Eclipse

Last week there was a solar eclipse that was quite visible from my part of the US.  I helped out at our astronomy department's big outreach event of the year, and so they gave me special eclipse-viewing sunglasses.  I tried using the sunglasses for looking cool, but it turned out that you just are blind unless you are staring straight at the sun.

On Sunday, around 6:30 the eclipse began.  It was quite a long event, but I started to watch a little after the eclipse began.  I showed a bunch of people in my ward my glasses and let them look at the sun as well.  It was surprising to see how many of them were surprised I knew so much about eclipses (not that much).  My being a physicist seemed to satisfy their curiosity.

Right as the eclipse reached its minimum light state, clouds started to roll in, and it gave the illusion that the sun was completely blocked out.  My favorite part of the whole of the eclipse was the fact that it got so dark.  Shortly afterwards it got brighter again.  Sadly, the revealing of the sun again was mostly hidden by thick clouds, so that was the event.



This is not my picture (http://wordlesstech.com/2012/05/22/videos-of-annular-solar-eclipse-may-20-2012/), but it is still really cool.  Notice that the sun makes a ring around the moon; the moon does not completely cover the sun.  This is called an annular eclipse.  The reason for this is that the moon is too far from the earth, and so just becomes a (big) dot in the sun.  Total eclipses are ones where the moon is close enough that it completely blocks out the sun, and spontaneously cause Christina and Tanner to start singing and dancing.