Thread: Total solar eclipse - USA - August 2017

They are also saying that the entire population of Wyoming is going to double during the Eclipse.

Current population is just over 1/2 Million.

Probably need to go to YouTube to go Full Screen

.

Don’t Miss the Solar Eclipse!
This is the first time in almost a century that a total eclipse will traverse the fruited plains from coast to coast.
https://stream.org/dont-miss-solar-eclipse/



...Totality

Here’s the thing: A total solar eclipse is nothing like a partial eclipse or a lunar eclipse. In a total solar eclipse, just before “totality,” the last bright bit of the Sun’s photosphere looks like the pink diamond of a cosmic engagement ring. When the Moon covers the Sun’s disk, the sky goes dark. The temperature drops. The stars appear. Critters get confused and go quiet. And the dim outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona, reaches out from the black lunar disk like the arms of an enveloping ghost....






...Just a Coincidence?

Have you noticed the odd coincidence? The Moon and the Sun aren’t much alike. Yes, they’re spherical. But one is a giant ball of gas and plasma. The other is a much smaller rock. And yet, during a total eclipse, they mark off the same space in our sky. They match. That’s because the Sun is about four hundred times larger than our Moon, but also about four hundred times farther away.

Eerie huh? Is that nice fit just a coincidence? Or is there something more to it? I’ll answer that in the next installment.

Originally Posted by fuego

Interesting point.

https://privilegedplanet.com/

https://privilegedplanet.com/synopsis/

Synopsis

For centuries scientists and philosophers have marveled at an eerie coincidence. Mathematics, a creation of human reason, can predict the nature of the universe, a fact physicist Eugene Wigner referred to as the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences." In the last three decades astronomers and cosmologists have noticed another, seemingly unrelated, mystery. Contrary to all expectations, the laws of physics seem precisely "fine-tuned" for the existence of complex life.

Could these two wonders actually be isolated pieces of a wider pattern? Both are prerequisites for science, yet what about the process of scientific discovery itself? What are its necessary conditions? Why is it even possible? Read any book on the history of science, and you'll learn about magnificent tales of human ingenuity, persistence, and dumb luck. But that's only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Our location is much more critical to science than it is to real estate. For some reason our Earthly location is extraordinarily well suited to allow us to peer into the heavens and discover its secrets.

Elsewhere, you might learn that Earth and its local environment provide a delicate, and probably exceedingly rare, cradle for complex life. But there's another, even more startling, fact, described in The Privileged Planet: those same rare conditions that produce a habitable planet-that allow for the existence of complex observers like ourselves-also provide the best overall place for observing. What does this mean? At the least, it turns our view of the universe inside out. The universe is not "pointless" (Steven Weinberg), Earth merely "a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark," (Carl Sagan) and human existence "just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents" (Steven Weinberg). On the contrary, the evidence we can uncover from our Earthly home points to a universe that is designed for life, and designed for discovery.



http://www.theprivilegedplanet.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pr..._for_Discovery

I remember as a young boy at school having a solar eclipse. We weren't allowed to go outside and play and they told us not to look at the sun. Everything went dark it was eerie and weird.

Originally Posted by Cardinal TT

I remember as a young boy at school having a solar eclipse. We weren't allowed to go outside and play and they told us not to look at the sun. Everything went dark it was eerie and weird.

April 8, 1959?