what is an eclipse, really? let's explore ideas for what an eclipse really is. seeking expert and amateur opinions of all sorts. later joined by Zach, photon physicist, as we strive to get to the bottom of all this """eclipse""" business.
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The eclipse is the milk in your spoon. It is the shiniest coincidence. It is the table cloth trick in the sky. It is a lasso of truth. It is not however the tortoise shell. It is not a reason for panic. It is not a hole in God's pocket. It is however a coin slot in Jesus's gachapon. It is the abandoned couch during Allston Christmas. Dig in the cushion and find some spare change.
once every decade or so vampires are given free reign over humans during daylight hours in an ancient agreement made between immortal evil (vamps) and mortal evil (mankind) and the eclipse dims daylight enough that they can feast with reckless abandon and not burn
Isn't an eclipse like, when everyone gets together in a flash mob, and then puts on sunglasses?
And that's why the sun gets dark. Because you're wearing sunglasses
the eclipse is why millennials can't afford to buy houses
Do you have a little sibling who never really seems to leave you alone? Do they unrelentingly pull at you with a small, temporally and spatially-varying tug? Do they follow you around constantly, day after day, month after month, millennium after millennium, always looking at you with the same silica-based, geologically static expression? Have you noticed that they’ve made any effort to develop a life, hobby, or atmosphere of their own? If you’ve answered “yes,” to any of these questions, your little sibling might actually be the Moon.
In that case, there’s something you should know. As much as your sibling insists that they really don’t mind being cast from time to (highly specific and calculable) time in your reddish-tinged shadow, the truth is, they are dying to cast a shadow themselves, and will, at certain mathematically predictable points, actually do so. Although it’s annoying to have them steal your thermonuclear fusion-powered spotlight and confuse your superficial life-forms with the sudden lack of infrared and visible-spectrum radiation, taking turns is part of being gravitationally bound...and although you’ll never admit it, you secretly think it’s kind of cute.
(This family moment is brought to by your friends at WMBR.)
In the moments before I turned to my boatswain I thought this long night finally came to a calming denouement. The storm passed off the bow leaving an undulating mix of swells and mid ocean breakers, quite rare for this part of the world. The first and second mates slept tossing and turning through most of it, though their bodies laid still beneath the blankets as the previous 28 hour shift left them dead in appearance. That's why a captain and his boatswain occupied the night shift in the last few tacks of a long journey. Land was near.
Anything a storm gives a sea-hardened vessel can take hope, excitement, and life just as quickly. Our gift from the passing weather this abysmally black night sat thick as the kelp it washed ashore. Fog, my least favorite three letter word, or any length for that matter. We were in the middle of an argument, two in fact. I with my boatswain about the channel heading; our boat with the bulging seas. Most boatswains possess little navigational prowess. Mine probably should be captain. Rank is important, but not if it will deprive a ship's crew of life. You'll never hear a captain speak that aloud. A good one knows this.
It's difficult to imagine fog taking on a personality. The tricks it conjures leaves nothing for the imagination and everything for doubt. I adamantly willed the tiller fifteen degrees starboard of the heading in which I insisted the lighthouse stood. My boatswain did all but prostrate me and usurp control to push our bow another twenty degrees further. We could hear the periodic low register notes. The damn fog. The horn's origination vector moved as though we were aboard a spinning carousel, except boats don't gyrate. Our eyes fixated a few inches above the forestays in desperate squints to catch a morsel of light break through. That would settle all arguments. Only then could we see again. I turned to my boatswain simply to see something that wasn't the surrounding eclipse.
In this break: Caitlin & Zach's eclipse theories. Eclipse Glasses as the New Cryptocurrency via Caitlin. A Culturally Relativistic Approach to the Eclipse via Zach.
In this break: what an eclipse actually is, with some viewing tips!
Comment:
- don't look at the eclipse without eclipse glasses: these aren't just normal sunglasses! - if using binoculars or another magnification device, you need a special filter for those too. eclipse glasses won't be enough. - this MIT event and the BPL will have eclipse glasses for use. - "The view of the sun at 2:30 pm will be very similar to the view of the sun at 2:46 pm and at 3:00 pm. - "anytime between 1:40 pm and 3:30 pm will be a great time to see this phenomenon." - next total solar eclipse: July 2nd 2019 - next total solar eclipse in the US: April 8th 2024
