Saw a bit of the 1999 eclipse.
It doesn’t matter which astronomical event I watch.
It doesn’t matter from which position I watch it.
There. Will. Be. Rain.
(Everybody relax, I’ll be on the other side of the planet this time.)
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Try as I might, I just can’t muster any interest whatever.
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It hasn’t been the same since we stopped sacrificing people to make the Sun come back.
I don’t know any rules of thumb, but I would suspect it has at least as much to do with eyes and how fast they adjust, as it does with the sun itself. For reference, the light in a typical office is something like 4 orders of magnitude (99.99%) less intense than bright sunlight IIRC. Also, it looks like sunglasses are typically in the 5% to 40% visible light transmission range, so a 90% reduction in sunlight might be comparable to “wearing fairly dark sunglasses on a sunny day.”
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My understanding, as well. My house resides in an area that will get 99.6% blockage. Not enough. I will travel that day to the 100% zone.
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Well you see, 3 f-stops is like a 90% eclipse…
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“Wenn die Sonne lacht - Blende acht!”
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We had an eclipse-ophile, a guy that has gone to the ends of the earth since the 70s to experience total solar eclipses, come give a talk to our astronomy group a couple months ago. His take was that it’s binary. Either you are in 100% totality, or you are not. It’s night or day, almost literally.
In the high ninety percents, like 97-99%, you might notice things don’t seem right, but it’s not totality.
Moral of his story wrt this is that the sun is really, really bright.
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Fuckin’ every now and then I fall apart
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+1 for knowing the Dan Band!
#oldschoolrules
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In my early 20’s I lived on a couch for awhile, and Old School was my go to pass out movie. Bonus side effect was waking up to the menu and hearing that little slice of this-
which was followed by me putting Heartbreaker on, being happy for five minutes, and then sob like a baby for 45 minutes after
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The Oct. 2023 eclipse will not be total - it’s an annular eclipse, which is to say, a partial one. The next total eclipse in the U.S. will be April 2024, and will be the last for a long time.
An annular (“Ring of Fire”) eclipse occurs when the moon is near the furthest point in its orbit and is too far to totally cover the sun, so a ring of light surrounds it at the time of peak coverage. That’s still very bright. I saw the one that was visible in the Midwest about 20 years ago and while it was pretty cool, it wasn’t spectacular like totality is supposed to be. The light got dim, but like early twilight - not exactly dark and it cooled off a bit. And the ring phenomena was still too bright to safely view directly.
I’ve seen two total eclipses (Hawaii, 1991, Guadaloupe 1998) and they really are pretty damned awesome. I can’t make it to this one, due to scheduling and whatnot, but I highly recommend it!
Coming right over my place in the Shawnee Forest for a full 2 minute 40 second show and for once all I gotta do is stand in the back yard and watch as it passes over southern Illinois Carbondale, Makanda and beautiful Lick Creek.
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Saw a 90% as a wee lad in 1965. The landscape definitely looked different, but didn’t have the spooky-spooky feel of a total. (I’ve not yet seen a total in person, but plenty of recordings and historical accounts make me qualified to claim that totals are completely mind-blowing; -) The wonder and awe of the 90 was seeing the sun’s sharply defined crescent disk inside a large box used as a camera obscura (pinhole camera) – 11 year old mind blown!
(FYI, an f-stop represents a doubling or halving of light. f/1 is twice the light of f/1.4, which is twice the light of f/2, which is twice the light of f/2.8, etc. Since light intensity varies with the square of distance – just go with it – you can always calculate the aperture ratio scale by doubling 1 and √ 2 in sequence, i.e. 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, etc. Thus, a 3-stop reduction in light is one-half of one-half of one-half, or 1/8 intensity.)
“Total” awe, courtesy Brian Cox:
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For what it’s worth, I will be completing the Lemons Rally in Monterey on the 19th, then driving north to witness the eclipse traffic jam south of Bend, OR on the 21st, on my way up to Portland. I wish the rally ended two days sooner!
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In 1999 I travelled down to Falmouth (which was in the path of totality) from London (which wasn’t). Falmouth had 100% cloud cover for the entire duration of the eclipse - everything went from grey, to black for a couple of minutes, then back to grey. Bah! I’d have been better off staying in London where I would at least have seen the “pinhole” effect in the shadows.
Walking back along the Falmouth seafront to catch my coach home, I heard a child crying in disappointment, and there was a guy banging away on bongos. I resisted the urge to explain to him that science had determined the sun was not being eaten by a dragon, and his attempts to frighten it off were unnecessary.
OTOH I got a perfect view of the transit of Venus (through welder’s glass) which was also a spectacular solar event. Never knew the unaided human eye could resolve another planet as a disk.
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