Shanghai, Total Solar Eclipse 2009

Just an update on my once in a lifetime trip to China to view live and in person the Total Solar Eclipse July 22 2009. A lot has transpired since I started my countdown to China a while back. First off, I now have a passport, what can I say, I don't....... or rather they don't let me out that often. Apparently you need passports to leave your home country, I've only heard speak of them before, now I have one.

To get one I first had to get a birth certificate, well I had one but under "Name" it had "Baby Boy". Plus I have gotten all my shots, I have over come my fear of needles to get all kinds of shots to protect me from God knows what, I spent over an hour listening to the travel agency nurse informing me of all the things I could get and how not to get them, turning white and getting faint as she's talking, and invariably it always happens, the statement,"Are you going to be okay, would you like a glass of water?" I hate talking about diseases, I always develop the symptoms when talking about them. I sent my passport away with my China visa application and I'm just waiting for the actual visa and passport to return, then I'm good to go.


I have done a lot of research about the weather stats over in Shanghai using sites such as NASA's Eclipse Web Site, It would kind of be sad if I went through what I went through spent what I spent to only have it cloudy the day of the eclipse, mind you a trip to China is okay cool to fall back on, so rich in history and lots to see. Shanghai is actually one of the better places to be during the eclipse. The image above shows it has the lowest average cloud cover of the sites in the eclipse's path. So here's the plan, I have found out that the Hotel... nay... Resort I will be staying at has Internet access, so I am planing , if all goes well, from the Hotel terrace...la de da, to use USTREAM to broadcast live from my blog, the actual Eclipse Event!!!!!! The Total Solar Eclipse starts at 9:32 am July 22, you can find what the time is in your location by using this converter, it works out to be 9:32 pm EDT July 21.


One last thing, as part of their International Year of Astronomy 2009 celebrations, KW Telescope is having a "Photographic Celebration Of the Night sky" where they display images taken by astrophotographers from across Canada, two of mine were selected to be on display for the event, my Nuclear Moon image above and my Double Halo with Circumzenithal Arc, image below, thought it was cool to have my work half way across the country being displayed with the best, very honored.


I'll leave you now with an animation of my Nuclear Moon.

Nuclear Moon

At -49c with windchill, .......(you know I'm just going to drop the windchill thing, it is always windy here in Saskatchewan, especially on the bald prairie where I take my images from), I really , really didn't want to go outside to take a pic of the March Full Moon, but I thought with the cold temps I may get some wacky images of the Moon.



When the warm less dense upper atmosphere meets the colder dense atmosphere, that is -49c for example, the place where they meet acts as a refracting lens and it inverts the bottom of the Moon, what you get is the real Moon setting on a fake mirage Moon, kind of cool, at one point, the Moon looks like a mushroom cloud.


At least with the Moon I know exactly how long it takes to set so I can sit in my car until the last possible minute before jumping out and snapping the pics. Because of the Earth's daily rotation the Moon appears to travel through the sky it's own diameter , or roughly .5 degree every 5 minutes, so if I want to shoot a 10 minute real time movie clip I pop out of my car when it is around 2 Moon lengths from setting. Also just for trivia sake, because the Moon orbits the Earth in the same direction as the Earth spins on its axis, the Moon appears to travel backwards, or along with us in the sky it's own diameter, or .5 degree every hour, over a 24 hour period that's 12 degrees, multiply that by 30, the average amount of days in a month and you get....TA DA.. 360 degrees or a complete Lunar orbit of the Earth....just so you know.


To take the movie clip below I had to stand outside in the frigging cold -49c weather and count down 5 seconds to take each image, let me tell you it was hard enough concentrating not to freeze and die let alone count down the 5 seconds, but in the end it was worth it.

At around 56 seconds into the clip notice the fake Moon rise to meet the real Moon. Actually because the atmosphere itself acts like a refracting lens, the Moon we see sitting on the horizon is actually a fake Moon, the real Moon is just below the horizon, the atmosphere refracts the real Moon up to what we actually see, so in essence what you are watching is the fake fake Moon rising as the fake Moon is setting, we don't really ever see the real Moon. I know this is a lot of technical stuff but I find it interesting, maybe some of you can follow, if not, you can just look at the pretty images, at least I think they're pretty and call it a day, anyways hope you enjoy the video.