BAN #343: Happy birthday Pirillo, An eclipse from 1.5 million km away

26 July 2021   Issue #343

July 26, 2021

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Subscribers are never eclipsed, annularly or otherwise

Blast from the Past

A quick link to an old post or article because it’s relevant, or came up in conversation, or just because it deserves a second look.

Today just so happens to be my friend Chris Pirillo’s birthday, so I figure I’d give him a shoutout.

By coincidence, I was poking around twitch.tv seeing what sort of science content they had and he was doing a live stream, so I popped in to say hi. I haven’t talked with him in a while and we reminisced; we met when he was doing a show on TechTV called “Call for Help”, where people could call in about computer stuff and he’d answer. He invited me on to do movie reviews from a science standpoint, and while I can’t remember how many times I came down to do the show, but it was always fun.

While we were talking I wondered if any of those segments were online so I did a quick search, and this came up: An article I wrote on Discover about it! I had totally forgotten about this, but in my defense it was 14 years ago.

Back then, I found an old VHS tape with the show, so I digitized it and uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is:

It’s so odd: I look the same, but different. Like my head was rounder, which to be fair might be a video aspect ratio issue, but may also show my actual aspect ratio has changed over the years. I do miss that shirt though.

Anyway, Chris is on Twitch.tv and Twitter (he was literally the first person I followed on Twitter when I first joined) and probably other stuff, so drop by today and wish him a happy birthday!

[Chris and me from 2007, I think, when I met up with him one day in San Francisco and we hung out.]

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[A portion of the huge Taurus Molecular Cloud is seen here in two-panel mosaic. From Tuesday’s article. Credit: Adam Block /Steward Observatory/University of Arizona]

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

On June 10, 2021, the Moon passed directly between the Earth and the Sun, creating a solar eclipse. This means its shadow is cast down on the planet. From Earth we see the Sun blocked by the Moon, either partly or wholly, but if you look down on Earth from space you see, well, the shadow of the Moon cast on the Earth.

The NASA/NOAA satellite DSCOVR sits about 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth in the direction of the Sun, taking images of our planet every hour or so. It had a phenomenal view of the eclipse:

[The June 2021 solar eclipse seen from the DSCOVR satellite. Credit: NASA/NOAA]

Yeah, whoa. Due to geometry the shadow falls on different parts of the Earth in different eclipses, and this one was a little bit arctic. It was also an annular eclipse: The Moon was near apogee, when it’s farthest from Earth, and appears a little bit smaller to us so it doesn’t block the entire Sun. Instead it leaves a circle of solar surface around it at maximum, like a ring. This happened in June when the Earth was also farthest from the Sun, so the Sun was a bit smaller too. That change is only a few percent, where the Moon changes size by 10% or so over its orbit; together it still meant we got an annular eclipse.

The next big solar eclipse in the US in is 2024. My wife and I are thinking of doing a Science Getaway for that one, so stay tuned for more info!

Et alia

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