“The last Baily bead that you see makes the image of the eclipsed sun look like a ring with a brilliant diamond on it,” Simpson says. Baily reported that the beads of light appeared to flow and coalesce, like drops of water.
Those dazzling points of light, resembling a necklace of beads around the dark circumference of the moon, are called Baily’s beads, named for the British astronomer Francis Baily, who vividly described them to Royal Astronomical Society colleagues after observing a solar eclipse in May, 1836. In the sky, in the last few moments before the moon completely blocks the sun, the sun’s rays will stream through the gaps between the moon’s mountains and its rugged impact crater rims. If there’s a clear view of the horizon, eclipse-watchers may catch the moon’s shadow rapidly approaching from the west, like an onrushing tidal wave. “Almost everybody in the country is no more than 12 to 14 hours away from the path of totality,” adds astronomer Jason Davis, Manager of the Museum’s Nathan and Fannye Shafran Planetarium. “This is a wonderful, rare opportunity where you don’t have to go very far to see one of the grandest spectacles in nature.” “You usually have to travel extreme distances and spend a lot of money to see a total eclipse of the sun,” says astronomer Clyde Simpson, Manager of the Museum’s Ralph Mueller Observatory and a veteran of several of those trips. Its broad accessibility is one thing that makes this eclipse so exciting. In Cleveland, we’ll see 80 percent of the sun obscured, beginning at 1:06pm, peaking at 2:31pm and ending at 3:51pm. Weather permitting, the rest of the nation (except Hawaii and northern parts of Alaska) will witness at least a 50 percent eclipse. In the upcoming August eclipse, the path of totality - the 70-mile-wide band of deep shadow where the moon will completely hide the sun - will track across 14 states spanning the country.
World War I was still raging, airmail service had just begun and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History wouldn’t be founded for another two years. Hawaii experienced one in 1991.īut the last time a total solar eclipse transited the entire continent, from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts, was nearly a century ago: June 8, 1918. Residents of five Northwestern states saw the last total solar eclipse visible anywhere on the U.S.
Partial, total and annular solar eclipses (the latter is when the moon passes directly in front of the sun but is too far from Earth to entirely obscure it, leaving a visible outer ring called the annulus), are periodically visible in parts of the U.S., depending on the particular orbital alignments of sun, Earth and moon. On Monday, August 21, 2017, residents of the continental United States will experience a celestial spectacular that hasn’t happened in most of our lifetimes.ĭuring 90 minutes, the moon’s inky shadow blocking the sun will race completely across the country at nearly 1,100 miles per hour - a coast-to-coast total solar eclipse from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina.
0 kommentar(er)
