Watch Today’s Total Solar Eclipse From the Comfort of Your Living Room
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Today there will be a solar eclipse, with a path of totality spanning 108 miles wide, and a travel distance of around 9,000 miles to go in a span of just three hours. It will take place over the South Pacific Ocean, beginning at 3:35 p.m. EST. If you don’t live in Northern Australia or on a series of rafts in the surrounding ocean, don’t worry: not only can you watch the entire thing live on this new-fangled gizmo we call the Internet, you don’t even have to worry about making any special glasses for it. Though you can, if making glasses is your thing.
A live feed of the eclipse will be shown from the website of the Slooh Space Camera, from a land site near Caims, a city in Queensland, starting an hour ahead. Because the eclipse will coincide with their local sunrise, it should be visually intriguing. Slooh president Patrick Paolucci is “ecstatic to have a world-class team on-site in Caims bringing the power and beauty of this spectacular event live to our worldwide audience.” The man exudes optimism even through text quotes.
Tourism Tropical North Queensland will also be providing live views from Caims via another website found here, though don’t expect the kind of enthusiasm that Slooh is bringing.
This will be the year’s first total solar eclipse, which occurs when the moon completely blocks out the solar disc from a certain perspective. The next time the North American region will experience a total eclipse will be in March 2015, though a “hybrid” eclipse — which changes from total to annular and back at different parts of the globe — comes earlier, in November 2013, for parts of the Atlantic and Central Africa. Saturday the 17th will also showcase the first of two instances of the annual Leonid meteor shower, which peaks that night.
And because I would feel ridiculous without including this, here’s the Dan Band.
