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Science

Solar Eclipse, As Seen From Mir 73

Posted by CmdrTaco from the check-out-the-pretty-pictures dept.
David Schick writes "This cool picture was the Astronomy Picture of the Day from the Goddard Space Flight Center on August 30. Apparently, someone on Mir had a chance to take a snapshot of the solar eclipse over Europe. Kudos to Brian B. Riley on the AMSAT-BB mailing list for finding this cool nugget. " Check out the image archive while you're there. Several little files that meet Rob's First Rule of Art [?] .
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Solar Eclipse, As Seen From Mir More

Solar Eclipse, As Seen From Mir

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  • Anyone care to post a mirror?

    Thanks!
    Jeff Higgins
    www.hal9000.cc
  • A picture like this really puts the size of the earth into perspective. From the ground, it appears that a whole hemisphere is eclipsed from the sun, but seeing the actual coverage area puts things into perspective. Seeing pics like these also makes me envy the astronauts.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • ...that it would be that fuzzy. The drawings you see in textbooks always show a completely dark circle inside a slightly dark circle, though this view does make more sense, if you think about it.


  • That should be ``... envy the cosmonauts'', eh?!
  • TOO COOL.

    mental note: build space station; take pictures of eclipses from said space station.
    --
    Matt Singerman
  • ICEs are German bullit trains, so I assume you were in the South?

    I thought the weather was especially bad there? Nothing but rain in Stuttgart...
  • I can't really make out what part of the Earth is depicted here. Damn clouds ;-)

    And those two dots in the background, that can't be stars, can they? I'd think it's space junk. Heck, perhaps it's debris from Mir itself... ;-)
  • Hmm seeing the fuzziness I suddenly understand the flashes that can be seen at the beginning and the end of the total eclipse.
  • Yup, it would be nice, but I don't expect to get a ride to orbit soon.

    But why not a webcam in space? Ideally, turn over one of those older and obsolete spy satellites for public use, and work out some equitable and efficient means of selecting view targets thru a web page.

    Jim
  • Since you said "makes sense", I assume you know the reason but for other readers who may not know, the fuzziness is caused by the atmosphere scattering light. Only the very center where the least light scatters into from outside the edges of the shadow is the totality complete. This same scattering is the reason why the Hubble was built and that some of the best ground-based telescopes are built high on mountains above as much atmosphere as they can and away from the light-scattering effects of dust and pollution (and light pollution).
  • Didn't Al Gore initiate a plan for a permanent satelite in space that would transmit images to a web site 24/7?
  • I will volunteer my talents to such an endeavor!

    Man that pick is cool. It just went onto my desktop.

  • Re:I agree (Score:3)

    by Accipiter ( 8228 ) on Saturday September 04, 1999 @04:08AM (#1704747)
    Are you kidding? Al Gore invented space.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • I haven't checked how many of these carry the entire back catalogue (which is _well_ worth it), but the first two certainly do:

    I got this list from the info page [nasa.gov] on the main site. I've just tried 'em out, and the Swiss one appears to be down but the rest are there.

    These all point to the picture of the day (which is of Earth, though it doesn't look like it!), of course: you'll have to head to the archives to find the eclipse picture. They've been carrying loads of eclipse pictures recently, and they're beautiful.

  • My socks! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > And those two dots in the background, that can't be stars, can they?
    > I'd think it's space junk. Heck, perhaps it's debris from Mir itself... ;-)

    No, it's not. What you see are two of my white socks! They just disapear sometimes (especially the right ones), now I know what happen: The rotation+the magnetic fields inside my washing machine opens up wormholes and they're transfered up into space..

    *That's* why you should not wash pets in a washing machine.
  • There's also angular diffraction from light interacting with the object (moon) itself. However, scattering from the air and diffraction from the moon isn't what we're seeing here. In this case the largest part of the effect is because the source (sun) and the object (moon) are the same size as seen from the screen (earth).

    If the sun were instead a point source, then the shadow would be much sharper. Since it and the moon are the same angular size, though, the center of the shadow gets complete blockage of the sun, a quarter of the way out from the center you get mostly complete blockage, etc. This continues all the way out to the edges where the moon is only nibbling away at the sun's disc, and the shadow on the Earth is correspondingly minimum.

    (And they said my Physics degree would be useless :-).)
  • Not exactly. The cosmonauts were cooped up in a space station that was falling apart. Nevertheless, they deserve my respect because:

    A) they stuck it out for so long, and
    B) They're in space and I'm not.

    Thanks for the point. I agree, but my comment wasn't about the photo in particular. I envy [all space travellers] because they get to see phenominal views with that picture being an example. :)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • I don't think they are stars, either. Earth is very bright. Reflections from lights inside Mir is my guess. But they are really small, so I am unsure!

    So long Mir :(

    -kabloie

  • Imagine.. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ..a cluster of these eclipses, you could darken a significant part of the world! hehe.. had to throw that in.
  • Service Electric Cable TV in eastern pennsylvania has a channel with 24/7 view of the earth from space. No sound, no commercials, just land, sea, and sky. Dunno if its live or canned, but it's nice.

  • See the info page I gave the url to (in the reply to the "mirrors?" subject) and you'll find the conditions for doing that: if it's a NASA image then it's public domain. If the copyright belongs to someone, they hyperlink the name so you know who to ask permission of. I've had mixed success with this: one person either doesn't read email or didn't reply (wail! I used the pic for a theme but I haven't uploaded it anywhere) but another time I've had a reply within five minutes saying "Go for it".

    The Mir one would be excessively sweet as a theme, yes. There's some even better ones in the archives, too :)

  • The website says the Eclipse was on August 11th of this year. That would mean the shadow you see is probably over parts of Europe or Asia.

    http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap9 90810.html [nasa.gov] - This is a link to a diagram of the Eclipse's path.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • It just brings home the fact that we are a small and arguably insignificant part of the universe.

    Humbling, no? So beautiful.

    Reminds me of a Radiohead song or three. hehehe

  • It was just as cool from the ground! I experienced it in Reims, France.

    A pity that it was over in 2 minutes :)

  • I remember seeing an eclipse in several years back. All of us at work were ordered outside to see it (my boss was cool.) There was a little light, enough to see, not like a sunset, but like a dim bulb for a sun. Shadows from anything showed up as cresents on the ground. The low light outside everywhere had a mystic look. The world was different that day.

  • Eclipse (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When I was young (~5 years old I think) someone told me that there was an eclipse the next day and not to look at the sun or you might go blind. I was no paranoid that the next day I stayed inside and was afraid to even look outside the window thinking I would go blind!
  • uummmm, you mean that's not true?
  • Well, for one we wouldn't have any tides on earth. People that live near coastlines would most affected.
  • Thanks for posting that one.

    It almost looks like a CG render. Hard to tell what is real and what is not these days.
  • Wouldn't it have been cool if there were an MPEG (or preferred video format) of this shadow moving across the earth?

    Also, at the bottom of that page is a link to the Next Pictue [nasa.gov]. Is it me or does this look interestingly like mitosis (or was it meiosis)?

  • One of the BBC's on-line video reports on the eclipse featured video from Mir where you could actually see the shadow moving over the earth. I'm not sure if it's still in their web archives.
  • Oh, by cluster you must mean a Beo-*WHAP* [user slapped upside the head by self-moderation instinct.]

    hehehehehe ;-)
  • My first reaction was "COOOOL", but the second one was, "what the heck took so long?" I mean, thirty years in space and somebody finally thought to take that picture?

  • Remember Io and Jupiter? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 04, 1999 @09:34AM (#1704778)
    I think was posted here on /. back in April, but I'll post it again in case you're interested. The Hubble Space Telescope took some very nice pictures of Io casting a shadow on Jupiter. This is the link [stsci.edu] to the story. Click on the picture to go to the download page.
  • Ha. That was only a partial eclipse (As viewed from the Jovian surface). I believe that Earth is the only planet in the solar system that gets total eclipses.

    I was in the path of totality for the recent eclipse. We had 10/10 cloud cover and it was still awe-inspiring.

    See you in Africa for the next one.
  • Did anyone notice that the Mir station actually flew over Paris just before the eclipse hit northern france?

    Just as Paco Rabanne claimed in his book on Nostradamus. Of course, nothing has happened, but I was actually slightly freaked out when I heard radio amateurs (HAMs) in france trying to contact the Mir 90 minutes before the eclipse. The Mir orbits the earth about once every 90 minutes, and its next pass put it near Paris just as the eclipse hit the west coast of France. Freaky!

    Just a bit of random, off topic rambling from...

    the AC
  • I disagree about the colour. I'd say 'purplish green'.

    I tried to describe it to people who weren't in the path of totality and failed. It is unbelievably strange. I want to see another one. Africa anybody?
  • ...when I blew up the pic to use it as my wallpaper. Check out the middle right edge of the shadow. There's what appears to be a perfect circle that's got to be hundereds of miles in diameter. What the heck is it? Or is it just an artifact of the pic? (It would be a strange artifact if it were.)
  • Sounds like the NASA channel....usually they have a view of space, 'cept when there's a misssion or something, then they display details on that. It's pretty standard actually, a lot of cable systems I know of have it.



    Cliff Palmer, Jr.
  • Actually, given the relative size of the sun as seen from Jupiter, it was probably a more than total eclipse. The Earth is the only planet for which the relative sizes of moon and Sun are identical, but you can bet anything than from, say, Pluto, the relative size of Charon is much bigger than the relative size of the Sun...
  • Take a look at the Phase 3D [amsat.org] amateur radio satellite, which AMSAT [amsat.org] is preparing for launch. The on-board experiment from Hams at AMSAT Japan is a camera and Ham Radio video transmitter. It wouldn't be that tough for Hams around the world to arrange to auto-post snapshots on a web site when P3D is in the sky above them.

    Though P3D may be new to many Slashdot readers, Amateur Radio ("Ham Radio") operators around the world have been working on it for years. AMSAT reports that the satellite just passed the vibration and spin tests and the next step is to get it to the launch site, where it will fly as a secondary payload on a rocket with a commercial satellite to launch. It's something like the 33rd Amateur Radio satellite (not counting the Ham Radio stations on Mir and the Space Shuttles.) The launch date has not been announced yet - should be late thie year or early next year.

    Once P3D is up, all you need is a Ham Radio license and you can transmit to talk to people on it. Even the entry level licenses with no Morse Code requirements will do. For info on getting a US Amateur Radio license, check out the American Radio Relay League [arrl.org] or an Amateur Radio club in your area.

  • Anyone remember the film version of 2010? This picture looks a lot like the effects they created near the end, when the zillions of monoliths were starting to eat Jupiter. Well, except for the Jupiter part.

    Just a passing thought.

    --
  • Anyone know where I can get some really high-res versions of similarly "kick-yo-ass cool" astro photography? Just purchsaed myself an Epson 3000 and am dying to make something like this into a poster.
  • Speaking of ham radio, since MIR is more or less "abandoned," are the packet and voice repeaters still up (R0MIR, IIRC was the call)?

    Or are they taken down already... }}:-(

    (always in class, when MIR decides to fly over..., and missing a vital link between TNC->HT)
  • The MIR cosmonauts maybe have seen the eclipse
    many times the same day.
    The shuttle takes 90min to make a complete orbit.

    Anyway, APOD rulz
    Oliver
  • It's gotta be ring worm, classic text book example...

    seriously, yeah you don't have to enlarge it to see it, but it must be huge if it is not an artifact of the photo.
  • You are of course assuming that Hale-Bope would totally remove the moon if it hit it. That is _slightly_ unlikely as the moon is several orders of magnitude larger than that comet, hence Hale-Bopp would aty most make a new large crater. Albiet it would alter the moons orbit slightly, but not enough to matter at all for us in the near future (several million (billion?) years)
  • whell ... do U know when it will be ? the exact date ?
    I say the last one .. from Romania ... and . .after it wa s over ... I said .. I want to see it again !Damn ! it's beautiful ! :o)
  • I followed a few links via the original post and came across a pretty cool computer simulated map of the known universe.

    You can get a high-res (2096x2604) gif via http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~jgc/hubble.html [mpa-garching.mpg.de]

  • This in mind. Do you think having such a large sized moon is one of the things that helped life develop on Earth? Alien hunters should be looking for planets with large moons.

    Earth's moon is quite large compared to most other planets in the solar system.

    I'm just speculating.. anyone care to comment? I would think it might help keep things jumping and shaking, you know.. circulating the water. Causing rain. Et cetera.

    Ideas?

    kaniff -- Ralph Hart Jr
  • > "are the packet and voice repeaters still up [...]?"

    No, they powered down all but the most critical systems before they left Mir.

    Their plans are to send another crew up later to prepare to de-orbit the station. Actually, they still hold out hope of finding funding to resume operation of the station. But they've got to do that before the next time the computer crashes, since no one's on board to reset it now. Otherwise, there won't be attitude control needed to dock with it, and won't be any way to pick where it burns up and impacts the Earth.

  • It is probably Europe as the Middle East had better weather. The clouds covered most of Central Europe from England in the North West (though Land's End seemed to have a mostly clear sky, and Stone Henge had a better view than in Stuttgart, Germany) to Austria and parts of Hungary. Romania had a good view with almost clear skies I think.

    We had the MIR pictures on Live during the Eclipse in Denmark and I suspect in other European countries as well.

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