Ring of Fire - ASE '10

Eight members of the COEP Astronomy Club (along with three members of a local Astronomy group - 'Akashmitra') had gone to Rameshwaram, a coastal village in South India to catch the Annular Solar Eclipse of 15th Jan 2010. Rameshwaram was chosen for its proximity to the Central Line of Eclipse (central line of the belt of shadow; places lying on this line have the longest time of eclipse and the maximum phase, with respect to places lying on a line perpendicular to the central line at that point).

In all, the long journey (around 30 hours one way!) was very much worth the 8-10 minutes of annular phase and 3-4 hours of the entire eclipse.

Click here (web album) for remaining photos of the event by the author.

Prayer to the rain gods!!

Firstly, for the record, I stand on the thin line between a theist and an atheist, or am rather an agnostic. (I'll leave it up to you to wiki for these terms!) However, I do have one strong prayer to make - to the rain gods, if any - please run a vacuum cleaner in the sky, for astronomers all over the world, amateur and professionals alike, would like to enjoy a grand celestial show this month! (Yes, of course the solar eclipse!)

This eclipse is the longest total solar eclipse that will occur in the 21st century, and will not be surpassed in duration until June 13, 2132.
The following is part of a pdf on NASA's website, showing the path of totality over a small part of western India, near Mumbai (click to enlarge). The totality band is around 250 km in width, and the time of totality increases as one approaches the central line of eclipse.
(Similar maps for other areas can be downloaded from NASA's website)

I am very excited about this eclipse, as it would be my first total solar eclipse; if the clouds don't decide to screw it up completely that is! To watch totality, a few friends from college and I are planning to go to a friend's home town, Nandurbar. It is supposedly a dry place year round, and does not receive heavy rainfall in the monsoon. Latest updates are that the sky is still pretty clear there, but we are all keeping our fingers crossed!

Total(ly) cool partial solar eclipse!!

Once again we get to ask ourselves a question, asked by many others, many a times - is there a superior entity beyond our current understanding, which seems to interfere in things happening around us? only this time, it is in a magnificent way - an eclipse. Think of it - each one of us learns in high school that solar eclipses are caused due to the moon coming in between the earth and the sun etc etc.. what we don't learn is that how well "manipulated" or similar as it may sound, this phenomenon really is.. Now by some sheer dum luck, the apparent size of the sun in the sky is very close to the apparent size of the moon (hardly 5% here and there, and there's some added bonus due to this as well!) and so when the moon comes in between the earth and sun, it appears to cover the entire disk, or a part of it, depending upon the place on earth from where it is seen. But this is all when the moon comes in between.. in reality, the moon can come in any plane in between the earth and sun, and so the three may not be always colinear; in fact, as it turns out, most of the time they are not! In one of the few occassions when they are in a line, we have a solar eclipse!! Remember the "added bonus" because of the non-exact apparent sizes? Well first of all the non-exact apparent sizes are due to the non-uniform earth-sun distance, and the non-uniform earth-moon distance.. What it translates into, is a rare phenomenon call an annular solar eclipse, where only the inner disk of the sun appears eclipsed, with a ring of light surrounding it!! This is simply because now the moon's apparent size is slightly smaller than that of the sun.

After all this discussion, just ponder on this - why in the blue should a planet have a moon, whose diameter is 400 times smaller than its parent star, and it's distance 400 times smaller than that of the star??!! (this is the reason for the apparent size of sun and moon to be equal in sky - about 0.5 degrees) And why in the blue should that lucky planet have life, an even rarerer possibility, which astronomers are trying to disprove day after day, with no luck as yet!

Having said this, let's come back to the question we started with.. is it realy impossible for any such external entity to exist? or can such an entity exist in the extreme possibility of our understanding of this world, and the one beyond it?

As for our "scientific" minds, lets just assume someone has set up a very long, precisely predictable, yet amazing slideshow of solar and lunar eclipses - on the curtain of the sky, with the biggest projector known - our sun! And also for these very minds, lets assume this "someone" is our friendly "luck" or rather "probability"!

Lucky for us at the astro club, we could enjoy the solar eclipse today, in spite of a very cloudy sky, which ironically, I'm sure most present would agree, added to the beauty of the event. The eclipse was seen in a partial phase from Pune, with 38.5% of the sun's disk being covered by the moon during the maximum phase of the eclipse. Humble attempts of recording this event with light, ie photographing it, can be seen here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/adb291088/SOLARECLIPSE1STAUG08

(comments and suggestions on pics are welcome)