Posts Tagged ‘eclipse’
January 15th, 2010
The first solar eclipse of the year is happening today. Twitter is buzzing, you can see photos being added to Flickr, Google’s real-time search results are brilliant. Almost makes up for not being able to see it myself – we only saw a tiny 3.5% coverage here in Durban this morning (07h30 SAT) – or would have if it wasn’t cloudy!
Path details and animations for almost every city are available at the excellent UK Eclipses Online site (doubly useful since the NASA eclipse page seems to be down, probably buckling under the extra traffic – google cached version is available though). Wikipedia as usual has excellent info.
- Some great photos from Nairobi, thanks @paulakahumbu
Update:
- * MailOnline’s report – some great photos and a great video.
- * NASA’s MODIS satellite caught an image of the Moon’s shadow over India and the Bay of Bengal (a roughly 300km wide shadow).
- * SpaceWeather.com has a great gallery of eclipse photos (and commentary for most of them) – well worth seeing
- ESA has a beautiful animated image of the eclipse as seen by their Sun-watching Proba-2.
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January 26th, 2009
A stunning view from Gough Island (40º20’57.7S 9º52’49.2W – Google Earth or Maps) during the partial solar eclipse this morning, from a live webcam.
We only saw 56% coverage in Durban (65% in Capetown) – thankfully the clouds were patchy so we had plenty of time for some great views.
Today also marked South Africa’s first formal day of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. I doesn’t matter how many eclipses I see, they are still awe-inspiring and somehow mystical events. I’ve seen two full eclipses before (one in Tshipise in Musina and the other from Lusaka, Zambia) and I plan to follow any others I can get to :-)
- Cape Town daily photo
- Justin Hartman
- Photos will apparently be posted on the South African Astronomical Observatory website shortly
- and of course Flickr eclipse photos are streaming in
September 29th, 2006
I managed to break my ring finger recently (falling off a mechanical bull at the Derivco fun day – I only lasted 3 seconds but in my defence the longest time anyone managed to stay up was 9 seconds, and you should see his injuries). My finger has to be splinted for several weeks (really slows down typing and nappy changing) but on the plus side my x-ray came in handy during last Friday’s solar eclipse (partial from SA). I didn’t take any photos, but happily others did – nice to see some South African photographers too.
ps – I do realise that an x-ray is not an ideal (read: safe) solar filter, but it works in a pinch as long as you don’t look at the sun for more than a few seconds, and are careful.
