The Great American Eclipse v2.0 has come and gone, sadly without our traveling to the path of totality as planned; family stuff. We did get a report from friends in Texas that it was just as spectacular there as expected, with the bonus of seeing a solar flare off the southwest limb of the disk at totality. Many people reported seeing the same thing, which makes us a bit jealous — OK, a lot jealous. Of course, this presented an opportunity to the “Well, ackchyually” crowd to point out that there were no solar flares or coronal mass ejections at the time, so what people saw wasn’t an exquisitely timed and well-positioned solar flare but rather a well-timed and exquisitely positioned solar prominence. Glad we cleared that up. Either way, people in the path of totality saw the Sun belching out gigatons of plasma while we had to settle for 27% totality.
The eclipse also presented plenty of hacking opportunities for YouTubers in our community. Matthias Wandel went to great lengths on short notice to build a solar tracker for photographing the eclipse, while Gabe Emerson from “saveitforparts” threw his little radiotelescope rig in the car and drove down to totality to listen to the Sun during the eclipse. Jeff Geerling brought three generations along for his eclipse party, which resulted in some wonderful photographs and rubbing elbows with Destin ..
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