Starship Asterisk*

Photo by Jay Pasachoff

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Jay Pasachoff, professor of astronomy at Williams College and Chair of the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Solar Eclipses, observed the second solar eclipse of the year from the grounds of the Mt. Pleasant Radio Observatory of the University of Tasmania in Australia. It was the 68th solar eclipse that he had observed.

Pasachoff reports that the partial eclipse lasted 64 minutes and that weather conditions were ideal, with clear skies virtually the entire duration of the eclipse. Even when clouds appeared in the final minutes of the eclipse, the sun was always visible.

According to Pasachoff, this solar eclipse was visible only from Antarctica and southernmost parts of Australia, especially Tasmania, where 10 percent of the solar disk was covered at maximum.

Pasachoff captured images of the eclipse using a Nikon D600 and 500-mm f/8 Nikkor lens and a Thousand Oaks Optical filter as well as with a Nikon D7100 and 400 mm Nikkor lens with a Questar filter.

There are two more partial solar eclipses—August 11, 2018, and January 6, 2019—before the next total solar eclipse, which Pasachoff will observe from Chile on July 2, 2019, now less than a year away.

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Sat Jul 14, 2018 4:06 am A Nibble on the Sun

Explanation: The smallest of the three partial solar eclipses during 2018 was just yesterday, Friday, July 13.

The greatest eclipse, about one-third of the Sun's diameter blocked by the New Moon, could be seen from East Antarctica near Peterson Bank, where the local emperor penguin colony likely had the best view.

heehaw wrote: ↑Sat Jul 14, 2018 3:30 pm People do go thousands of miles to see solar eclipses ... but NO ONE went there, to see THAT!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_the_Penguins wrote:

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<<March of the Penguins (French La Marche de l'empereur) is a 2005 French feature-length nature documentary directed and co-written by Luc Jacquet, and co-produced by the National Geographic Society. The documentary depicts the yearly journey of the emperor penguins of Antarctica. In autumn, all the penguins of breeding age (five years old and over) leave the ocean, their normal habitat, to walk inland to their ancestral breeding grounds. There, the penguins participate in a courtship that, if successful, results in the hatching of a chick. For the chick to survive, both parents must make multiple arduous journeys between the ocean and the breeding grounds over the ensuing months. It took one year for the two isolated cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison to shoot the documentary, which was shot around the French scientific base of Dumont d'Urville in Adélie Land.>>

Ironwood wrote: ↑Sat Jul 14, 2018 5:30 pm
If I had a dollar for every eclipse that has looked like that at some point, how many dollars would I have?

A. 1
B. 100
C. 1000
D. 10,000,000,000