This is Dr. Pamela Gaye. I don't remember your title because it's so new.

It's all right. I am the director of technology and citizen science for the astronomical society of the Pacific.

And the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Bant, how's it going?

It's going well. How's it going, praise?

Good. So for those of you who are listening to us in the feed, we are looking for a way to get the best of our technology.

So for those of you who are listening to us in the feed, we are live.

Yay!

In person with more than a hundred of our closest friends here in St. Louis, Missouri, in preparation to go and watch the solar eclipse that happens in two days.

This is one of those things where people have been planning for this their entire lives because this is not an eclipse of the century.

This is an eclipse of once in a nation. The last time there was a solar eclipse that transversed this much of the current United States, our country wasn't here.

And the fact that it's doing it in the middle of summer when we stand a chance at getting good, clear skies across the country is, yeah, this is like, this is unbelievable.

I checked actually the one that's in 2024 happens in April. So this is it. This is the one. This is our chance. So here's some clear skies.

So we're going to just give you some tips, tricks, last minute to do, don't do, safety precautions and sort of give you an idea of what it is that you're going to see.

So where should we start? Pamela, what is an eclipse?

An eclipse. You have two different options. You can have just solar eclipse.

Okay, just solar eclipse. Fine, fine. You've removed the punch line from my story.

So a solar eclipse is where we have a lineup of the earth, then the moon, then the sun and the sun is really big, but it's far far away.

Because it's far far away, it appears to be on the sky the exact same size as our tiny little, but fairly nearby moon.

This is a fairly unique alignment. We do have other moons that transverse in front of the sun compared to their planet, but they're tiny and they don't block out the whole sun.

So it's sad and boring, but with our moon, we get this amazing opportunity. So when we're all little kids, we draw the sun with like all of these little rays coming off of it. Those are actually there.

And during totality, we get to see them. That's the sun's corona. So it goes earth, moon, sun, main body of the sun, blocked out, corona not blocked out. We get to see the corona.

And I know like for a lot of the population, they get to see when the lunar eclipse is because really if you can see the moon, you can see the little eclipse when it's happening.

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