 I'm Judy Byron. I'm the adult program coordinator and this is the Vermont Astronomical Society. They are astronomical. You guys did not need to laugh. It was really bad. And this is Jim Osek. Correct. Cool. He is the Eclipse Committee Chair for the BAS. And as Jim likes to say, it is the movie's work, but the sun show. It is. And he's going to tell us everything we need to know. And more than you wanted to know. More than I, he's going to bore you guys with some facts. If I start boring you yell it out. You're boring. Oh God. So anyway, take it away. Okay, so a little bit about us. The Vermont Astronomical Society will celebrate its 60th birthday on May 6th of this year. So we've been around in some form of former fashion for 60 years. We were down to three members at one point. We now have about a hundred members. Our activities vary. Some of us are just enthusiasts. Some of us really delve into it. We got some amazing astro-imagers in our midst. I am not one of them. However, I do love this stuff. I've witnessed the total eclipse once. And you folks are in for a show should we have a clear day. And if it's not clear, go out and witness this any way. So we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff. Sun stuff. A lot about the sun. More than you wanted to know. The timing of the eclipse. When will this happen? What are the events that will sort of precede it? What follows a little bit sort of kind of? But the timing of the event. And the timing is exact. You can set clocks by this easily. Why does it happen? And why so infrequently? Where do you need to be looking? Everybody wants to know that. What to expect when this happens? Particularly the totality. There's really not a whole lot to expect until that moment. And it happens in a moment. And how to do the preceding part and the afterwards safely. It's important to know that you need to protect your eyes during the partial phases. However, once again, the totality is special. When the totality happens, you just look. If you don't have your viewers, you really haven't missed much. You've missed about 1% of the show. Because the totality is what this is about. It's why this everybody is so excited. We've had a number of partial eclipses in the last few years. We've had a couple of them that I know of. They really don't get anybody that excited. We had one this past October, which was sort of got it going for this. But even that, people weren't, we didn't have to close roads and really get excited. So the sun, because like I said, this is the sun's show. It's the moon causes it, but it's about the sun. And I already know my laser doesn't work real well, so I'm going to get up on this a little bit. And this is where the sun is powered from. This core. This core is like an ongoing hydrogen bomb. And it turns the hydrogen into helium releasing energy. But this is the only place where that conversion is happening. In this area here, we call this the radiative zone. It's kind of like a pressure cooker. And it's slowly letting the energy out that is generated by the core. So it literally takes millions of years for the energy that's generated by this core to make it through this. This is the convective zone. It's a little bit more like you're familiar with. The physics that goes on from here to here, we're really not that familiar with on the earth. But the physics that happens here, we're starting to get a little more familiar with it. It's a convective zone. And what do we know about convection? We put the radiators down here on the floor. The heat rises. It circulates. It cools off and it comes back down and around. And that's what's going on in the convective zone. Every one of those little, there's these little spots that you can see on the surface of the sun if you use the right kind of filtering. The surface of the sun looks like a boiling pot of oil. And every one of the bright little spots on top is about the size of Texas. So you're looking at this sun and you start seeing these little spots. Every one of them little spots is the size of Texas. The bright spot on top, that's where the heat has risen. It cools off and sinks down in between, just like a boiling pot of water or oil. There's a close-up of those convective zones. And you can kind of see that similarity to the pot of boiling oil. So every one of them bright spots on the top, they're all roughly the size of Texas. The stuff cools off and sinks down into the darker areas in between. And lighter and darker when we talk about the sun is a very relative thing because it's all too bright to look at. There's a picture of the sun and you can kind of see that grainy effect on it. Those are those little spots, those little spots of Texas. You see the pairs of sunspots. You see they often occur in pairs. Here's a pair, here's a pair, pair here, pair here, pair up there. The sunspots are magnetic storms and they occur in pairs often. Not necessarily every time, but most of the time. And we're going to see why in a little bit. So if you get a close-up of that of that sunspot, we got names that are similar to our eclipse. So we call this dark center area the unbra. We call this area the pen umbra, just like on an eclipse. And this darkness is relative. If you were to separate one good-sized sunspot in the sky by itself, it would light up the sky like the full moon. So that brightness is relative. And I want you to pay attention to this fuzzy area, because in a little bit you're going to see why, maybe, why that area takes on that appearance. So here's a pretty good-sized sunspot. And this spot between the arrows, that's the earth. So the earth would fall right into that spot, like a guy walking down the street falling into a manhole. And there you can put 109 earths across the face of the sun. You could put 1.3 million earths inside of the sun. So that gives you an idea of how big that sun is. And here we have a horseshoe magnet. Now you're seeing why you have a pair of sunspots usually. You can see those iron filings on the ends of the magnet. Looks kind of like that penumbra picture, doesn't it? You can also see the filings following the magnetic lines of force. That becomes important in another moment or two. Here's a diagram of a sunspot and the magnetic fields arising from the sunspot. You see the convective zones, you see the sunspots, you see the magnetic field extending above. The surface of the sun is about 10,000 degrees. The sunspots are a little bit cooler, but that doesn't mean more sunspots the cooler it is on earth. That core that we saw earlier, that little ball of energy in the center, it's about 27 million degrees in there. At least that's what we think. We can only have mathematical models. We can't send anything in there. I believe the convective zones about 17 million degrees and things get cooler as you come out. Interestingly enough, the atmosphere of the sun gets hotter than the surface of the sun. And we don't know why. That would be one of the things they'll be looking for an answer for with the eclipse. There's this picture of the magnetic lines of force on the sun. So that's kind of like the sun's weather map. If you look at a weather map of the earth, you get moisture zones, you get high pressure zones, low pressure zones. But when you look at the map of the sun, the weather is all magnetism. Here's a diagram of the sunspot activity on the sun. This activity cycles over an 11-year period. So every 11 years, there's like a high and low activity on the sun. We're currently approaching a time of maximum activity on the sun, which also makes this eclipse more interesting, we hope. The high activity on the sun has not been as much as it was 30 or 40 years ago, but it's still a little more active time right now. And we're hoping to make use of that during the eclipse. We have this separated into blue and red. And this is kind of important because at this point on, we were able to filter the sunlight well enough to observe the surface of the sun in detail without hurting ourselves. So that's when the observations of the sunspots got better. That red zone, we knew there were sunspots. We knew about them. You could observe them through a dust storm, maybe along the horizon on a hazy day. It wasn't easy. It wasn't a smart thing to do, but people did it. We do all sorts of things that aren't smart. We do them anyway. But right in here, we know that we had a period of time when the sun was really quiet for almost like 100 years. Things were pretty dull on the surface of the sun. We don't know why, but we do know that it happened. And we do know that we now call this the Little Ice Age. There was a period of time there between the 1600s and the early 1700s where things were on the average cooler than they had been. If you look at old paintings from the period, you see winter scenes that are more severe than anything that we've had than we've had. Not just in the last 30 years, but even before that. Ice skaters on the Thames River and stuff. The Thames River doesn't freeze up anymore, but it did then. This is how we study the sunlight. This is how we study light in general. We pass light through an apprism and separate it out into all its colors. And Isaac Newton taught us to do this, like he taught us to do a lot of things. And we separate that piece of light into its colors. White light is not white. White is not a color. White is a combination of all the colors together. This orange band, this is where we like to visualize the sun. This is where we like to take our pictures. We call that alpha, hydrogen alpha light. And that's where we like to photograph it. That's the visible light we like to take pictures of. We study all the light that comes from the sun. It's all interesting to us. But the part where we take our pictures is hydrogen alpha light in that narrow band over there. It is less than one percent of the output of the sun that reaches the earth. But that's where we like to take our pictures. What else can I tell you about this? This is called spectroscopy. And we literally discovered helium on the sun before it was ever found on the earth. We knew helium existed on the sun before we ever found any on the earth. And we did it by spectroscopy. Here's a picture of that sun and the hydrogen alpha light. Now you can see why we like to take our pictures here. You can see all those cells really well. You can see flares on the sun, hot spots. You can see these prominences. What are these? There's probably some sort of sunspot activity on the limb where you can't see it anymore. And the magnetism is pulling the material up into those magnetic lines of force. Just like the magnet would pull iron filings into their magnetic lines of force. It's interesting because we can kind of take pictures in this hydrogen alpha light. But if you go back over 100 years, the only time we could see this stuff is during a total eclipse. We had no way to even know it was there except during a total eclipse. Here's a close-up of one of those prominences. There's probably a pair of sunspots right here. The magnetic lines of force pulling up the material from the sun like a magnet will pull those iron filings around it. This is an artificial eclipse. Science now has the ability to create an eclipse of sorts for us to study the sun. The white circle in here, this represents the size of the sun and this here is our artificial eclipse. We have to make a much bigger shadow than nature would provide within a eclipse in order to get the pictures. So you can see we kind of chop off a lot. This big prominence here is called a coronal mass ejection. We're studying them now as you're going to find out in a minute. We're hearing about we had one recently. There's going to be some maybe some aurora borealis going on. These are caused by these in ejections and the ones we're talking about recently are pretty minor details. We pay attention to them now and here's why we pay attention. On September 1st, 1859, we had the granddaddy of coronal mass ejections. Our entire electric what we would call an electrical grid and electronics for the day in 1859 was telegraph. There was no other use for electricity. There was no other electronics. Telegraphs. That's it. And this coronal mass ejection called the Carrington event was so severe it induced currents in telegraph wires that snapped them. It burned down telegraph offices. It actually killed a few telegraph operators and they were the guys who were still going were able to operate their telegraphs without them being hooked to the batteries. And can you imagine what would happen to us today? Your power being off for a week because of a wet snow does not even count. Some estimates say our power grid would not be the same for 10 years. Not to mention everything else we do now. When this guy discovered it, he was poo pooed like so many things in science and the guy talked about it. Nobody believed him. Nobody believed him. Just like in the 1930s, a guy came up with his theory of continental drift. Nobody believed him. Later on, he was proven right. Same thing with this guy Carrington. Later on, he was proven right. The British were actually quite good at mapping magnetic fields because they were navigators, you know, the British. They had ships all over. They like to do all they they kept track of magnetic fields in a fashion that would astound us. And he they had proof that this actually happened. One of the more recent events, a pretty good powerful coronal mass ejection in March of 1989, shut down the power grid in in Quebec. It probably happened in a moment, but it took him nine hours to get it back up. It wasn't so much physically damaged as overloaded. And it all shut down. And of course, when you put something like that back online, you just can't say, Hey, flip the switch and bring it back up. Of course, when your power goes out at home, doesn't the power company to tell you to shut off everything that's unnecessary? So when they turn the power back on, it doesn't just surge was caused by this sunspot that pulling off of them by the magnetic field. The magnetic field had probably gotten all the way to the earth. The material that was pulling off got all the way to the earth. And while I got us looking at this, this is how we can track the speed of the sun's rotation. Because keep track of a sunspot watch it go across the sun. We now know the sun spins about a sun's day is about 25 of our days long takes 25 days for the sun to spin on its axis. It's interestingly enough, it doesn't spin at the same rate from the poles to the equator. It spins faster. I believe at the poles. So it's winding itself up. That's part of the theory of the why the sun cycle. The sun winds itself up. And then that, you know, like a rubber band that's too tight. It pops and things are unwind. Here's why you're here. Finally, Jim's done talking about the sun. People don't want to hear about it anymore. These times are for Burlington, Vermont. These times are not exactly for Waterbury, but darn close. So the partial will start in Burlington at 214 in the afternoon. The partial, the start of the partial is when the moon first touches the sun to our appearance. Obviously, the moon is not touching the sun. But to our eyes, that's where we can first see the shadow of the moon start. And that will go for an hour and 12 minutes before totality starts. Totality will start in Burlington at 326. It will go for three minutes and 15 seconds, and then it will be gone. And the second partial phase start. It's a little bit shorter. We'll tell you why in a bit. They are not equal. So the one after the totality will be five minutes shorter. This is the path of the eclipse. This is kind of truncated to show it through North America. The path of this eclipse will start in the South Pacific way south of Hawaii. The shadow will travel for 85 minutes till it reaches the west coast of Mexico. Start its transition across North America. And then it will leave off the coast of Newfoundland and travel for 1500 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. The total duration of the eclipse, not your viewpoint, but the viewpoint from the moon. You're looking at the earth watching this eclipse. The total duration of this eclipse is three hours and 15 minutes. So from the moment it starts to the moment it ends, three hours and 15 minutes, it travels 9,200 miles across the face of the earth. Here's more of a close-up of the local neighborhood you might say. The red line in the middle represents the center of the the eclipse. The area of the longest duration. The blue lines represent the edges of the eclipse. Everything outside the blue lines does not get totality. They get a partial eclipse. The duration of the eclipse at the edges is literally seconds. It's kind of almost hard to define exactly where that edge is. Because it will be it'll be like a plane going over the sun. It'll be gone. But the closer you get to the center, the longer it lasts. And it's not a linear relationship. Meaning the closer you get to the edge, the quicker it falls off. It's the it's the interrelationship of two circles. It's not linear. Here's a picture of the eclipse in Vermont. This time the blue line represents the center and the red line represents the edge. So in St. Albans they're almost in the center. They get three and a half minutes. That's why they're all worked up over there in St. Albans. You might be hearing about it. Burlington will get three minutes and 14 seconds. Montpelier gets a minute and 30 seconds. St. Johnsbury gets a minute and 30 seconds. Middlebury is just in the zone. Depending on where you're at in Middlebury will dictate how much you get. You got called into a meeting in Middlebury with the village officials. And the first question they asked me, how many food trucks do we need? And I said to them, you don't need any. Nobody's going to stop here. Worry about your traffic situation on Highway 7. And that's when the guys' eyes went ah because they're only going to you know between seconds and a minute. It falls off quicker and quicker as you get away from the center. You're going to see why. Here in Waterbury you get about two minutes and 20 seconds. I traveled 2,000 miles for two minutes. Now brown trip. But I traveled quite a distance for two minutes and 20 seconds. And I'm not going to tell you it wasn't worth it. It was. Here's a map of the detail of that drop off. And I'll get up here and I see somebody's people squinting ready. So here's the center as it hits the northern South Hero Island. Three minutes 34 seconds. Here in St. Albans. Pretty darn close to that. Three minutes 30 seconds. Here in Milton. Here's Burlington. This is three minutes 10 seconds. Here's Burlington at 315. Here's three minutes. Two and a half. Here's Waterbury. Here's Waterbury. For Gens. Two minutes. Here in Bristol. And then from here to here. That's it. It falls off like a rock. So it's like a curve. It's always falling off faster and faster. The closer you get to that center, all this stuff's on the internet. You can google all this stuff. So don't worry about taking your pictures. This is all on the internet. What causes a solar eclipse? The moon causes a solar eclipse. That and some exquisite timing. Because you don't get one of these every time there's a new moon. Doesn't happen every new moon. It happens. It doesn't. Even blue moons are more common than total solar eclipses. That being said, there's generally at least one on the earth every year. But where is it? That's the key. You can wait a long time. If you're standing in this spot, you can wait a long time for the next one. I've met people who've seen a half a dozen. They spend a lot of time and money going to chase them. There's a picture of a total eclipse on the top. And they're in between the total eclipse and the partial eclipse. You see a partial eclipse. And then on the bottom, that is called a ring of fire eclipse. Sometimes they call them ring of fire eclipses. It's an annular eclipse. It's a variation of a partial eclipse. It is not a total eclipse. It's not even close. People will go see them. They're fun to look at. They're great to photograph. But next to a total solar eclipse, it's not a good time. So what has to happen is the moon has to be close enough to the earth for it to get its shadow all the way to the surface. The moon does not move about the earth in a perfect circle. It moves about the earth in an ellipse. Sometimes it's 250,000 miles away. Sometimes it's 220,000 miles away. Our eclipse is going to be one day away from its closest approach in that orbit. So we've got a good one coming. We call it a deep eclipse. We've got a pretty good one coming. Here's the annular eclipse. The sun is farther away from the earth and the totality never reaches the surface of the earth. So if you were like 20 or 30,000 miles above that spot, you would see a total eclipse. But at the surface of the earth, the totality, that zone of darkness, never quite makes it. You see this ring of light around here and that ring of light is way brighter than you could possibly imagine. One percent of the sun exposed is about a thousand full moons. It's not the same animal. The totality is what we're, what this is all about. This is why we're so excited. We've had, we had an annular eclipse here about what, 30 years ago, Jack? Yeah. Didn't draw that nearly that much attention, did it? Not like this. What else, got any partial eclipses? They come and go. I've seen a couple of them in the last couple of years. We got a little excited about this one in the past October. There was a ring of fire eclipse out west associated with that. But it didn't draw that much attention. It didn't really didn't. Nobody noticed anything unless they knew to look. It certainly didn't get dark out. Here's why it happens once in a while. So the earth rotates, the earth revolves around the sun on a plane, the moon revolves around the earth on a plane, and those planes do not coincide. They're tilted with relationship to each other by five degrees. So sometimes the moon is too high to cast a shadow. Sometimes the moon is too low to cast a shadow. Sometimes the moon is too far away to cast a shadow all the way into the earth. Sometimes it's just right. And you can see those just right times seem to happen twice a year. It's mathematically possible to get five solar eclipses a year. Not necessarily total eclipses, but five solar eclipses a year. Don't lay awake thinking you might get that because those are like better than 10,000 year events. We get 2.38 a year. So most of the time we get two. Our next solar eclipse in 2024 is on October 2nd. It's an annular eclipse. It's not a total eclipse. And it happens on the tip of South America and out in the Pacific Ocean. And nobody will get super excited because it's an annular eclipse, not a total. Here's another bad distorted diagram of an eclipse reaching the surface of the earth. 865,000 miles. Don't forget you can put 109 earths across the sun. So you can tell. They pictures all askew. You can't really see it right. This is normally when I want to bring my model out, but I don't think I'm going to do it right now because we're too crowded in here. But if you want to hang around just after the after the presentation here, we'll take out the model and we'll let you see the true relationship between the earth and the moon. And it's kind of shocking actually. Jim, if Natalie, if you wanted to move, we did keep a little kind of a... We can try. I mean I'm always willing to try. Do you want lights? Yeah, turn on the lights. Turn on the lights. Okay, now this is when I conscript my young person. You're going to come with me. We need you. We need you to help us. Have you ever heard of Atlas? Are you familiar with Atlas? Well that's kind of... They were like Greek superheroes. Okay, and Atlas's job was to hold up the earth. Now come with me. You get right in front of this lady in this pink sweater. Okay, you hold the earth. Now, if the earth... Let me hold the earth. Let me hang on, Atlas. If the earth was this big, this is how big the moon would be. These two are in the right perspective. Now we're going to put the distance between them. I hope. Here you go. Hang on to that. Now you have to hold that string on the earth. Hold that string. Hold that string. Don't let it go. I'll be tripping over somebody. It's okay. I'm still... That's a partial trip. It's a partial trip, yeah. I don't even have enough room in here. Almost. Oh my gosh. I'm going to pull that string kind of tight. Hang on to it. Here's where the moon is in relationship to the earth at scale. Okay? So sometimes that moon can be here. You get the total eclipse. Sometimes when the moon's out here, you get the annular eclipse. Sometimes the moon's up here. No eclipse. Sometimes the moon's down here. No eclipse. So what has to happen? Three things have to happen. Everything's got to be lined up really well, and the moon has to be closer to the earth than farther away. Then closer to its perigee, not its apogee. A whole bunch of stuff has to happen. Yes, sir? I think the sun would be out about Waitesfield. The sun on this scale, that's that, thank you for bringing that up. The sun on this scale is four times this distance across. So what you're looking at for the sun, the diameter is four times this, and it is 1.6 miles away. You can't even think of put it in here. This is when I like to go off on one of my little rants, and I'll try to make it short. We've launched a probe called Voyager in 1977, and you may have heard, I'm sorry, and you may have heard about Voyager. Voyager is now on this scale 230 miles away. We're still talking to him. We're still having fun. Thank you, Ethel. Thank you, Ethel. Yes, thank you. Our space station, our space station, is a quarter of an inch above this earth. The highest we've been from the earth, people, have been from the earth, except during those nine voyages to the moon that happened in Apollo is less than an inch. Less than an inch. Something to think about. I like to think about that stuff. But that's just my, that's a little, my, my littlest side. I like to keep that in mind and let people know that we've been doing a lot cool, a lot cooler stuff in space as far as people are concerned 50 some years ago than we do now. You know, our robots are amazing. I, my hat's off to that. But what people are doing, quit wasting my time. The sun is 400 times the moon's diameter. In other words, you put 109 earths across the sun. You put 400 moons across the sun. The sun is 400 times farther away than the moon. This is why they fit together so well. Nowhere in the solar system do we have such an amazing eclipse. There are eclipses on other planets. We can view the eclipses that occur on Jupiter. We look through our telescopes and we see the shadows of the, of the Jovian moons going across the face of Jupiter. We see them. We sometimes have two. Once in a great while we even see three. But they're not like this because the perspective is different. Here it's just right. The moon in the sky looks the same size as the disc of the sun and covers it precisely during a total eclipse. There's a diagram of the moon casting its shadow on the earth, that little tiny spot. And there's like a slightly different area. That represents the partial eclipse to Penumbra. Here's an actual photograph from space of the, of the moon's shadow on the earth. The shadow is constantly moving faster as it progresses. It hits Mexico at 1,500 miles an hour. It hits Vermont at about 2,500 miles an hour. It's Burlington at 2,600 miles an hour. And leaves Vermont at 2,800 miles an hour. By the time it exits off the coast of Newfoundland, that eclipse shadow is traveling 4,700 miles an hour. And the reason for that is once again we don't have linear math going on here. We have the shadow move in linear but it's expressing itself across the curve of the earth. So it's always going faster. The lower the sun is in the sky, from your point of view, the faster the shadows move in. Those shadows also, those eclipses, occur in a pattern. If you start looking at this long enough, you start to see patterns. The moon moves through the sky in something called a Soros pattern, which lasts 18 years. So every 18 years there's a pattern that occurs as the moon travels through the sky. And that occurs every 18 years. What doesn't occur in sync with that is the earth's rotation. So the earth's rotation is kind of like the wild garden a lot of it. So you see the August 2017 eclipse, August 2027 eclipse, this July of 2009 eclipse all have about the same shape. Let's see, where's another one? You're down here. Eclipses taken on the same shape. There's a regularity to it. I like pointing out here, August 2017, April 2024, right here where they cross, Carbondale, Illinois, is going to have two total solar eclipses in six and three-quarter years. They don't even know how lucky they are. That is really almost amazing. So here we have, there's two eclipses a year, similar, 18 years the Soros pattern. The average is every 375 years. Don't forget that's average. What does that mean? There's some places that get them more often. There's some places that get them less often. We get them a little better than every 375. Our last total solar eclipse was in 1932, 92 years ago. Our next total solar eclipse, so the rain date on this one, is May 1st, 2079. That'll be in southern Vermont. My understanding is the next total solar eclipse in Burlington is in 2106. So you're either there or you're probably out of luck. Maybe the young lady here will say, yeah, right, right. You'll be like us now. Think about that. Don't think about that. Have fun while you can. The next total solar eclipse happens in the southern United States in 2045. That being said, there's going to be one next year if you go see it, if you go. People sometimes, they're kind of like, I like to call them like dead heads. You've heard of dead heads, right? Or the fish fans, right? That's what they do. They will go. Where are we looking? If you looked outside today at 330 at the sun, where the sun was at, you got a pretty darn good idea where to look. Southwest, about 41 degrees up during the totality. The partial will start at about 50 degrees up. Don't forget that's at 215. The totality will start here about 327. It'll be over before 3 by 330 or before. And then you get your partial phase. So if you've got another day like this tomorrow, or one that's a little bit cloudy, we'll let you see the sun a little better actually. If there's high thin clouds. Go outside at 330. Look where the sun is at. It's not going to be far away from that spot. If you go out in the next week at 330 and look where the sun is, it's not going to be in a different place. And the sun's not going to come up at night. What's going to happen? You'll notice a dimming of the light. You'll notice that over that hour and 12 minutes, it'll sort of get dimmer. It's not the kind of thing that kicks you in the head. It really isn't. But it will slowly, it'll be weird looking sort of. But if you weren't expecting it, you might not even notice it. And then when the totality hits, it abruptly gets darker. Not instantaneously, but it ain't going to take long. 15 or 20 seconds, if that. It will be like a half an hour after sunset. Not total darkness like at night, but like about a half an hour after sunset. You will probably be able to see some of the, you'll see some bright planets. Might be able to see a couple of brighter stars in the sky, but not complete total night time. The temperature will drop maybe as much as 20 degrees. Yeah, it will, you'll probably notice the the the wind change a bit. If you're changing the pressure, you're changing the temperature. Things will will, the way the wind has been blowing will not be quite the same. And if you've got a cloudy day and you can't see the sun, be outside anyway, you won't melt in three minutes in a pouring rain. Go outside. You're probably going to notice that the first shift of animals is going to go to bed and the second shift will come out. In 2017, I did, I was there for the eclipse. I wasn't there to observe nature per se. And we did see flocks of birds flying toward the trees without even trying to find it. So if you've got a cloudy day and you can't see anything else, you can't see this going on, it's still going to get dark. It's still going to cool off like the sun went down and it, watch, pay attention. It's not like a sunset. It's weird. It's, we'll see a video at the end of this because when you've got a sunset, it's bright down on one horizon. You go to the other horizon and it's dark. Here you're going to have this happen 40 degrees high in the sky. The darkest place will be 40 degrees high in the sky where the sun's at and it will get brighter as you go to the horizons all around you. It's not the same, similar but not the same. A really neat effect actually. Here's a diagram, a time lapse of the eclipse. Everything in the sky moves from the east to the west. Everything rises in the east, everything sets in the west. The sun and the moon both do. That being said, because of the earth, the moons revolution around the earth, it is not moving to the west quite as quickly as the sun. So that shadow will proceed from the west to the east against the sun, against the current. Everything's moving to the west but that moon is not moving at the same speed. Thus you see as the as the eclipse progresses, that eclipse is, that moon's moving this way relative to the sun, you get your totality and then the opposite happens. Here's a picture from one of our club members. He, this is not, this is kind of photoshopped. All those pictures are real. They're just scrunched up to get up on the page, kind of like our earth moon thing. And he went to, Steve went to Madras, Oregon, where he knew it was a hot spot to see the eclipse, where he was less likely to get clouded out. And he, he was right, he didn't get clouded out. That's out in the Oregon desert somewhere. The coast is quite wet of Oregon. You go 100 miles inland, it's a desert. At the very last moments before the true totality hits, you get an effect called Bailey's Beads. And this is where the last bits of the sun's disc shines through the peaks and valleys of the, of the moon. So you got that kind of globby appearance, Bailey's Beads. I want to, I want to trivia pursuit game one time because I knew the answer to what's Bailey's Beads. But you can see some, you can see, you can see stuff going on already. You can start to see that corona already, but it's not quite there. Theoretically, you really shouldn't be looking at the sun without protection yet. You're probably gonna, you probably won't hurt yourself. You know, but you really shouldn't be looking directly at it yet. Just before those Bailey's Beads, you get something called the diamond ring. This is when the last bit of that sun's disc is shining around the edge of the moon. You definitely shouldn't really be looking at, at this yet without your filter. You should still be using your filter. That little bit of sun is quite bright yet. You'd be surprised. There's your totality. This is what we're all excited about. This is what's bending northern Vermont out of shape. It is the only time you can witness the sun's corona without the, without the aid of high science. When you see this, you will go, oh, everybody around you will too. It's kind of like a snowflake Bentley effect. Every one of the coronas, every eclipse has its own fingerprint of the corona. There are probably experts out there who could look at a picture of an eclipse and say, oh, that, that was the totality of this and that was the totality of that year. Every one of them will be a little different. They're all the same. They're all that black center with the white around it. But the white will be of a different shape. Each time, never the same like snow, Bentley and his snowflakes. Over there in the upper right corner, you can see a bit of a prominence. I witnessed that in 2017. It was cool. I saw that. I was like, wow, there's a prominence. The sun was actually kind of quiet at the time. I'm hoping we can see more of them this time. And you could see that with your naked eye. You did not need a telescope. You did not need a telescope. You just looked. There's a more of a close-up picture. You can see those streamers coming off the sun, the corona. Can you imagine being a stone age person out hunting or gathering? And all of a sudden it gets totally like not totally dark. It's like the sun goes down in the middle of the day and you look up and you see a big black hole in the sky. Yeah? You know, there's if you look at pictures of like the New Mexico flag and you look at buying stuff, somebody saw a total eclipse somewhere in that culture. They couldn't have made that picture without it. Why did they become sun worshipers? Uh-huh. I think they saw an eclipse. I don't know about you. There's a picture of the sky in the dark on that day. This is a map of the stars on that day. This little smoky rain here you probably can see it. That's your total eclipse. Okay? Here's Jupiter and Venus. If it's clear, you should see them. There's no doubt you will. There's a brighter star up here. You might see that. Some brighter stars you might see. Venus and Saturn are down on the horizon. So, you know, if you're over on the lakefront maybe you might see something like that. That's going to be difficult. But if you can see down low on the horizon, you might see Mars and Saturn. Supposedly, not supposedly. We know it's there. There's a comet that'll be in this area. Okay? Don't get your hopes up. If we were not Zoom, we might have been throwing chairs at each other. Because we know the comet's there but we're pretty sure it's going to be too dim to see. That being said, comets are notorious. We really don't know how bright that comet will be on April 8th at 3.30 until April 8th at 3.30. We don't know. So, we know it's there. But if you look in between Jupiter and the sun and you see a comet, you know, that fuzzy ball kind of a thing with a little tail, that's that comet that's out there. Don't get your hopes up but you might. It'll be cool. How to do this safely. We all worry about our eyes. Nothing's more important to us than our eyes. Not even our teeth. You cannot look at the sun without a filter. You can't. Don't. They're everywhere. These things are everywhere right now. Make sure you're using one to look at the partial. Somebody's waving their hand. Yeah, we got 40 of them. You got 40 of them? I got some too. Yeah. They're around. You can find one. Don't look at the partial eclipse without filtering. Appropriate filtering. But the total of you can? Absolutely. You don't need a thing but your eyeballs. It's the one exception in all of this. But you better know that timing. It's obvious. We'll get to it. It's obvious. You don't really have to worry about the timing. You'll know. Here's a way to look at the progression of the partial eclipse. Just punch a tack hole in one piece of paper. Hold another piece of paper a couple feet away and project through that pinhole. It's like a pinhole camera. You won't see a great detailed picture of the sun but you'll see the crescent as it goes partial. You'll see the shape. You'll see the progression. Here's one of the librarians in Jericho in 2017. She's got a big grin on her face. She's doing that right now. But why is she grinning? Because she did it like that. Jack over here punched a bunch of holes in a piece of cardboard. VAS Eclipse 2017. And every one of them little spots is hard to see. But every one of them little spots is a partial eclipse. That's why she's grinning. You literally make your fist projected onto the ground. You probably will see something. It'll be not a very good picture but you can see it. This guy used a triangle. The bigger the hole the less sharp the picture becomes. This guy just took out a big sheet of white cardboard and held it up to the shade of a tree. And as the as the sun peeked through the leaves of the tree he got a bunch of crescents of the partial eclipse. This is a little bit better way to make one of those pinhole cameras. You make a box. You got that piece of white paper on the inside. You punch a tiny pinhole in the front of the box and you look into the cut a hole in the slot. Cut a slot in the box so you can look inside this dark box and get more contrast. Safe ways to look at it. Absolutely safe. This guy just stuck his head in a box. He got it darker yet. Don't walk around like that. Safe shades. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. You need something to look at the partial phase directly. Don't do it. Okay we all get popped in the yes. Yeah you burn your macula. You know just like if you take a magnifying glass and you can start a fire on a paper. It's that strong. Well your eye is like a magnifying glass. You've got a focusing mechanism in your eye. You're looking directly at it. You point the most sensitive part of your eye. The part you really like. Or need. Or need. Well you need all of it. Don't get me going on that. It's a subject all the other. You're pointing the literally the most easily damaged part of your eye directly at the sun with a magnifying glass. Okay don't do it. We all get popped in the eye. If you're driving your car at sunset into the sun you get popped in the eye. If you're playing baseball and you're out in the outfield looking for that fly ball you get popped in the eye. But you reflexively don't look directly at it. You're always averting your games. You trust yourself a little bit. If it's too bright to look at it's too bright to look at. If you when you look if you looked at it and you wince don't keep looking. Here's some various filters. The glasses like everybody's getting. This is what we have something more like this. It's just a piece of that same filtering material in a cardboard. You hold it up to your eyes. You pass it to your friend. That's what we decided to do. Here's a specialized filter for a for a telescope. Here's some here's one specialized filter for a pair of binoculars. You need two of them. Here's a fancy pair of black glasses. Number 14 welder's glass. Let's talk about that for a minute. Don't do it. Okay I can only because there's no guarantees. Some people say yes some people say no. If you had one and you held it up and you looked at the sun you'd say oh that ain't too bright that's just great. I can see it fabulous but we don't know if it's filtering out all the light. Some say yes some say no. I don't want to call from Harding and Mazzotti. Okay don't do it. There's plenty there's plenty of legitimate ways to do it. Here's a picture of ours. This is what we bought. We bought them like this because we figured with this way you know our budget was limited. We couldn't buy one for everybody in the state. This way you know if you have one of these 10 people can see the partial. You just pass it over. You hold it up look look away and it's the next guy. You're not going to spend all that time looking continuously at the partial eclipse. It's like watching paint drying. You won't do it. Notice that we have an ISO label here and there's some numbers. We'll show you the numbers in a little bit but they all should be marked with something. Yes can you look now? Yeah yeah absolutely absolutely. If a sunset you know you'd see you see a little orange ball if the sun spot is big enough a little tiny spot you might see it if they're big enough. You know what you're doing is you're looking through that during this partial eclipse you're watching the progression that looking at the full brightness of the sun through that or that cutoff is really no big difference. The intensity is the same it's just a smaller area but the intensity ain't any different. Do you need anything for your smartphone? What kind of cell filters online? I don't know you're looking at a real oddity here. I don't know in a smartphone. All right yes sir. Quickly about the viewing with the glasses at other dates are there not also planetary eclipses that are fun to watch like maybe Venus or Mercury is going past the sun and you can use that viewer to see. Yeah you could yes here's the problem we're not going to have it a transit of Venus for over 100 years. We had one in what 2014 was it? 2008 and then 2012. 2012 and there's after there's those that occur in patterns also so you had those two and then it's like 118 years until you get the next one and I've seen of the eclipse of Venus I saw an eclipse of Mercury yeah you can see them but I don't think there's an eclipse or a transit of Mercury now for another 30 or 40 years. Maybe ISIS the International Space Station something like that you can see. Maybe. Maybe. That goes really quick. Yeah yeah ready for it. Yeah the the transit of Venus was pretty cool to watch that. Yeah. Especially knowing that you're looking at another planet not you know just here's another picture of the total eclipse and the partial phases and we've marked it off use the filter use the filter no filter if you see this if you see that what that black hole in the sky surrounded by the white you won't wince you'll look right you won't wince you look right at it it won't hurt you it won't hurt you don't lock the little person in the house be smart enough not to look at the partial eclipse you know I always like to say you're not a bad guy for looking at the partial eclipse when you shouldn't you're a dumb guy here's the ISO numbers on the glasses somewhere you're going to see this ISO International Standards Organization 12312-2 the 2015 was the year they did it you got them on there somewhere it might be on the box it came in look at the other side then too there it's on there somewhere see it they're on the temple pieces what they're on the temple pieces it'll be our go yeah i hear 12312-2 yeah yeah there you go you'll try safe to be nice to them they're not exactly real tough guys okay don't scratch them don't crease them be nice to them if you get one today i've been telling people this because we've been doing this for a couple of months put them in your dictionary if you still have a book at home put them in your dictionary under eclipse right you'll find it you'll stay safe if you have an astronomy book at home put it in there i got a bunch of them i find them in garbage cans it makes me mad do not use ordinary sunglasses i don't care how many pairs stack up don't do it don't use any other kind of filters made for cameras don't do it smoke glass don't hold a candle under the glass and get it all that's what they used to do don't do it photographic or x-ray film young lady have you ever seen photographic film yeah yeah don't stack up a bunch of negatives and look through it don't use a potato chip bag don't use a dvd or a cd don't use any of that in the last one we put don't use a wellness glass and that's just us it's sort of us playing it safe you know i like i said i don't want i don't want anybody to say they hurt themselves injuries from this can be pertinent you know if you look too soon and you get that spot in your eyes and you blink a little bit and a couple minutes later it come your vision's okay again you're fine right that's normal that's normal if you look at something too bright and your vision doesn't get better in an hour you probably hurt yourself don't do it here's people you here's a guy using the filters this is an important part of using filters never put them next to your eye put them on the outside if you got filters for your binoculars or a telescope don't put the filter next to your eye put the filter before the light enters the device if you put that filter next to your eye you're allowed to burn a hole in it uh-huh don't do it it's perfectly safe to look through these binoculars with proper filtering astronomers do it a lot you don't see many astronomers with white canes can you look at the total eclipse without any filters in the binoculars i i'm yes but hear me out you certainly don't want to be looking through that when it's done remember here you here in here here in waterberry you've got two minutes and 20 seconds and it's the fastest two minutes and 20 seconds you're ever going to experience so if you do that when you know the totality starts take a good look count to 10 and then stop there's nothing going on during the total eclipse during the totality that's going to hurt your eyes and the reason for that everything you're seeing is reflected light it's like looking at the moon you see none of the sun's light emitting disc it's gone behind the moon that that white corona the prominences are not emitting light they're reflecting the light from the sun here's a telescope with a filter notice it's on the outside this is a newtonian reflector so way this works the light comes in here it bounces off a mirror back here comes back up here and out you don't need all that telescope to see the sun you use a big telescope like this to gather dim light for dim from dim objects you literally can see almost the same thing through a teeny tiny little telescope as a great big one here's where the sight silt filter sight scope was we often have something that looks like a scope on a deer rifle to aim the telescope so we can see the object of regard we're looking at notice he took it off if you have a telescope don't leave your sighting devices on it you'll you'll somebody will invariably look through it you don't want that and if you have one with a reticle in it just like a like a deer rifle scope you'll burn it off you'll ruin it so you either got to cover it securely or take it off don't leave it on the telescope like i said first and foremost somebody will walk up to it and look through it don't be that person more information i like that top website it's now like seven or eight down but that's been around for since 2017 they've been hawking this eclipse for that long i like it because you can look up your state look up your community look at the local circumstances for the eclipse how much totality you're getting something closer to the right times these things can be slightly imprecise due to atmospheric effects or just the way the moon is shaped it's maybe not totally precise to the second just because of all those variabilities but it'll give you all that information that's why i like it but if you google eclipse 2024 you're going to end up with a bunch of sites they all have good information if i can do it i am sure anybody here who owns a smartphone can do it because i am about as backwards as they get there's our our information on the bottom we do have some information about the eclipse we have this somewhere on our website what we just did narrated so what we just did this is on our website so if you want to show your neighbors go ahead next this is the fun part this is why you're all here the video so we got a video of the eclipse and then we repeat showing the surrounding area which i think is almost more fun pay attention to the guy to the surrounding area one notice that there's a guy in his house all he does is turn on his lights had to be Tennessee or Kentucky or something actually this was in Tennessee it's i found it when i noticed that i started laughing i'm like oh my god we have sound with this oh it's a yeah we're gonna be mostly cluttered out folks almost there folks can we look straight at it not yeah yeah you look at this okay here's that diamond ring you're the camera whacking away there's a lot of glasses off no no glasses you're not no you'll know when no more than we had this thumb there but it's still yeah yeah those are prominences around the edge it's partial again wow glasses on definitely i like this actually better i this is better quick it starts getting dark notice it's hard to see notice he has a white sheet out i'll tell you why in a minute there's the lights on the mouse it's bright again just like that watch your shadow dance look let's stand you don't know what to look for okay what you can do one of the things you can do is you take out a big white towel a hunk of white sheet that you don't want anymore something white lay it on the ground especially not if it's raining out but if it's if it's a clear day lay it on the ground and what will happen when the sun is is just a narrow band the you'll get these bands moving across the sheet like a herringbone almost moving across the sheet and what that is a star will twinkle in the night sky because of the atmospheric effects and what you're seeing is that twinkle being projected onto the sheet the atmospheric bending the light and whatever's causing stars to twinkle is making that herringbone across the sheet it's cool something to look for i like to tell people about this real quick one of the things that we've done in the last hundred years with eclipses so it's been over a hundred years since einstein came up with his theory of relativity and it was a conjecture it was a story in the book it was this guy's thoughts and he had some mathematics to back it up but nobody had a smoking gun nobody had any direct evidence that he was right until somebody said well you know einstein saying that gravity bends light why don't we take photographs of the stars during a total eclipse they had those stars plotted in detail they knew exactly where they were in the sky they took photographs of those stars and measured them again and all those stars were bent just a tiny bit toward the sun the smoking gun they had evidence that einstein's theory was right they still perform that experiment time and time again in 1932 when we had the last total eclipse here that was big doings in 1932 they were still making sure that they had it right and now they're fine tuning it and i am sure there are countless of high-end science classes doing that experiment over and over again that's all i got unless you guys got questions questions or did i do such a great job you don't have any left you know the funny thing about Galileo he didn't make money making telescopes he made money making glasses for rich people yeah he sold it to the military yes he did yes in vermont i don't know but during this total eclipse i know nasa is going to have a half a dozen high altitude planes flying they got rockets going up somebody's got a kite they want to send three miles high their atmospheric things jack over here he's also got some fingers in amateur radio the amateur radio guys are looking at something so there is all sorts of stuff going on you know we're hoping to get the corona the sun is over a million degrees hot we don't know why so they're going to use this eclipse to try to come up with some ideas as to how that's happening why is the surface of the sun 10,000 degrees and the corona a million degrees we don't know back in the beginning of the presentation and you're talking about that that's sunspot that like blew out everybody's telegraphs yeah if that was to happen now would we have a warning we're working on that we certainly have satellites up there that look for solar weather trying to give us a heads up you know if if it's something like that bad was coming they'd probably be trying to shut things down yeah that's what i was wondering and we don't know if that would entirely help but it wouldn't hurt you know nothing's worse than having it running when it gets hit yeah but yeah exactly you know there's a good possibility your car wouldn't run right you know everything we got now is is electrical yeah you know electronic we kind of go into unless you got that 65 Chevy in your garage with the points and condenser you might go you're welcome