Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I drove halfway across the continent to see the eclipse. And then after it was finished I immediately drove the other halfway back home. After more than 24 hours of driving, I was beat, and this week was kind of a wash for me after that.

But the eclipse itself was beautiful and I encourage everyone to look for images of it online. NASA had an entire party for the eclipse, I don’t know if they did that for 2017 but maybe with how popular the 2017 eclipse was, they felt they needed to.

There was also some real science being done during this eclipse. Telescopes trained on the sun to look at its corona in great detail as the moon passed in front. A longstanding humorous story in the scientific community comes from an eclipse observed not long after Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity. The theory predicted that light should bend when passing by massive objects. So scientists used a solar eclipse to visualize stars that were hiding near the sun. As predicted by Einstein, their light appeared to be “bent” because it had passed so close to the sun to get to us.

The newspapers published this with a somewhat hilarious line:

Stars not where they seemed or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry.

New York Times

The “but nobody need worry” always gets to me.

Regardless, eclipses are fun both for scientists and non-scientists alike. I hope if you missed this one, you’ll get to see one soon!