pacific Daylight Time (1:16 PM EDT) the center of the moon's shadow will come ashore at Lincoln Beach on the Oregon coast, and 93 minutes later, having
- bisected Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska,
- grazed the northeast corner of Kansas,
- split Missouri (darkening the northeast half of Kansas City then the southwest half of St. Louis,)
- nipped the southern tip of Illinois and a bit more of the western end of Kentucky,
- split Tennessee,
- shaved the western tip of North Carolina and the northeast corner of Georgia,
- passed a mere 80 miles southwest of Charlotte,
- and cleft South Carolina almost perfectly in twain,
will, at 2:49 PM EDT, quit North America at Cape Romain on the South Carolina coast.
Between 2:38 PM and 2:44 PM EDT the center of the eclipse path (i.e. where the eclipse will last 2 minutes 40 seconds) will trace a line parallel to--and about 13 miles south of--the I-385/I-26 corridor between Greenville, SC and Columbia, SC. This is only 80 miles southwest of Charlotte.
Why is everybody going so wacko about this? Because if this shadow passes over you, the sun will appear to go dark for a few minutes, stars will come out, roosters will crow a second time, and many other wild things happen as well. Honestly, why this isn't a national holiday is beyond me. [8/26/17: I was essentially right on the centerline and it got dark enough for streetlights to come on, and dark enough to see planets, but not dark enough to see stars. WHY? With a max duration of only 2:40, the moon and sun are very close to being identical sizes in the sky. So the moon's shadow is relatively small. NOW. In 2024? Max durations are in the mid-4 minute range, which means the moon is CLOSER to the earth, which means the eclipse shadow/totality path is wider (120 miles in 2024 vs. 70 miles for 2017), which means when you're within the shadow, that omni-directional horizon daylight is farther away, which means the sky gets darker, which means stars should be visible.]
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ARE YOU TRAVELING INTO THE PATH OF TOTALITY TO VIEW THIS SUCKER BETWEEN 2:30 and 2:45 PM ON THE AFTERNOON OF AUG. 21? You should. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. As an amateur astronomer and a professional science teacher, here's what I have done and will do to prepare for this eclipse:
I. FOLLOW THIS LINK -- it's the first one I've listed below. IT'S IMPORTANT, SO GET TO KNOW IT WELL. It's an interactive Google map with the eclipse path overlaid, and it will tell you not only where to go, but if you click anywhere on the map itself it will tell you how long darkness will last at that location. (I seriously can't recommend this site enough). The name of the game on Monday is to get as close to the centerline of the 70-mile wide eclipse path as possible to experience the longest duration of totality. If you're on the centerline you'll get 2:40 of darkness. The farther away from the centerline you are, the less time you are in the moon's shadow, the shorter your eclipse experience. [9/11/17: As I said over on the Eclipse 2024 page, I can totally vouch for this guy's accuracy; I spotted my viewing location precisely--on the tip of a peninsula, on a lake, in Kefauver State Park, in Madisonville, TN--and Jubier's times for totality for that spot were within a half-second of my direct observations for both the beginning AND the ending of totality, as well as for first contact, when the disk of the moon first dents the disk of the sun, which for us was at 1:04 PM.]
II. FORGET ABOUT HOTELS. Greensboro is close enough (3 hours drive to the eclipse path, longer though if we need to head west) that you can get up Monday morning, check the weather, and drive to a spot near the center of the eclipse path. If you're thinking about a hotel room within the shadow's path, forget it. Most hotels [but not all! See below!] near the eclipse path—let alone within it—sold out last fall. I booked my Columbia, SC hotel room 12 months ago for goodness's sake. [22AUG17, post-umbral, It took us almost no time at all to dump this year-old reservation once it was clear on Saturday night that the weather was going to be crap everywhere east of the Appalachians. Looked at Knoxville but the entire town was sold out. SOMEHOW found a room in Pigeon Forge, TN, of all places!]
III. FORGET ABOUT TELESCOPES IF YOU HAVE NEVER USED ONE BEFORE. Unless you are a professional or a seasoned amateur, a telescope will not only be useless on eclipse day, it could be dangerous. If you have a telescope AND are comfortable using it AND you have a sun filter that fits snugly over the APERTURE of the telescope (i.e. the wider, far end that points to what you're looking at...where the lens cap goes), then you know what you're doing and I have nothing for you. IF YOUR SUN FILTER IS A LITTLE 1" DIAMETER THING THAT SCREWS ONTO YOUR EYEPIECES: Don't do it! HERE'S A PDF WITH PHOTOS ILLUSTRATING WHY EYEPIECE SUN FILTERS ARE DANGEROUS AND APERTURE ("LENS CAP" STYLE) SUN FILTERS ARE SAFE.
A) By the time all that magnified sunlight travels the length of your scope and reaches the eyepiece, so much heat has built up inside the instrument that plastic parts inside it can melt, as mine have done, on more then one embarrassing occasion!
B) If you rapidly and frequently swap eyepieces like many folks do, it's VERY easy to forget that your sun filter was attached to the eyepiece you just removed...and you can toast your retinas with the new unprotected eyepiece you just inserted.
Only a sun filter that covers the aperture is truly safe,
and this applies to binoculars too!
Bottom line: I know all that stuff, AND I'm an experienced telescope user, and I'm still not bringing my telescope [I did bring it, but it stayed in the trunk of my car.] If you're interested, here's what I'm doing. I will have a pair of sun-filtered binoculars around my neck, and I might pull the filters off and look up when the sun is totally obscured. [Yep. Totally did that!] But I'll also have a decent pair of Eclipse glasses; they're probably all you need to glance up and see a crescent sun! (Pinhole cameras are so easy to make I can't imagine I won't try to fudge at least one if I have a moment before or after totality.) [Did that too, and in fact was a bit of a hero for 30 seconds when I turned my unfiltered binoculars around and projected a large image of the eclipse onto a piece of paper on the ground so 10 or 15 people could snap photos.]
But frankly, there's so much more going on around you, on the ground, ON EARTH, during a total eclipse; That's part of the fun I'm anticipating. What am I talking about?
* The horizon never goes perfectly dark. Way off in the distance, for 360 degrees around you, you'll see a weird sort of twilight, like you see in the east an hour before sunrise, or the west an hour post-sunset. [Definitely observed this.]
* The temperature instantly drops 10-15 deg F. I'm told that apart from the abrupt mid-day darkness, the temperature change is the coolest thing about a total eclipse. (Ya get it? The COOLEST thing? OMG somebody stop me.) [OK, not instantly, it turns out. It definitely does feel cooler in the shadow than in direct sunlight, but the temperature starts to fall far sooner, as the pre-total partial eclipse allows less and less of the sun to reach the earth. All day we'd been sweating though our shirts, but after about an hour of partial, we noticed that everyone's sweat spots had dried. Clearly it was cooler.]
* Wind. Breezes have been known to cease, or change direction. [Did not observe this.]
* Polaris. You've been told the North Star is always in the same place, 24/7/365...that if the sky was black instead of blue you would see it sitting right where you always see it at night. Now you can spend a few seconds glancing north and proving this to yourself! [Forgot to do this, but stars didn't come out where we were anyway, so probably wouldn't have been able to see Polaris anyway.]
* Shadow Bands? Mysterious wave-ish light effect which, on the very rare occasions it actually appears on light colored surfaces does so only at the instant totality begins or the instant it ends. [No way.]
* Animals. If there are any animals around you--especially roosters!--make note of how they react to the mid-day darkness and temperature change, and the sun's reappearance. [Where we were there was a lake with 60-70 birds floating upon it. A few of them did fly off in many different directions as totality got close.]
* YOURSELF. And this is a very big thing: Do not be surprised if you behave strangely during the 2-3 minutes of totality. People have been known to come completely unglued by the experience: crying, laughing, dancing, babbling (even scientifically, like this guy!) (better link, direct youtube); name it. (Yes, all through human history, people sometimes just freak the f**k out during a solar eclipse! Do I think that will be me? You know...it just might be. Like I've said here and elsewhere, I've been waiting for these three minutes since I received an eclipse book on Christmas Day, 1999: I would not at all be surprised if, after waiting 6,449 days, and talking to students about it every single year since, and then SOMEHOW getting to teach astronomy at a really good school, and then going so far as to make hotel reservations last year, and then on the day IF WE ACTUALLY GET CLEAR SKIES (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) to say nothing of the elemental fact that, oh yeah, IT'S SUDDENLY NIGHTTIME AT MID-DAY...no, I would not at all be surprised to find myself completely overwhelmed emotionally: maybe I will burst into tears! LET'S FIND OUT!!) [I did not burst into tears during totality, it turned out. But we arrived at our viewing location (Kefauver Park in Madisonville, TN) 7 solid hours before the eclipse, so I had lots of time to wander around the park's lake and reflect. And a couple times I found myself saying aloud things like: "So this is the day. Look around and soak it in because after all these years of hoping and wondering, this is what your Aug. 21, 2017 looks like. Of all the places you could have ended up, with cloudy skies or a broken down car on the side of some road, you ended up here in Tennessee at a really nice park on a crystal clear day. Look around." And *that's* the kind of overwhelming realization that's getting me a little emotional now as I write this, and it sure did that morning. More than once, I'm not ashamed to say.]
(5/17/20: ...and every single time I re-read this.)
(2/24/23: Every single time.)
(3/30/24: Yep!)
IV. I'll say it again: CHECK WEATHER FORECASTS for you viewing location. On the morning of the 21st be prepared to "audible," to high-tail it to a place of clearer skies. Here again is my homemade page featuring Aug 21 forecasts for several locations along the eclipse path. Now that we’re within the extended forecast window, I’ll be updating this page daily at least, and more frequently if need be.
(National maps showing clear sky probability are linked below, #4 & #5, but unless you can fly to Missouri or Nebraska or even farther west, and with detailed forecasts all along the path readily available, probability maps are surely superfluous.)
V. DON'T FORGET THE PARTIAL. I'll say it again: Your three minutes of totality will be bookended by 90 minutes of "partiality" before, and then 90 minutes of "partial" after. Most folks won't get ANY totality, so this will be their eclipse experience. If you can't get yourself into the path of totality and will only experience a partial eclipse, go outside, find some trees and look at the ground under them; The gaps between leaves work like thousands of natural pinhole cameras so you will see lots and lots of little eclipses on the ground under trees!
VI. BUT...BUT...BUT....WHAT IF IT'S CLOUDY? If you wake up on the morning of the 21st and the forecast for your planned viewing location is clouds (as it's looking more and more like it will) then that's when you'll find out how important this experience is to you. Meteor showers are a dime a dozen and are so frequently disappointing that I only off-handedly announce them to my students. A total solar eclipse is different. A total solar eclipse, like a hurricane, or an mag 8.0+ earthquake, or an erupting volcano, is one of nature's "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME," "ONCE IN A LIFETIME IF YOU'RE LUCKY" moments, and I think they're worth risking a lot for. (Ask this guy, who's seen more than one!) Seriously: if you want a full total solar eclipse experience, and it becomes apparent that it's going to be cloudy, then you have to drive. Period. I got a hotel room within the eclipse path, and I'm getting up at 6 AM on Monday. If current forecasts hold I'll probably be getting up a d*mned sight earlier than 6, and my butt is on the road, it's as simple as that. [There have been and will be other references to Columbia, SC here, but we dumped that reservation on the evening of the 19th since Columbia's forecasts were no good. Or rather, they were only OK compared to points farther west. We ended up getting a hotel room in Pigeon Forge, TN, to which we drove Sunday afternoon, and from which we checked out at 6 AM Monday morning.]
Where can you go?
- Head southeast? From my hotel in Columbia it's a two hour drive to Charleston (the eastern extreme, on the eastern coast. As of 8/13 Charleston's 8/21 forecast is as crappy as Columbia's, so we can probably rule out southeastern alternatives.)
- Head northwest. From my hotel it's 6.5 hour drive to Nashville, to the west. If I get up earlier I can drive farther if need be, and I fully expect highways to be crowded. Point is, if you're serious about this and have been for many years, a few extra hours of driving is NOTHING. [Almost literally: nothing at all.]
[21OCT17: Not being female I can only presume here, but I liken this helpful amnesia to that experienced by women after childbirth: we're told it's the most intense pain a human can experience, so why would a woman ever have more than one child? Because you remember THAT you were in pain, but in your memory the aftereffect was so overwhelmingly positive you do not associate that pain with actual suffering. Same with eclipse traffic; I surely remember THAT it was a heinous interminable nightmare, but when I think back on the eclipse, I rarely think of the traffic. i.e. the net experience was so positive that I would do it again without a moment's hesitation!]
Happy eclipse chasing, you demented and lovely umbraphiles!!
Steve
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1. Interactive Google map of Aug. 21, 2017 eclipse path
Huge gratitude to Mr. Xavier M. Jubier for creating this map, because I don't care who you are, this is JUST COOL. It's like any other Google map except it has the eclipse path included. You can zoom way in to see, for example, which roads you might want to drive to on the day. It'll be very handy this week before, as weather reports become crucial.
2. REPUTABLE ECLIPSE GLASSES/VENDORS. - https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters
3. My daily updated assemblage of 8/21 forecasts for locations along the eastern 1/5 of the eclipse path.
4. INTERACTIVE CLOUD COVER HISTORY ALONG ECLIPSE PATH - www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/ready-set-eclipse
South Carolina is not beautifully positioned for great weather on Aug. 21, but still...
5. ANOTHER CLOUD COVER PROBABILITY MAP - http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/weather/2017_clouds.htm
6. REPUTABLE ECLIPSE GLASSES/VENDORS. - https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters
7. greatamericaneclipse.com - http://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/eclipse-2017/ - A Heavy duty 8/21/17 site! I like their logo too, spotting the point of greatest eclipse in western KY!
8. NASA's interactive map of the Aug. 21, 2017 TSE
9. GIF of 21AUG17 TSE
10. Another nice TSE will cross the US from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024! If I'm still around I'll be almost 60 years old, but I'll still get a nerd b-.... well, you know what I mean.
11. Another eclipse NEARLY IDENTICAL TO THE 2017 EVENT will occur on Aug. 12, 2045. I'll be 80, you guys will be in your mid-50s, as old as I am now. [3/30/24: nope. In 2045 I will indeed be in my 80s, but the 17-year-olds I was presumably addressing when I wrote this in 2017 would be in their mid 40s.]
12. If you live long enough, NORTH CAROLINA GETS A NICE ONE IN 2078!!
Fayetteville will be right on the 5 min 27 sec centerline. You guys will be in your mid-80s! [3/30/24: as with #11, who was I addressing?? Someone in their mid 80s in 2078 would have been born in 1993! Dude! Math!] If I'm still around for this one, I will surely be pretty well known as one of the oldest people not only in the country, but on earth! (Although, by then, people will be living longer, so maybe 114 is not too much of a stretch!)
13. View any eclipse from 2000 BC to 3000 AD! http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/catalog.html
14. July 16, 2186. 7 minutes, 30 seconds of totality? WHAT? Aug. 21, 2017 was a "mere" 2 min 40 sec. How can an eclipse be so lengthy?? Here's how: On 7/16/2186, the moon will be very near perigee (when the moon is at its closest point to earth in its monthly orbit, so it appears bigger in the sky than usual) AND the Earth will be very near aphelion (when the earth is at its farthest point from the sun in its yearly orbit, usually July 4, and the sun will appear smaller in the sky than usual.) The totality path for the Aug. 21 eclipse was about 70 miles wide. The totality path for 7/16/2186 will be about 160 miles wide. Our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids can meet up in Cali, or Bogota, Colombia!
I. FOLLOW THIS LINK to see the actual eclipse path and find out the best place for you to go. (IF YOU STAY IN THE TRIAD, you will not see a total eclipse, but the deepest part of the partial eclipse will be at 2:40-2:43 PM EDT. By way of comparison, in Nashville TN, totality occurs from about 2:25 - 2:30 PM, and Charleston, SC it's 2:45 - 2:50.)
II. FORGET ABOUT HOTELS (they're all full) just use the above map link and this weather link, and drive on Monday morning.
III. FORGET ABOUT TELESCOPES, especially if you have never used one before. Just a pair of decent eclipse glasses or a rudimentary pinhole camera will do you. (For the times before and after darkness when the sun will bake your retinas.)
IV. CHECK WEATHER FORECASTS for all potential viewing locations (weather.com, Intellicast, if you like, but my link will zero you in on the path itself. I know that's the third weather link since the start of the page: it's that important.)
V. DON'T FORGET THE PARTIAL ECLIPSE. The three minutes of totality will be bookended by 90 minutes of "partiality" before, then 90 more minutes after.
VI. BUT, BUT, BUT...WHAT IF IT'S CLOUDY? It's looking like it might be, but if you want a full total solar eclipse experience, and you don't have access to a jet, then you simply have to drive on Monday morning. Period.
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For more detail (a lot more) scroll on down. Seriously, I've been waxing rhapsodic about this eclipse to my students since I first had students in 2001, and if you'd told me back in 1999 (when I first learned about it) that, on eclipse day, I will have been an Astronomy teacher for 6+ years--a subject I'd never heard of having been taught in any high school--I'd've asked you what the h*ll you were smoking. No kidding: I haven't been able to shut up about this eclipse since for 18 years, so if you dare, read on.
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WHAT EVEN IS THIS?
On Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, the moon will pass directly between the sun and the earth creating a 70 mile wide circular shadow on the earth's surface (aka a total solar eclipse) which will spend an hour and a half cruising across the continental United States, from the Oregon to South Carolina coasts. More specifically: At 10:16 AM Pacific Daylight Time (1:16 PM EDT) the center of the moon's shadow will come ashore at Lincoln Beach on the Oregon coast, and 93 minutes later, having
- bisected Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska,
- grazed the northeast corner of Kansas,
- split Missouri (darkening the northeast half of Kansas City then the southwest half of St. Louis,)
- nipped the southern tip of Illinois and a bit more of the western end of Kentucky,
- split Tennessee,
- shaved the western tip of North Carolina and the northeast corner of Georgia,
- passed a mere 80 miles southwest of Charlotte,
- and cleft South Carolina almost perfectly in twain,
will, at 2:49 PM EDT, quit North America at Cape Romain on the South Carolina coast.
Between 2:38 PM and 2:44 PM EDT the center of the eclipse path (i.e. where the eclipse will last 2 minutes 40 seconds) will trace a line parallel to--and about 13 miles south of--the I-385/I-26 corridor between Greenville, SC and Columbia, SC. This is only 80 miles southwest of Charlotte.
Why is everybody going so wacko about this? Because if this shadow passes over you, the sun will appear to go dark for a few minutes, stars will come out, roosters will crow a second time, and many other wild things happen as well. Honestly, why this isn't a national holiday is beyond me. [8/26/17: I was essentially right on the centerline and it got dark enough for streetlights to come on, and dark enough to see planets, but not dark enough to see stars. WHY? With a max duration of only 2:40, the moon and sun are very close to being identical sizes in the sky. So the moon's shadow is relatively small. NOW. In 2024? Max durations are in the mid-4 minute range, which means the moon is CLOSER to the earth, which means the eclipse shadow/totality path is wider (120 miles in 2024 vs. 70 miles for 2017), which means when you're within the shadow, that omni-directional horizon daylight is farther away, which means the sky gets darker, which means stars should be visible.]
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ARE YOU TRAVELING INTO THE PATH OF TOTALITY TO VIEW THIS SUCKER BETWEEN 2:30 and 2:45 PM ON THE AFTERNOON OF AUG. 21? You should. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. As an amateur astronomer and a professional science teacher, here's what I have done and will do to prepare for this eclipse:
I. FOLLOW THIS LINK -- it's the first one I've listed below. IT'S IMPORTANT, SO GET TO KNOW IT WELL. It's an interactive Google map with the eclipse path overlaid, and it will tell you not only where to go, but if you click anywhere on the map itself it will tell you how long darkness will last at that location. (I seriously can't recommend this site enough). The name of the game on Monday is to get as close to the centerline of the 70-mile wide eclipse path as possible to experience the longest duration of totality. If you're on the centerline you'll get 2:40 of darkness. The farther away from the centerline you are, the less time you are in the moon's shadow, the shorter your eclipse experience. [9/11/17: As I said over on the Eclipse 2024 page, I can totally vouch for this guy's accuracy; I spotted my viewing location precisely--on the tip of a peninsula, on a lake, in Kefauver State Park, in Madisonville, TN--and Jubier's times for totality for that spot were within a half-second of my direct observations for both the beginning AND the ending of totality, as well as for first contact, when the disk of the moon first dents the disk of the sun, which for us was at 1:04 PM.]
II. FORGET ABOUT HOTELS. Greensboro is close enough (3 hours drive to the eclipse path, longer though if we need to head west) that you can get up Monday morning, check the weather, and drive to a spot near the center of the eclipse path. If you're thinking about a hotel room within the shadow's path, forget it. Most hotels [but not all! See below!] near the eclipse path—let alone within it—sold out last fall. I booked my Columbia, SC hotel room 12 months ago for goodness's sake. [22AUG17, post-umbral, It took us almost no time at all to dump this year-old reservation once it was clear on Saturday night that the weather was going to be crap everywhere east of the Appalachians. Looked at Knoxville but the entire town was sold out. SOMEHOW found a room in Pigeon Forge, TN, of all places!]
III. FORGET ABOUT TELESCOPES IF YOU HAVE NEVER USED ONE BEFORE. Unless you are a professional or a seasoned amateur, a telescope will not only be useless on eclipse day, it could be dangerous. If you have a telescope AND are comfortable using it AND you have a sun filter that fits snugly over the APERTURE of the telescope (i.e. the wider, far end that points to what you're looking at...where the lens cap goes), then you know what you're doing and I have nothing for you. IF YOUR SUN FILTER IS A LITTLE 1" DIAMETER THING THAT SCREWS ONTO YOUR EYEPIECES: Don't do it! HERE'S A PDF WITH PHOTOS ILLUSTRATING WHY EYEPIECE SUN FILTERS ARE DANGEROUS AND APERTURE ("LENS CAP" STYLE) SUN FILTERS ARE SAFE.
A) By the time all that magnified sunlight travels the length of your scope and reaches the eyepiece, so much heat has built up inside the instrument that plastic parts inside it can melt, as mine have done, on more then one embarrassing occasion!
B) If you rapidly and frequently swap eyepieces like many folks do, it's VERY easy to forget that your sun filter was attached to the eyepiece you just removed...and you can toast your retinas with the new unprotected eyepiece you just inserted.
Only a sun filter that covers the aperture is truly safe,
and this applies to binoculars too!
Bottom line: I know all that stuff, AND I'm an experienced telescope user, and I'm still not bringing my telescope [I did bring it, but it stayed in the trunk of my car.] If you're interested, here's what I'm doing. I will have a pair of sun-filtered binoculars around my neck, and I might pull the filters off and look up when the sun is totally obscured. [Yep. Totally did that!] But I'll also have a decent pair of Eclipse glasses; they're probably all you need to glance up and see a crescent sun! (Pinhole cameras are so easy to make I can't imagine I won't try to fudge at least one if I have a moment before or after totality.) [Did that too, and in fact was a bit of a hero for 30 seconds when I turned my unfiltered binoculars around and projected a large image of the eclipse onto a piece of paper on the ground so 10 or 15 people could snap photos.]
But frankly, there's so much more going on around you, on the ground, ON EARTH, during a total eclipse; That's part of the fun I'm anticipating. What am I talking about?
* The horizon never goes perfectly dark. Way off in the distance, for 360 degrees around you, you'll see a weird sort of twilight, like you see in the east an hour before sunrise, or the west an hour post-sunset. [Definitely observed this.]
* The temperature instantly drops 10-15 deg F. I'm told that apart from the abrupt mid-day darkness, the temperature change is the coolest thing about a total eclipse. (Ya get it? The COOLEST thing? OMG somebody stop me.) [OK, not instantly, it turns out. It definitely does feel cooler in the shadow than in direct sunlight, but the temperature starts to fall far sooner, as the pre-total partial eclipse allows less and less of the sun to reach the earth. All day we'd been sweating though our shirts, but after about an hour of partial, we noticed that everyone's sweat spots had dried. Clearly it was cooler.]
* Wind. Breezes have been known to cease, or change direction. [Did not observe this.]
* Polaris. You've been told the North Star is always in the same place, 24/7/365...that if the sky was black instead of blue you would see it sitting right where you always see it at night. Now you can spend a few seconds glancing north and proving this to yourself! [Forgot to do this, but stars didn't come out where we were anyway, so probably wouldn't have been able to see Polaris anyway.]
* Shadow Bands? Mysterious wave-ish light effect which, on the very rare occasions it actually appears on light colored surfaces does so only at the instant totality begins or the instant it ends. [No way.]
* Animals. If there are any animals around you--especially roosters!--make note of how they react to the mid-day darkness and temperature change, and the sun's reappearance. [Where we were there was a lake with 60-70 birds floating upon it. A few of them did fly off in many different directions as totality got close.]
* YOURSELF. And this is a very big thing: Do not be surprised if you behave strangely during the 2-3 minutes of totality. People have been known to come completely unglued by the experience: crying, laughing, dancing, babbling (even scientifically, like this guy!) (better link, direct youtube); name it. (Yes, all through human history, people sometimes just freak the f**k out during a solar eclipse! Do I think that will be me? You know...it just might be. Like I've said here and elsewhere, I've been waiting for these three minutes since I received an eclipse book on Christmas Day, 1999: I would not at all be surprised if, after waiting 6,449 days, and talking to students about it every single year since, and then SOMEHOW getting to teach astronomy at a really good school, and then going so far as to make hotel reservations last year, and then on the day IF WE ACTUALLY GET CLEAR SKIES (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) to say nothing of the elemental fact that, oh yeah, IT'S SUDDENLY NIGHTTIME AT MID-DAY...no, I would not at all be surprised to find myself completely overwhelmed emotionally: maybe I will burst into tears! LET'S FIND OUT!!) [I did not burst into tears during totality, it turned out. But we arrived at our viewing location (Kefauver Park in Madisonville, TN) 7 solid hours before the eclipse, so I had lots of time to wander around the park's lake and reflect. And a couple times I found myself saying aloud things like: "So this is the day. Look around and soak it in because after all these years of hoping and wondering, this is what your Aug. 21, 2017 looks like. Of all the places you could have ended up, with cloudy skies or a broken down car on the side of some road, you ended up here in Tennessee at a really nice park on a crystal clear day. Look around." And *that's* the kind of overwhelming realization that's getting me a little emotional now as I write this, and it sure did that morning. More than once, I'm not ashamed to say.]
(5/17/20: ...and every single time I re-read this.)
(2/24/23: Every single time.)
(3/30/24: Yep!)
IV. I'll say it again: CHECK WEATHER FORECASTS for you viewing location. On the morning of the 21st be prepared to "audible," to high-tail it to a place of clearer skies. Here again is my homemade page featuring Aug 21 forecasts for several locations along the eclipse path. Now that we’re within the extended forecast window, I’ll be updating this page daily at least, and more frequently if need be.
(National maps showing clear sky probability are linked below, #4 & #5, but unless you can fly to Missouri or Nebraska or even farther west, and with detailed forecasts all along the path readily available, probability maps are surely superfluous.)
V. DON'T FORGET THE PARTIAL. I'll say it again: Your three minutes of totality will be bookended by 90 minutes of "partiality" before, and then 90 minutes of "partial" after. Most folks won't get ANY totality, so this will be their eclipse experience. If you can't get yourself into the path of totality and will only experience a partial eclipse, go outside, find some trees and look at the ground under them; The gaps between leaves work like thousands of natural pinhole cameras so you will see lots and lots of little eclipses on the ground under trees!
VI. BUT...BUT...BUT....WHAT IF IT'S CLOUDY? If you wake up on the morning of the 21st and the forecast for your planned viewing location is clouds (as it's looking more and more like it will) then that's when you'll find out how important this experience is to you. Meteor showers are a dime a dozen and are so frequently disappointing that I only off-handedly announce them to my students. A total solar eclipse is different. A total solar eclipse, like a hurricane, or an mag 8.0+ earthquake, or an erupting volcano, is one of nature's "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME," "ONCE IN A LIFETIME IF YOU'RE LUCKY" moments, and I think they're worth risking a lot for. (Ask this guy, who's seen more than one!) Seriously: if you want a full total solar eclipse experience, and it becomes apparent that it's going to be cloudy, then you have to drive. Period. I got a hotel room within the eclipse path, and I'm getting up at 6 AM on Monday. If current forecasts hold I'll probably be getting up a d*mned sight earlier than 6, and my butt is on the road, it's as simple as that. [There have been and will be other references to Columbia, SC here, but we dumped that reservation on the evening of the 19th since Columbia's forecasts were no good. Or rather, they were only OK compared to points farther west. We ended up getting a hotel room in Pigeon Forge, TN, to which we drove Sunday afternoon, and from which we checked out at 6 AM Monday morning.]
Where can you go?
- Head southeast? From my hotel in Columbia it's a two hour drive to Charleston (the eastern extreme, on the eastern coast. As of 8/13 Charleston's 8/21 forecast is as crappy as Columbia's, so we can probably rule out southeastern alternatives.)
- Head northwest. From my hotel it's 6.5 hour drive to Nashville, to the west. If I get up earlier I can drive farther if need be, and I fully expect highways to be crowded. Point is, if you're serious about this and have been for many years, a few extra hours of driving is NOTHING. [Almost literally: nothing at all.]
[21OCT17: Not being female I can only presume here, but I liken this helpful amnesia to that experienced by women after childbirth: we're told it's the most intense pain a human can experience, so why would a woman ever have more than one child? Because you remember THAT you were in pain, but in your memory the aftereffect was so overwhelmingly positive you do not associate that pain with actual suffering. Same with eclipse traffic; I surely remember THAT it was a heinous interminable nightmare, but when I think back on the eclipse, I rarely think of the traffic. i.e. the net experience was so positive that I would do it again without a moment's hesitation!]
Happy eclipse chasing, you demented and lovely umbraphiles!!
Steve
- - - - - - - - - - - - - LINKS - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1. Interactive Google map of Aug. 21, 2017 eclipse path
Huge gratitude to Mr. Xavier M. Jubier for creating this map, because I don't care who you are, this is JUST COOL. It's like any other Google map except it has the eclipse path included. You can zoom way in to see, for example, which roads you might want to drive to on the day. It'll be very handy this week before, as weather reports become crucial.
2. REPUTABLE ECLIPSE GLASSES/VENDORS. - https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters
3. My daily updated assemblage of 8/21 forecasts for locations along the eastern 1/5 of the eclipse path.
4. INTERACTIVE CLOUD COVER HISTORY ALONG ECLIPSE PATH - www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/ready-set-eclipse
South Carolina is not beautifully positioned for great weather on Aug. 21, but still...
5. ANOTHER CLOUD COVER PROBABILITY MAP - http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/weather/2017_clouds.htm
6. REPUTABLE ECLIPSE GLASSES/VENDORS. - https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters
7. greatamericaneclipse.com - http://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/eclipse-2017/ - A Heavy duty 8/21/17 site! I like their logo too, spotting the point of greatest eclipse in western KY!
8. NASA's interactive map of the Aug. 21, 2017 TSE
9. GIF of 21AUG17 TSE
10. Another nice TSE will cross the US from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024! If I'm still around I'll be almost 60 years old, but I'll still get a nerd b-.... well, you know what I mean.
11. Another eclipse NEARLY IDENTICAL TO THE 2017 EVENT will occur on Aug. 12, 2045. I'll be 80, you guys will be in your mid-50s, as old as I am now. [3/30/24: nope. In 2045 I will indeed be in my 80s, but the 17-year-olds I was presumably addressing when I wrote this in 2017 would be in their mid 40s.]
12. If you live long enough, NORTH CAROLINA GETS A NICE ONE IN 2078!!
Fayetteville will be right on the 5 min 27 sec centerline. You guys will be in your mid-80s! [3/30/24: as with #11, who was I addressing?? Someone in their mid 80s in 2078 would have been born in 1993! Dude! Math!] If I'm still around for this one, I will surely be pretty well known as one of the oldest people not only in the country, but on earth! (Although, by then, people will be living longer, so maybe 114 is not too much of a stretch!)
13. View any eclipse from 2000 BC to 3000 AD! http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/catalog.html
14. July 16, 2186. 7 minutes, 30 seconds of totality? WHAT? Aug. 21, 2017 was a "mere" 2 min 40 sec. How can an eclipse be so lengthy?? Here's how: On 7/16/2186, the moon will be very near perigee (when the moon is at its closest point to earth in its monthly orbit, so it appears bigger in the sky than usual) AND the Earth will be very near aphelion (when the earth is at its farthest point from the sun in its yearly orbit, usually July 4, and the sun will appear smaller in the sky than usual.) The totality path for the Aug. 21 eclipse was about 70 miles wide. The totality path for 7/16/2186 will be about 160 miles wide. Our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids can meet up in Cali, or Bogota, Colombia!