Total Solar Eclipse Visible Across North America Oct. 23rd

ASTRO ALERT            ASTRO ALERT            ASTRO ALERT           

THURSDAY, OCT. 23^rd, 2014

PARTIAL SOLAR ECLIPSE VISIBLE

A partial solar eclipse occurs tomorrow, Thursday Oct. 23^rd, across North America. The eclipse is visible from the mid-Atlantic region south into Florida and Mexico, west out into the Pacific Ocean, north into Canada. For details about visibility in your area check out this link.

For the PHILADELPHIA AREA, the eclipse begins at 5:51 pm, reaching its maximum of less than 20% coverage at 6:08 pm. Unfortunately, sunset occurs at 6:10 pm. We will not see very much because only a small portion of the sun will be covered by the moon. No effects typically associated with eclipses will occur because the eclipse is so minimal.

Solar eclipses occur when the moon passes between the sun and the earth and the moon’s shadow fall onto the earth. In this case, the moon will not completely block the sun’s light as seen from the earth, so only a portion of the sun will appear covered by the moon.

For us, the eclipse begins 19 minutes before sunset, when the sun is very low in the western sky. Maximum eclipse occurs just two minutes before sunset. Viewers in this region will need a completely unobstructed view of the western horizon and clear skies in the west. The sun will set as the eclipse is in progress.

Viewers further west will see more of the eclipse before sunset occurs for them. No one on the planet will see a total solar eclipse because the Sun-Moon-Earth positioning isn’t correct for that.

To safely view the eclipse you’ll need either a pinhole camera-like device like this or this one , something with lots of holes like this or a piece of pegboard. You can also view the event directly IF you have the correct filter material like these kids do.

Weather is the most important factor: if the sky isn’t clear, we won’t have any opportunity to see anything. In case of cloudy weather, the eclipse will be broadcast live here.

There are two solar eclipses next year, neither visible from our area. The next visible for us is August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse visible for the Carolinas!

- Compiled by D.H. Pitts, Chief Astronomer, Franklin Institute Science Museum, dpitts@fi.edu, 215 448 1234, 10/22/14.

New Planetarium Show's a Winner!

IPS/MIFF 2014 Best 3D Show Award Trophy

The Franklin Institute’s most recent planetarium show co-production, “To Space and Back”, received two more film festival awards this past June. The International Planetarium Society/Macao International Fulldome Festival selected TSAB as the best 3D planetarium show and the best 8K show over nearly 60 other entrants at the 2014 festival held in Macao, China. This brings the total number of awards to five since the show was released in March 2013. Co-produced by TFI and Sky-Skan, Inc., world leader in planetarium projection equipment, the show was written by Sky-Skan producer Annette Sotheran-Barnett and TFI Chief Astronomer Dr. Derrick Pitts. The other awards are:

-       First Prize – First International Fulldome Festival in Russia, 2013

-       First Prize Audience Choice – Imiloa Fulldome Film Festival, 2013

-       Honorable Mention – Jena/Zeiss Fulldome Film Festival, 2013

And this year:

-       Best 3D Show – IPS/Macao International Fulldome Festival

-       Best 8K Show – IPS/Macao International Fulldome Festival

Created to help viewers, particularly teen viewers, better understand how space exploration and satellite communications shapes their lives, TSAB uses innovative production and composition techniques to entertain viewers as they are drawn deeper into the story of their connection to space technologies every day.

While the show is produced in standard formats of 2K and 4K resolutions, show producer Sotheran-Barnett pushed the envelope on fulldome capability by building some of the most difficult and complex CGI models ever made for planetariums. Several scenes show the highest resolution fulldome projected images ever produced – 8K. To make these scenes most stunning, the show runs at 60 frames per second – twice the frame rate of the most sophisticated Hollywood films. The most advanced version presents the show in 8K resolution, at 60 frames per second, and in 3D! Because this version places such a high demand on playback computers and projectors, only the newest theaters with the most advanced playback equipment can run it – right now just two theaters in the world, Macao Science Center Planetarium and Beijing Planetarium – where the show premiered this past June.  TSAB currently plays in 30 theaters and on every continent except Antarctica.

The show runs 25 minutes and has two versions; one narrated by BBC Top Gear host James May, the other voiced by Pitts. The decision to add Pitts as a narrator came when the National Air and Space Museum’s Einstein Theater included that request for Pitts’ voice as part of their contract to run the show in Washington. The show opened at NASM in September.

Longtime Fels Planetarium show producer Pitts is very pleased with the success of what is currently the most technologically advanced and highly awarded planetarium show on the planet; “Right where a Fels Planetarium show should be,” he says. TFI and Sky-Skan plan to co-produce another fulldome blockbuster soon.

- 9/2014, by Derrick Pitts, Chief Astronomer, Franklin Institute Science Museum, dpitts@fi.edu, 215 448 1234.

There's No Such Thing as A 'Blue Moon'

Despite the success of The Marcels' 1961 doo-wop hit, I have to bring you the bad news that there is no such thing as a 'blue moon' - at least not in this solar system.  Did you see ‘the’ blue moon last Tuesday? Have you ever seen a blue moon? I didn’t see ‘the’ blue moon’ on Tuesday because there wasn’t one. Have I seen a blue moon ever? No, because the moon cannot be blue. If you’re wondering what all this claptrap is about,  as it turns out, Tuesday's full moon was NOT a blue moon, neither in the 'traditional' sense or literally, even though several national news outlets described it as one.

Unfortunately, what we all describe as a 'blue moon' is a clash between folklore and science. The traditional 'blue moon' that most of us refer to is the instance when there are two full moons in one month. Happens every 2.7 years on average and here's how to think about it:

Given that there's a full moon every month, there should be 12 full moons in a year and therefore 3 full moons in each season (3 for spring, 3 for summer, 3 for fall, 3 for winter). Occasionally, due to calendrical quirks, there can be 4 fulls in one season and in some folklore, the third of the four is called a 'blue moon'. This 'definition' hasn't been current or contemporary for many, many years. In recent folklore (actually the mis-translation of someone else's definition of the phenomenon!) , a 'blue moon' is defined as the second full moon in a month and Tuesday's full moon DID NOT satisfy the required criteria for 'blueness' according to modern popular folklore.

Now, how did this false 'blue moon' get into the popular press, you may ask? Newsroom researchers, armed with access to the World Wide Web can search up all manner of obscure trivia to fill the massive amounts of on-air time the news programs have strapped themselves with. Some well-meaning but astronomically challenged researcher found this trivia point and with no one on their staff to properly vet this, they RAN with it! It's not even a scientific phenomenon. The so-called 'blue moon' is a result of our civil calendar trying to trap the eternal motions of the moon into a limited framework. The moon doesn't care about months or seasons – it just orbits the Earth. End of story. We humans add the rest.

The photo of the blue moon was FAKED – either by coloring the moon blue with some graphic image tool or an actual photo of the moon, seen as blue because of some completely unrelated atmospheric effect (like volcanic dust aerosols or forest fire smoke particles) allowed the moon to be seen as blue and THAT image was connected to the 'blue moon' story. This is an excellent 'teachable moment' about how access to information does not make one an expert or how NOT to use the Internet.

Another example of overzealous Web searching is the announcing of inconsequential meteor showers like the Delta Aquarids in July, with an hourly rate of 16 meteors per hour. On any given night, anyone almost anywhere can see 10 meteors per hour, so seeing six more per hour is not worth announcing as 'nature's celestial fireworks'. BTW 16 per hour is one every 3.75 minutes – one of the better examples of the phrase 'about as exciting as watching paint dry'. Even the best showers of the year only average a meteor every 30 seconds – and that’s average! Sometimes we can see a flurry of meteors or a bright fireball occasionally, more often it can be minutes between faint, short, unspectacular streaks. Hardly celestial fireworks.

But meteors showers are to be noted if you happen to be out on the night of peak ‘shower’ activity. Unless you’re out to view the November Leonid shower at one of its 33-year maximums, don’t make a meteor shower the focus of your observing session. Use it as an added treat to being outside at night, enjoying a casual look at the heavens. And by all means, DON’T get up at 2 a.m. to see a meteor shower. If you’re an insomniac or raiding the refrigerator because you just can’t get that last slice of cherry cheesecake out of you mind, have a look to see what’s happening.

Sound like astronomy observing blasphemy to discourage observing? Not at all, just helping casual observers, like most folks,  focus energy and interest to the real exciting sights, like Comet ISON coming later this year.  That'll be worth getting up in the middle of the night!