Tintin used his knowledge of an approaching solar eclipse to his advantage in Hergé’s ‘Prisoners of the Sun’, published in 1949. (He is praying to the ‘Sovereign Sun’ to decrease its rays. The locals that took them captive were freaked out by his powers, and Tintin and his companions were released).
It’s 12 noon on Monday here in the Pacific Northwest, and the solar eclipse has just ended. It started at the Oregon coast, and the moon shadow traveled at about 1,400 mph across the continent. Here is a collage of (mostly) my own pictures of what we saw and experienced here in Seattle (92% of the sun obscured). We had blue skies; eclipse watchers in South Carolina had cloud cover, though. My takeaway: the sun is a mighty, mighty source of heat and light, radiating a lot of light even at 92% obscured. The ambient temperature did feel as if it went down by 5 to 10 degrees due to the obscured sun, though.
Clockwise: The background picture is from NASA’s feed of the view of the eclipse from an aircraft; the path across the United States; a selfie with crescent partial eclipses on my shirt from the sun filtering through a tall tree; NASA having a little fun with its ‘NASA Moon’ account, doing a Twitter block of the sun; the 92% obscure view captured on a yellow sticky with a card with a pin-hole; also on aluminum foil; on black, the start of the eclipse with the moon shadow just starting, captured on my iPhone through solar glasses; finally, the reduced sunlight cast through a prism made for intense rainbow colors on a rock, surrounded by the crescent sun images.
Update Tue 8/22: I added a few more interesting pictures that I found on line!
Taken while the sun was over Wyoming, as an overexposed close-up, showing the dark side of the moon, with the sun’s corona visible around it. Scientists still do not know exactly why the sun’s atmosphere is millions of degrees warmer than the surface of the sun. Source: From The Astrophysicist @ThomasMoszczuk, posted on Twitter.Multiple exposures on one image, as the sun moves across the sky, while at the same time, the moon comes between it and Earth. Source: From The Astrophysicist @ThomasMoszczuk, posted on Twitter.Here’s a picture of the moon shadow on Earth, as seen from the International Space Station.This is a rough flight plan of a flight by Alaska Airlines that was plotted so that the total eclipse can be seen from the airplane.
