Been seeing some posts from family west of St. Louis that they are expecting major traffic problems where they live too. Work (in St. Louis right on the edge of the path) is having a party but I was only invited at my own expense so I'll be working.
Been seeing some posts from family west of St. Louis that they are expecting major traffic problems where they live too. Work (in St. Louis right on the edge of the path) is having a party but I was only invited at my own expense so I'll be working.
My daughter and I will be driving about 6 hours south towards KC to see this eclipse. Hope it's sunny!
We are in the path of "totality" the weather forecast looks to be good. [mostly sunny]
The wife and I will be outside watching the show.
It's a media frenzy around here, they are telling people to keep their pets inside to prevent them from suffering retina damage. As if domesticated animals have a habit of staring at the sun lol. I suppose all the wildlife and farm animals will all go blind...............
Well...the peacocks have so many eyes , I wouldn't worry about the two beady small ones. Pretty sure that favorite bee of yours will get her pair !
My favorite is Gertrude.
I asked my bee mentor once if he named his bees. He said, yep, that one thar is Gertrude. I said how about that one? Gertrude. The queen? Gertrude. The drones? All Gertrude. Since I got my starting hives from him I figured the genetics carried over and today all of mine are Gertrude. I'll have to get Gertrude some glasses.
JKJ
I checked my welding helmet yesterday and it's not dark enough to look at the sun. The glass is shade 10 and 12-13 is needed. Bad planning when I bought the helmet 10 years ago. Time to make a pin hole viewer.
One cool effect I remember from the last partial eclipse is the shadows under a tree.
Do you have a small telescope or binoculars? I use an 8" telescope with a solar filter, but I also also do a projection through a 4" scope and got a nice 2" to 5" diameter sun image onto a piece of paper (depending on the projection distance). Far better than a pinhole.
My small scope has a 90-deg eyepiece so I project the image sideways into a cardboard box with a piece of white paper taped inside. This allowed lots of kids to view from the same time.
You can project with binoculars but the light from the sun and sky can drown out the image unless you shield by putting the eyepiece lens up to a hole in a piece of cardboard or something.
I got my telescope out yesterday and checked it out with the solar filter. There are sunspots now, five in a line near the center of the sun! I held my phone camera up to the eyepiece and took a (poor) sunspot photo. Another thing I tried was holding the 10x image stabilized binoculars behind the 8" solar filter. The image wasn't too big but I could still see the sunspots clearly.
JKJ
I'm in E. Kentucky today and it looks like around 94% coverage so should be worth looking at. Re the use of welding lenses I wonder if there's a duration of exposure element there. A #10 lens is pretty dark unless there are damaging light frequencies (Infrared/Ultra Violet) that aren't filtered by welding lenses. Lots of information out there, I'm sure some of it is even correct.
We are about 150 miles north of the expected arc so it got a little "dusky" here and that was it.
A DIL and grandkids were driving home to Southern California from here yesterday and today. As advertised, she said the traffic around Madras, OR to Bend, OR was heavy but moving quite well. They watched the eclipse from Mt. Shasta, CA where they overnighted.
Ken
So much to learn, so little time.....
We had cloud cover come in right at the same time as peak eclipse, so it's hard to say the effect of the eclipse was here. Overall, it looked about 7-8 pm on a cloudy day here.
Brian
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger or more complicated...it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - E.F. Schumacher
All i can say is it was AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!
Not a cloud in the sky, it got eerily dark. The best part was when it reached totality and you could look directly at it without the glasses.
And right on time, as the eclipse ends, our skys have cleared and it is a bright sunny day... go figure...
Brian
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger or more complicated...it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - E.F. Schumacher
Had my eclipse glasses on and stayed cool at the same time. We were in the perfect place in Lexington, SC. The traffic on interstate I-20 was bumper to bumper. The eclipse was totally amazing.
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The forecast was not looking good for eclipse viewing but it cleared up in time so I made a quick pinhole projector from a 3 foot long box I found at work. A scrap of aluminum tape on top for the pinhole and a piece of printer paper in the bottom for a projection surface and Bob's yer uncle.
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This was taken within a minute of max coverage. We were only supposed to get about 83% coverage. could have used another three feet or so of box.
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Lot's of people stopped to have a look and when we were finished, I dropped it in the box crusher on my way back to the shop.
About two minutes afterward it began to cloud up. In another 20 minutes it was heavy overcast and by the time I left work it was raining.