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Find out more about Christopher: Christopher Langton is a scientist who works in the area where physics, biology, and computation overlap. He was one of the early scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, where he initiated the field of Artificial Life. He is currently working on a book about the origin and evolution of life and mind. |
A total eclipse of the Sun took place on Friday, August 1st, at about 4 a.m. San Francisco time. Although not visible from the United States, the Exploratorium sent a team to a remote corner of China to capture the event.
From 3:30 to 4:30 a.m., the team broadcast live video of the eclipse, with feeds from an array of camera equipped telescopes.
The results were spectacular!
The Exploratorium team was incredibly lucky: clouds moved in just as the Moon started to transit the face of the Sun, and it was literally only seconds before totality that the Sun broke free of the clouds, allowing a perfect view of the total phase of the eclipse, when the disc of the moon completely hides the disc of the Sun, the sky darkens, the stars come out, and the spectacular solar corona becomes visible to the naked eye. This total phase lasts only a couple of minutes, and the clouds cooperated just long enough for the cameras to capture the entire total phase, before closing in again as the Moon drifted away from the Sun.
With such an array of high quality camera equipped telescopes feeding the webcast, I was able to sit in the comfort of my own home and snap screenshots of the eclipse. Actually, a lot of astronomers do their work this way nowadays anyway, no longer having to trek to remote mountain top observatories, but rather controlling high-tech astronomical instruments from the comfort of their university digs through computer link-ups. Personally, I enjoyed my brief stint as an apprentice astronomer in Tucson Arizona primarily because of the trips up to remote mountain-top observatories, but there's not much need for that anymore.
Here are some pictures snapped from the live webcast (images courtesy of the Exploratorium).
The Moon takes its first bite out of the disc of the Sun:
A little further along:
Approaching totality:
Totality!
An illustration of the shadow of the Moon crossing the surface of the Earth:
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Kudos to the Exploratorium for putting together this adventure and for making it so easy to participate.
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