Upcoming Solar Eclipse on August 21st

I don't normally write about celestial events here on this blog, but I am making an exception with the upcoming solar eclipse in the US on August 21st. As a child I was living in Massachusetts, and in the summer of 1963 I do recall seeing what I was told was a solar eclipse. Someone told me, probably my Dad, that the moon would be blocking the sun during the day. It turns out that the solar eclipse that I witnessed that afternoon was not a total solar eclipse, but a partial solar eclipse, more information on that eclipse may be found here. Still as a child, I was awestruck by what I saw.

I am hoping to be at or near an area where the total solar eclipse may be seen on Monday, August 21st. See the map. I'll let you know what I see or don't see. I was fortunate enough to find a few pairs of reputable eclipse viewers from a local store before they ran out. Looking at the eclipse with reputable eclipse viewers can cause blindness, please be safe, please don't be fooled by counterfeit products. Our eclipse viewers are from American Paper Optics, meeting ISO 12312-2 international safety standards for eclipse viewers. These are paper, and I will use them under my eyeglasses. For other tips on viewing the eclipse safely, go to this NASA page.

The National Weather Service has a webpage where you may find out about weather conditions and other facts about the upcoming eclipse, see this NWS website for more information.

A map from NASA of the path of the eclipse and how much of the eclipse you can see over the US and adjoining areas of Canada and Mexico is reproduced below. Some of you might be interested in NASA's explanation of this mapping along with some other products and some history here. NASA's entry page to eclipse mapping is found on this NASA webpage.

Obtained on August 16, 2017 from https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4518

If you will be driving around the time of the eclipse, please be safe and follow the suggestions in this Time Magazine article. Allow extra time to get to your observation spot if you are going to somewhere in the path of totality and arrive early!

NASA's entry page to the 2017 eclipse may be found here with links to oodles of information. I suspect that many newspapers have coverage of the eclipse. I'll leave you to your own devices to find coverage in your favorite media outlet, but here is a nice page on the eclipse from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Space dot com has a list of live streams covering the eclipse available here. NASA will have a livestream of the eclipse on Monday with a variety of ways you can stream the eclipse, including facebook, smart phone apps, and NASA TV, the entry page for NASA's eclipse live stream is here. NASA has a page with some apps that you may choose from to watch the eclipse on your tablet or smartphone. Finally NASA has a nice press release about the eclipse and some viewing options that was posted on June 21, 2017.

For those of you who are home during the day and want to watch the eclipse from your living roomI think, but am not sure that the Weather Channel, ABC and the Science Channel are among those networks that will be broadcasting about the eclipse. I don't know how many of you will have the Science Channel but I think that most basic cable and satellite packages include an ABC affiliate as well as the Weather Channel. You might want to check your local listings to verify this and to see about other live eclipse coverage where you live.

The links on this page may only be live up to the day of the eclipse. So, I suspect that some of these links will be no good after the eclipse has passed. However, I'll try to post something about the eclipse, a video and other stories after the eclipse has passed.

On Monday, I will post links to what I hope for where you can go for live streams of the eclipse.

Added on August 24th: Some of the links here no longer work, e.g. the NWS eclipse page is no longer up and the list of live streams covering the eclipse from Space dot com is no longer available. NASA's eclipse page has has different eclipse related information. The two articles I referenced from Time and the Atlanta Journal Constitution are still available but I am not certain how much longer they will be available.