Sun Series: How to Experience a Total Solar Eclipse

NASA's Curious Universe

Katie Konans

Science

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On April 8, 2024, the Moon will pass in front of the Sun, casting a shadow across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Total solar eclipses have fascinated human beings for thousands of years. Watching the Moon eclipse the Sun is a surreal, multi-sensory experience that you’re not likely to forget. But Eclipses also offer unique opportunities for NASA to study the relationship between our star and home planet. Join current and former NASA sun scientists Kelly Korreck, Fred “Mr. Eclipse” Espenak and Cherilynn Morrow on a journey through time and space to solve eclipse mysteries.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Have you ever experienced a total solar eclipse?
0:09.0	It's this strange, magical, somewhat unsettling moment when, in the middle of the day, the world
0:15.3	suddenly goes dark as the moon blocks out the sun.
0:19.9	The first eclipse I saw was back in the early 1960s,
0:25.2	and I was only, let's see, that would have made me 11 years old.
0:32.1	My first total solar eclipse was in 2017,
0:36.5	and I had the privilege of being on the USS Yorktown in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina.
0:45.4	That's Fred Espinack and Kelly Corrick.
0:48.3	Kelly is a NASA Sun scientist who studies total solar eclipses and Fred's an eclipse addict.
0:54.1	He's earned his nickname Mr. Eclipse
0:56.4	by experiencing 30 of them all over the world.
1:00.8	Now the odds that you, listening to this episode,
1:03.2	are currently experiencing a total solar eclipse,
1:06.0	are pretty low.
1:07.3	They're rare phenomena.
1:08.9	In any given place, where you live, for example, you'll only get about
1:12.8	one every four centuries. So I'm not going to get in the way here. I'm going to let Kelly and
1:18.4	Fred tell you what experiencing one firsthand is like. And leading up here, this is actually
1:25.3	a really kind of eerie scene. You start to notice that the quality of light now is starting to look a little odd.
1:32.2	The light seems weird and your brain definitely starts thinking something doesn't seem
1:37.6	right. So there's this feeling of kind of anxiety yet also excitement.
1:42.8	The sun is no longer a disc in the sky.
	...

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