Category Archives: Eclipse

Don’t Miss Watching this Solar Eclipse High Altitude Balloon Online

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[Dan Julio] let us know about an exciting project that he and his team are working on at the Solid State Depot Makerspace in Boulder: the Solar Eclipse High Altitude Balloon. Weighing in at 1 kg and bristling with a variety of cameras, the balloon aims to catch whatever images are able to be had during the solar eclipse. The balloon’s position should be trackable on the web during its flight, and some downloaded images should be available as well. Links for all of that are available from the project’s page.

High altitude balloons are getting more common as a …read more

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How to Eclipse When All You Have is a Welding Helmet

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What do you do if you don’t trust cheap eclipse-watching glasses from the internet? What about if everyone’s sold out? Well, if you want to watch the eclipse and you have an auto-darkening welding helmet, you can do what [daniel_reetz] did and hack something together with a remote and your welding helmet to let you see the eclipse without blinding yourself.

Essentially, the hack tricks the helmet’s sensors into thinking it’s very bright. [Daniel_reetz] accomplishes this by gluing a remote with an infrared LED to the side of the helmet and covering it with a 50mm plastic lid. There are …read more

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Eclipse 2017: Where Will You Be When the Sun Goes Away?

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In less than a month, on August 21, 2017, the Moon will cast its shadow upon the Earth, a relative pinprick at only 60 miles across. The shadow will begin in the Pacific Ocean off North America, make landfall south of Portland, Oregon, and rake diagonally across the United States. Charging southeastward at about 2000 miles an hour, the path of totality will touch 12 states before racing off into the Atlantic Ocean around Charleston, South Carolina.

Those are the dry facts of the eclipse, the wheres and the whens of an event that hasn’t been visible to a majority …read more

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Get Ready for the Great Eclipse of 2017

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On August 21, 2017, the moon will cast its shadow across most of North America, with a narrow path of totality tracing from Oregon to South Carolina. Tens of millions of people will have a chance to see something that the continental US hasn’t seen in ages — a total eclipse of the sun. Will you be ready?

The last time a total solar eclipse visited a significantly populated section of the US was in March of 1970. I remember it well as a four-year-old standing on the sidewalk in front of my house, all worked up about space already …read more

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