The May 2012 Solar Eclipse

May 20, 2012 was a day for which I'd been waiting for more than 2 years. I had never seen a solar eclipse before, and this one would be visible from right where I lived - who could ask for anything better than that?

I didn't worry about how to view the eclipse until the day before the event. Up until then, I thought I could view it through a telescope with a solar filter, or maybe with a pair of eclipse glasses - but on the night before the event I still had nothing, and it was too late to get anything shipped from Amazon on time. I had to come up with another plan. I knew I'd definitely be able to view it with a pinhole projector (a fancy name for a board with a tiny hole in it), but I knew from experience the image of the sun would be either small or faint. I wanted something better. I couldn't use my dad's telescope to project the image; the first time I tried that, I ended up melting the lens from the powerful focused rays. I started thinking of how I could use lenses to project light onto a white surface. Then I realized that my toy 1.25" refracting telescope I'd had since I was about 5 would project the sun's image wonderfully. My refractor lets in so little light you can hardly feel the rays of the sun focused on your finger, so melting plastic wouldn't be a problem. If things worked well, that telescope would be what I'd use.

Viewing Sunspots

Things did work well. A few hours before the eclipse began, I started trying things out. I found that a paper plate taped inside a box worked best, because ordinary paper is so thin it looks blotchy, and the paper had to be in a dark place or the projection would be too faint. In the end, my setup was so good I could even see sunspots. Looking into the box was a little awkward, but it was worth it.

A very short time after the eclipse started, I noticed some dark clouds getting dangerously close to the sun. Within a few minutes the sun was hidden. I thought it could be like that for the rest of the day, but it wasn't! The sun came out for quite a while before disappearing again, and even after that it came out yet another time before finally disappearing for good. I missed the climax, but what I saw was so close it didn't really matter. This is from a video I took with the moon partly covering the sun:

So that's the story of my viewing of the May 2012 solar eclipse. Not only did I find a safe way to view eclipses, but now I can view sunspots and the Venus transit in June.

Comments

Flipping Quarters

Here's an interesting puzzle involving chance: A man in a park asks you to play a game with him. It's a form of gambling. To play, you must pay the man $5, then flip a coin repeatedly until you get heads. As soon as you get heads, you stop flipping. If you only flipped the quarter once, he'll give you $1. If you flipped it twice, you get $2. Three times, $4. Four times, $8. Each extra flip gets you twice as much money, so the longer it takes before you get tails, the more money you get. Should you play, if you have a lot of time and the man will play as many games as you want? How much money, on average, would you gain (subtracting the $5 fee)? I will give the solution in a later post .

Pluto No Longer on the Horizon

This morning, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to make a flyby observation of the Pluto system. During the mission, the spacecraft captured the most detailed photographs of Pluto's surface we've ever had, and possibly ever will have. It also found many new properties including size, mass, atmosphere, and surface composition. In a period of a few hours, we discovered more about Pluto than we've found in the 85 years since Clyde Tombaugh captured its first photograph. Before After (images credit: NASA) To complete this mission, the spacecraft flew for more than 9 years through the emptiness of space. This may sound like a long time, but it's actually amazingly quick. In fact, New Horizons set the record for the fastest speed at launch, and during the flyby, the spacecraft was moving at a rate of over 30,000 mph, or roughly 50 times the speed of sound. Picture an object twice as heavy as a grand piano moving 25 times faster than a bullet from a gun. Yikes. The man...

Should Tau Replace Pi?

The digits of π, organized in a very new way Happy π-day! And happy π-month! Today's month and day - that is, March 14 or 3.14 - includes the first 3 digits of π. And today's month and year - March 2014 or 3.14 - also includes the first 3 digits of π. We won't have another double-day for π for the next 100 years, so enjoy this one! For the special occasion, I'm posting two π-related posts - one for π-month, and the other for π-day. In both posts, I'm setting the font size to approximately π * π + π + π. This is the first post, for π-month; to see the second, go to http://greatmst.blogspot.com/2014/03/pi-month-pi-day-post-2-5-common-pi-myths.html . In this post, I am including an essay I wrote about whether π or τ is the more superior constant. This was written for people who know very little about math, so the basic idea should be easy to understand even for people who are not mathematically inclined. Should Tau Replace Pi? A constant is any number or value that ne...

Cosmos Computed

Search This Blog