Check out the Goddard Engage TV Stream. The show starts at 10:30 am ET (1530 UTC) and ends one hour later. Totality is at 11:02 am ET (1602 UTC) where the camera is located.
The eclipse is not visible to SDO, but the view from the ground should be breath-taking.
Enjoy!
But this is a post about eclipses on other planets.
The shadows of the four Galilean satellites have long been seen on Jupiter. Because the moons appear to be so much bigger than the Sun, these shadows are called occultations. An annular solar eclipse has been observed when Phobos' shadow passed over the rovers Opportunity and Curiosity.
It interesting to think about what an eclipse would be like on Neptune, Pluto, or Eris. The primary moon appears so much larger than the Sun for those planets. The amount of heat from the Sun is already a small fraction of what we receive at the Earth. Would you even notice if such a dim light was occulted?
Call them transits, occultations, or eclipses, astronomers are quite excited when one thing in the universe passes in front of another. The Kepler and TESS satellites use the dimming caused by planetary transits across their home stars to discover those planets and even study the atmosphere of the planet. Occultations of stars by Pluto were used to study the atmosphere of Pluto years before New Horizons was launched. Occultation of the New Horizons radio as it passed behind Pluto was also used to study Pluto's atmosphere. The beauty of the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse is just the icing on the cake.
Next chance for people in the US to drive to an eclipse is 8 April 2024. This eclipse will be near solar maximum. That means the corona should look more complex and interesting. I hope a spot as good as Madras can be found for that eclipse.
That was a beautiful eclipse on 21 August 2017!
Looking for a new way to enjoy SDO Data?
Grammy award-winning artist Beck took an ethereal journey to the stars for his 2019 record "Hyperspace." Now, he has taken this cosmic journey a giant leap forward in a collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and artificial intelligence creatives OSK. The result: A visual album experience titled "Hyperspace: A.I. Exploration."
The new visual album, unveiled today (Aug. 12), is an "interstellar journey combining publicly available NASA mission images, curated with assistance from NASA JPL, visualizations, animations and data with revolutionary Artificial Intelligence tech," with Hyperspace's songs as the soundtrack," according to a Beck statement.
NASA's visual archives were scoured by OSK using "unique A.I. utilizing computer vision, machine learning and Generative Adversarial neural Networks (GAN)" and it "began creating its own visions of our universe," Beck representatives wrote in the statement.
The SDO video is here: https://youtu.be/iE7PBovWh-E
On the right is a magnetogram from April 2, 2020. A high-latitude active region (AR 12759) has the outward field is leading the active region and the inward magnetic field is behind. AR 12759 is at 28 N (the same latitude as Cape Canaveral, FL, SDO’s launch site).
Hale’s Polarity Law is one of the reasons for the confusing names of the solar cycle. People see an 11-year sunspot cycle when they look only at sunspots. The reversal of the leading and trailing fields means that two sunspot cycles are necessary for the Sun to return to the same conditions (the 22-year solar cycle). But we still count Solar Cycles. So Solar Cycle 25 is the 25th sunspot cycle since records the numbering began in 1755.
The high-latitude, oppositely-directed field active region AR 12759 is just the beginning of Solar Cycle 25.The leading field is an outie!
Lunar transits are one interesting feature of life in a geosynchronous orbit.
Over the next year, Solar Cycle 25 will become more and more apparent. SDO will be there, observing the Sun and its magnetic field.
Congratulations to the SDO teams and all the people who enjoy our data!