Bright and sunny here, but only 55% totality. Coincidentally our power went out right about at the peak. Turns out a tree took out a power line a few blocks away. Thought all the crazy folks were right for a second there.
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Amazing eclipse viewing experience in Eaton Ohio.
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Beautiful northern lights here in Vancouver last night. Loveliest I have ever seen. They were spectacular throughout Northern Europe and northern North America apparently.
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I went outside a bit after 9 last night expecting I would be lucky to see much of anything being too close to city lights, there was a swath of bright purple streaks directly overhead, very visible. This faded and the sky was dimly lit after that in various shades of pink, purple, and dark green - barely noticeable at all, could have been missed completely if I had not been aware of the ongoing event.
Phone cameras were able to catch all of it really easily, much more vibrant than what you could see with the naked eye. I wish I could have captured that first patch as that was really remarkable, but I was running around yelling at everyone to get outside and look, and trying to get down the street for a better view around the trees.
Seems like it generally faded out here in the next hour, most of what I saw on FB was all posted between 9&10, so a bit of luck seeing what seems like was the main event. I’ll be out watching again tonight.
First time ever seeing it, none of my northerly travels have coincided with a solar storm.
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I am an early bird rather than a night owl but am making an attempt to stay up late and go down to our local beach to watch the display tonight.
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SpaceX IFT-4 of the Starship booster and ship underway. First stage seemed to meet goal of soft splashdown in Gulf after successful boost back burn and later landing burn. Ship (orbital stage) currently in coast mode before re-entry testing over Indian Ocean in 10 or so minutes. IFT-3 had cool video before loss-of-signal with plasma evident on surfaces as it entered high atmosphere, I expect to see similar footage this time. Hopefully they retain attitude control for a longer time in IFT-4.
Holy cow. Great camera feed saw a flap get melted (hot spot seemed evident early on), but ship still was able to do a soft splash down after relight in last seconds of flight.
That was a really cool launch. It’s nice to live in a time of both cutting edge rocket science and durable remote cameras.
I think Starship is now somewhat firmly a big success. Lots of work to be done, obviously, but it seems like a basically functioning rocket right now.
So past rentries have the ionization blackout. I think i heard ship is so large that they have enough of a hole in flow of ionized gases that they can still transmit successfully. Not sure how that relates to shuttle. But we had a feed almost the entire way down. Can’t wait for IFT-5.
IFT-4 spacex feed
You can start to see the problem on one of the forward flaps a little after 47m on the test flight (about 1:27 on the video). By 48 it is glowing white and the change of perspective right after 48 shows where it will burn. Right at 57:22 it burns thru, chunks flying off by 57:40. Camera covered by debris by 59, lens cracks by 59:20. Splashdown around 1:05:45 ending at 1:06:05.
You can of course see the Milky Way throughout the year, but there are some particularly good dates coming up if you will be in a low light area:
tl,dr:
July 8
July 28
August 7
August 26
September 6
September 24
October 5
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Technically you look up in the air and thats the Milky Way.
To see the thick part, only when the sun is out of the way. And when the moon is not too bright.
Won’t be visible without using a decent telescope but this is still a bit interesting.
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WTF, Time!?!?
Also, a “horseshoe” orbit?
One article I read, said you need a 30" telescope to be able to see the mini-moon. Might have to see if any of the local planetariums with big telescopes will be having watch parties during this time.
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There is a brief period of time where its path will follow an arc, the pivot point of which is inside the earth. However, physics have it destined to escape Earth’s gravity rather than fall into an ellipse around the earth.
I’m just trying to picture it.
Would be nice to see a visual.
Apparently you’ll need a telescope for that
OK, an animated simulation of it would be nice.