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With the increasing number of people adding total eclipses to their bucket list and with a number of European eclipses in the near future this would make a good forum to add.
What do others think?Attachments:
Sheridan Williams
I have already ticked a total eclipse off my list (Austria 1999) but I could be tempted by the 2026 & 2027 total eclipses if I have the opportunity. The north coast of Spain looks the best for 2026 with Majorca (just above the horizon?) as a back up. Egypt is still on my list so that would be my destination choice for 2027. I’d hope to get better images than I did in ’99.
Nick’s addition of a spacecraft did have me wondering if there is a place in space he could go to see a total eclipse involving the Sun & Earth and how it would look.AlanM – There is a place in space where you could observe a Sun/Earth eclipse – near the Second Langrange point (L2). Nick is probably quite familiar with it since he has worked on spacecraft that operate there. L2 is actually slightly beyond the Earth’s umbra, so you’d see a partial/annular eclipse there, but any spacecraft en-route to L2 will pass through the Earth’s shadow to get there.
Unfortunately there aren’t many eclipse observations, though. Those pesky spacecraft project managers tend to get upset if you propose to point expensive spacecraft cameras at the Sun…
Dominic, I did ask Alan Bean about this image in 2013. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/apollo-12-sees-a-solar-eclipse Forgive the name dropping! He complained how little time Mission Control gave them to get cameras ready.
AlanM – There is a place in space where you could observe a Sun/Earth eclipse
[pedantry]Apart from points within the antarctic/arctic circles, don’t we see one of these every 24 hours throughout the year?[/pedantry]
At perihelion the Earth’s umbra extends around 1.4 million km away so, as Dominic says, you would only see an annular eclipse from L2 which is around 1.5 km outward from the Sun. Eclipses are really bad things for spacecraft which rely on solar arrays for power so the outbound trajectory will avoids the Earth’s shadow wherever possible. L2 is gravitationally unstable and so spacecraft don’t actually sit at the Lagrange point itself but orbit in a halo around it with relatively frequent small thruster burns to keep them on station. We’ll have another opportunity to watch a spacecraft heading out to L2 when ESA’s Euclid gets launched on a Falcon 9 at the start of July.
Back on topic though. Could those additional items be added to the forum topics list?
Back on topic though. Could those additional items be added to the forum topics list?
They have been!
Callum
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