I can’t explain this one, but I’d like to offer some other identifiers used. When searching for likely planets, they observe stars for wobble in their position. Large planets like jupiter and Saturn have some hefty pull on our own star. The common orbital point between them, called the barycenter, is still inside the sun, but their great distance apart pulls that barycenter closer to the edge of the sun. Our sun has a pretty notable wobble as a result. That’s the kind of thing they look for elsewhere. If there’s no other star causing the wobble in a binary system, then it must be a planet pulling it.
By estimating the mass of the star by various observations of color, brightness, and brightness variation, they can do some “easy” algebra to calculate the size of the affecting planet. From there, they can scan for radiation frequencies in the darkness where they think a planet is sitting. Water has a frequency, hydrogen has a frequency, oxygen has a frequency, helium, etc. By stuffing objects close to home, we can extrapolate that info and apply it to further objects with some confidence. This is how organic compounds were discovered in Venus’ atmosphere.
A lot of it is based on what we have at home, meaning we’re largely looking for what we have and then identifying it as the same. There is uncertainty about some details, but that’s how it always goes with science. It’s always being updated. It’s takes a lot of creativity to imagine what else might be out there and to devise how to look for it. Black holes are a pretty notable example. Since they’re not observable directly, what do you look for? Well, you look for other things being eaten and hope the matter is hot enough to throw a lot of radiation. 80 years ago, they were just an idea. Now we have images of a few galactic-center black holes. Some have been observed free floating through space by distorting the apparent position of stars behind it. Do we absolutely know it was a black hole? No, but that’s what solid theories can identify it as given the darkness and huge mass required to cause that kind of effect. But, as a result, estimates for dark and cold objects vary greatly because they’re the hardest to observe. There’s talk of finding more “hot jupiters” than expected, but it’s totally valid that maybe wevre just missing the cold Jupiter’s because they’re hard to see.
They’re full of shit. It’s a short-term boost to stock price via slashed operational costs. They’ll bail as soon as the momentum starts to derail. Improving safety doesn’t start with reducing maintenance resources. Precision railroading is a scam that investors buy into because it sounds good on paper, but keeps proving to be a disaster when all the minor shortcomings stack up into a collapse of performance - every sick day, every repair delay will cause a larger ripple than before. Safety isn’t lucrative in the short timeline of a pump and dump.
Existential crisis about how every narrow image shows 100,000x the amount of matter and bodies that I already can’t conceptualize from just our own galaxy
Need some help? I know of some body snatcher groups that exist out there but I’ll offer my own help. I can’t promise it’ll go swimmingly, but I’ve at least beat the queen (in a group of 5)
To potentially save you the confusion I had, the next popular one in North America will really be 2045. They’re both in August, but the 2044 TSE is a relatively short, northerly event with totality ending in Montana at sunset. Meanwhile, 2045 is more akin to the 2017 path, passing from California to Florida.
I have such mixed feelings about all the time I spent with my cameras during the event. By time I realized I had no practice with the camera and eq mount for daytime use, it was cloudy the whole time at home. Totality is not something you can reasonably practice anyway. So yeah, I have a few cool totality pictures with varying detail and a couple hundred showing the partial phases… But for what? They’re not as good as many other amateurs, let alone professionals. If there was ever a time to deal with the hassle of raw photos, it was then. Part of why I gave up on most astrophotography is because the best I could possibly do is simply match it to scientific equipment. It’s cool to do it, but there’s no personalization. Instead, I look more for nightscapes or wide angle really detailed starfields. I’m still conflicted as to whether or not I experienced it properly. I got to show the pics to some people passing by after, assuming I was the go-to person for info on what they experienced, something I love about night time astronomy, but those aren’t such time-limited events.
I’ll probably revel in memories whenever I actually flip through the pictures. But, personally, I don’t think it was worth spending so much of my time getting pictures of a black hole in a black background rather than just letting my mark 1 eyeballs observe the hole in the blue-fade skies.
However, the one piece I absolutely would bring every single time again is binoculars. Maybe that’s why I feel like I didn’t see the eclipse. The view in my 10x binos was so incredibly detailed, the memory matches the stacked and tweaked pictures. I could see more than just the big laser-don’t flare on the bottom, I saw at least 3. Just unreal, no sight in my life before could explain it. A cartoonishly large corona with a black hole in a black background. Maybe I just couldn’t comprehend.
The light effects near totality were certainly something to experience. Decades of experience being in sunlight just didn’t jive with what the sun was doing then. It was more akin to a distant white streetlight rather than a sun. It dimmed and crisped shadows unlike a sunset by not turning orange and blurring of the edges.
I’m glad you had the emotional experience I was expecting to have.
This is the kind of thing where even if kids don’t seem to really be interested in it, even if they don’t seem impressed, it’s such an incredibly rare and unique event (close enough to home) that they will always remember it. Maybe not to the point of thinking about it every week, but in the sense that every mention of solar eclipses, at the very least, will remind them of this one moment in totality with you. You can plant some seeds for interests without knowing what will take root while still knowing the seed stays there.
That sounds more like a normal population density representation. Everyone hears about CA or NY news because they have more significant national and global impacts, through number of affected people and volume of business. News about the state of Arkansas is less visible since it has less population than any of the major cities in the aforementioned states.
Despite that, I’ve seen plenty of coverage specifically because, compared to the 2017 American total solar eclipse, this one is more accessible to a vastly greater population: namely DFW TX and NYC. NYC has a longer drive, but the northeast is an incredibly dense portion of the country.
Nova, not supernova. Novas happen multiple times. Supernova do not but it doesn’t say supernova. Soon, as in within the next 6 months since its following a cycle that happened about 80 and 160 years ago.
Reminds me of when Betelgeuse, the orange upper star of Orion, went dim in 2020. Lots of amateur reports on its brightness, 3x per night, for a few months waiting for it to go nova. It settled down a bit before disappearing behind the sun for the season and came back just fine. It was kinda fun to monitor, but soooo many false alarms from people trying to call it first