[Plplot-devel] <off topic> Solar eclipse coming for North America in 4 days!

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

For those PLplot developers who are in North America on Monday, August
21st (4 days from now) there is going to be an exciting solar eclipse
visible to all of you who have clear skies.  Most of you will only see
a deep partial eclipse (e.g., 90 per cent of the sun will be obscured
from here in Victoria) which is exciting enough (and even detectable
in cloud) but the privileged few that live in or who visit the narrow
total eclipse track from Oregon through southern Illinois (maximum
totality near Carbondale) and then on to the Atlantic coast via S.
Carolina will see a spectacular and rare event which is a total
eclipse of the sun if you have good weather.

Barbara's sister (who lives near Carbondale) says they are now
expecting something like 100 000 (!) vistors to Carbondale to view the
total solar eclipse there which will likely completely overwhelm the
resources of that small town.  Barbara and I won't join those
Carbondale visitors because we don't travel much any more.
Nevertheless, this is a pretty exciting astronomical event so I have
built an eclipse viewer out of an old cardboard box following the
instructions at
<http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/multimedia/activities/eclipse-projector.asp>.
It worked very well today to show me the round solar disk so it should
be good to go on eclipse day to show us the thin crescent left when
the moon is obscuring the sun at the 90 per cent level (assuming we
have good weather that day).  Or if it is socked in that day we will
throw away the eclipse viewer, but we should still be able to observe
the eclipse effect since only the 10 per cent of the Sun's disk that
is not obscured by the Moon will be providing our daylight.  And
similarly for virtually everyone else in North America if they just
evaluate the dimness of the daylight when looking out the window at
the right time that day.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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