Yesterday I got a ride with two old friends, science writer Horst Rademacher and his seismologist wife Peggy Hellweg, up to Nevada County in the northern Sierra foothills and into the path where yesterday’s eclipse would unfold in full annularity. We spent mid-day ogling the impressive mess that gold miners in the 1850s-70s left at the Malikoff Diggins, now a state park. The miners hosed down mountainsides with gravity-driven water cannons (or “monitors” as they called them) until townspeople and farmers downstream on the Yuba and other rivers sued, and won. The debris was clogging things up and causing floods. Even today it is a problem. One hundred fifty years later, the excavation with its fluted towers or eroded sedimentary rock “looks like Zion National Park,” Horst exclaimed. But this one is no testament to nature.
Nature got its show time next. As late afternoon approached we found a good spot next to a pasture on a gravel road to watch the moon fail to quite block the sun. Horst and Peggy, organizers and owners of many marvelous gadgets, had thought ahead and obtained thin-sheet solar filter material for binoculars, eyeball-viewing, and to fit over their impressive motor-driven Meade telescope’s barrel and a second ‘scope with a camera they affixed to it. We could easily make out three active regions, or groups of sunspots. The eclipse was eery and spectacular, the moon moving close to smack through the middle of the sun’s disk, the day getting sort of gloomy but not dark, and mosquitoes suddenly arising as they sensed, one presumes, the brief dusk. Birds twittered too.
And on the drive out, down North Bloomfield Road, a bear scampered out of the woods to the left and back into them on the right only about 50 meters in front of us. A lesson in landscape engineering, a splendid display of orbital dynamics in the sky, and a surprised black bear (actually, sort of chocolate) galloping by. That’s some sightseeing for one day.
There are, of course, many stories on the eclipse path from dawn in China and Japan, up to near the Aleutions, and down across Northern California toward its finale at sunset in New Mexico and west Texas.. And many pictures.
Not much in popular press, to my mind, takes full advantage of an oddity. Just two weeks ago news was rife on the SuperMoon, when it rose with an apparent size in the sky greatest of the year. The same moon that was a notable giant two weeks ago was too puny yesterday to even cover the sun. Some might ask, how could the moon shrink so fast? Two weeks, all the smart people reading this site know, is about half the time the moon takes to go around the Earth. It doesn’t go in a circle. Its elliptical orbit varies its distance, and apparent size or patch on the sky, by about 13 percent from largest to smallest each time around. So two weeks ago the full moon- on the side of Earth opposite the sun – was big as the full moon nearly coincided with perigee. Yesterday’s new moon, sitting dead sunward from here, was near its seeming smallest extreme due to the corresponding apogee. To tell readers that little bit gives them a visceral encounter with fundamental parameters of life on Earth that many have not pondered.
Some did explain it. One excellent example was picket up by Wired from SEN.com (Space Exploration Network) by Paul Sutherland. Another is at MSNBC’s Cosmic Log by Alan Boyle written a few days after the SuperMoon and with a passage on the logical reason we were soon to have an annular eclipse.
At Space.com Joe Rao has a super explanation of this year’s annular event, written a few days beforehand. But he misses the chance to mention why it came just two weeks after a full SuperMoon.
To no possible surprise the apogee-perigee, SuperMoon vs. annular pipsqueek, dichotomy also got full explanation at the blog Bad Astronomy by Phil Plait. He includes a link to a very cool video enactment of how the moon would look from Earth all this year to people on the ground with no clouds and no bright sky. It nods and approaches and recedes, over and over again – mesmerizing.
Associated Press put together a fine gallery of photos of the eclipse, here at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
– Charlie Petit
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