So, the eclipse is over, and now you have a pair (or a bunch of pairs) of eclipse glasses lying around. What can you do with them?

Astronomers Without Borders, an organization that brings astronomy to underserved populations, has set up a big national campaign to collect “gently used” glasses, including drop-off points all across the US. See if one is near you! They’re also raising money to help with the effort, which you can donate to on that linked page.

Eclipse Glasses USA is also accepting undamaged glasses that they can then give to kids across the world who can’t otherwise get them. I urge you to go to their page about this, but you can also send those glasses to

Eclipse Glasses, LLC
PO Box 50571
Provo, UT
84605

They accept glasses up to August 1, 2024.

I’ll note that I always have a pair or two of such glasses on hand, because sometimes there are sunspots big enough to see by eye, and it’s fun to go out and take a look. But donating them is a pretty good idea, too, as it gives others a chance to see something cool. Sharing astronomy is — obviously — one of my passions, so I hope if you have extra sets you’ll send them along to others in need.

You’ve probably seen approximately eleventy kajillion photos of the eclipse by now, but I have a couple here that I bet you haven’t seen.

Tunç Tezel is a brilliant astrophotographer who specializes in wide images of the night sky (as opposed to getting detailed images of specific deep sky objects like nebulae and galaxies). After the eclipse, I posted on Bluesky asking if anyone had been able to get photos of the bright comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, which was near Jupiter and naked-eye visible… at least at night. But at magnitude 4.5 it should be possible to see it in deeper photos of the eclipse-darkened sky.

And of course, Tunç came through:

Jupiter was bright enough to see easily by eye during the eclipse. But, glowing faintly in Tunç’s photo, the comet made an appearance. To be sure, he asked his brother Cenk in Turkey to get good images of the sky around Jupiter at the same time as Tunç took his. While we in the US saw the eclipse, the Sun had already set in Turkey, so the comet was more easily seen. Sure enough, it’s in the same spot in Cenk’s photo as it is in Tunç’s, confirming he caught it.

That is so cool.

Tunç also took an amazing shot at totality showing a phenomenon called Baily’s Beads:

The Moon isn’t a perfect sphere; it has mountains and craters and valleys. If there’s a dip on the edge of the Moon as seen from Earth, sunlight can poke through even though the rest of the Sun is blocked. Sometimes you see several of these, shining like luminous beacons along the Sun’s edge. They’re called Baily’s Beads because an astronomer named Francis Baily described them in the 1830s (even though Edmund Halley also saw them and correctly identified their cause in the early 1700s).

The Moon moves across the Sun’s face rapidly, so the beads only last a few seconds. Seeing three in a row perfectly spaced like this is unusual, and extremely pretty. You can also see lots of towering plumes of reddish hydrogen prominences off the edge as well, including one I saw in my own photos taken during the eclipse. I’ll note that it’s very common to people to call these solar flares (I remember doing so when I was younger) but that’s an entirely different phenomenon. Flares are massive explosions caused by energy released when the Sun’s magnetic field lines tangle up and suddenly reconnect; prominences are towers of plasma drawn up off the Sun’s surface by magnetic fields. Just so’s you know.

I also mentioned in my issue about the eclipse last week that I was hoping to see some photos of the eclipse from the International Space Station. Well, guess what? Yup.

WHOA. The Moon’s circular shadow is seen foreshortened into an ellipse due to the angle at which it was seen by the astronauts. It was over Quebec and New Brunswick, Canada and Maine in the US when this was taken. You can also see a bit of the ISS (looks like the end of the robotic Canadarm 2 to me) in the upper right. Ye, and may I add, GADS. [Thanks to Bluesky follower Bobson Dognutt for the link!]

One more thing. The Moon doesn’t stop moving around Earth, and two nights after the eclipse was in the western sky after sunset, sporting a thin crescent. Astronomer Gianluca Masi got a gorgeous shot of it next to Jupiter and the comet (and, as a bonus, Uranus!) on April 10:

Wow! The Moon was new, but you can see features on its dark side due to earthshine. You know the full Moon is bright enough to read by. When the Moon is new, if you were standing on the lunar surface the full Earth would dominate the sky. It’s four times wider and many times more reflective, so the full Earth is about 50 times brighter than the full Moon. That lights up the part of the Moon unilluminated by the Sun, so we can see it (I wrote all about this effect for Scientific American, in fact).

You can also see the fuzzy comet, Jupiter and a couple of its moons, and even Uranus over on the left. The image is a combination of five 60-second exposures taken with a fancy astrophotography telescope that can be used robotically. Very cool indeed.

All of this inspires me to get out under the night sky more often. There’s so much to see, and it’s always changing. And it’s also always beautiful.

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