 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy! One of the things that I like to do in each of my introductory astronomy classes is to begin the class with the astronomy picture of the day. From the NASA website that is apod.nasa.gov.APOD, a today's picture for October 9th of 2023, while it is titled A Distorted Sunrise Eclipse. So what do we see here? Well, here you see, looking off in the distance here, a sunrise. Now, when the sun rises, it will look very red. And that's because when we look toward the horizon, we are looking through more atmosphere than when we look up higher in the sky. The atmosphere is very good at scattering blue light. So the shorter wavelengths, like blue and green and even yellows, get all scattered out of the light, and only the deepest reds can make it through as you get very close to the horizon. So that will cause things like the sun and the moon to look very red as they are rising in setting. Now, of course, that's not the biggest thing that stands out here. It is actually the shape of the rising sun, almost two horns rising above the horizon. And that's because when the sun rose here in 2019 during this eclipse, this moon was directly in front of part of the sun, and it was blocking out its light. So you can see the moon there just up above the sun, blocking out the light of that upper portion, giving those two horns, red horns, sticking up over the horizon in terms of what you're able to see. Now, that's not the only place we see the moon. If you notice, that's not a mountain off in the distance below the sun there. That's actually another image of the moon. When you look very low in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is very turbulent and can act as a lens and give multiple images. So we not only see the regular image that we're used to up above, but we can also see the image down below there of the moon almost cutting the sun in half and having two separate parts to the sun rising up above the horizon. So as that would continue, the sun would get higher and higher in the sky, and then the eclipse would progress, eventually ending, and the moon completely moving out from in front of the sun, and it would be back to being a completely normal day. But you can imagine it might be a very impressive sight, especially if you weren't ready for it, to look out and to see this view rising up over the horizon in the distance. So if you didn't know that that was the eclipse coming, it would be a very interesting thing to see off there in the distance. Now, we do have an annular eclipse coming up in just a few days now, in fact on Saturday, depending on where you happen to be located in parts of North and South America, you will be able to see an annular eclipse. Now an annular eclipse occurs when the moon is a little bit farther away from Earth and looks a little smaller and doesn't completely block out the sun. So it will be in front of the sun, but there will be a ring of sunlight still visible around it. So depending on where you happen to be located, you may get a chance to see that eclipse coming up in less than a week now. So that was our picture of the day for October 9th of 2023. It was titled A Distorted Sunrise Eclipse. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture, previewed to be Hidden in Orion. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then, have a great day everyone, and I will see you in class.