Double Eclipse of the Sun; Eclipse Statistics

My favorite picture so far of the recent eclipse of the Sun is the one you see with this post. Photographer Simon Tang (who gave me permission to reproduce it here) took a sequence of photos from Huron, California, recording the International Space Station crossing the face of the Sun just as the Moon was eclipsing it.

Each of the images of the Space Station is less than 1/1000th of a second long, since the Station moved across the Sun in less than a second. The image is taken in H-alpha, a specific color of light emitted by hot hydrogen atoms in the Sun's lower atmosphere. You can see the Station close up in our second image.

NASA reports impressive statistics for the Aug. 21 eclipse: 90 million page views on NASA's two websites, 40 million views of the live broadcast, 3.6 billion users on social media, and the most popular Instagram image ever -- all of a celestial event with no politics, no national or religious affiliation. It was just nature, doing its thing, predictably, reliably, spectacularly.

In our own project, 2.1 million eclipse glasses were distributed to 7,100 libraries -- all to be given away free to the public. I was one of the astronomers leading the effort, and want to thank the Moore Foundation, Google, and NASA, for supporting the program to allow public libraries to help their patrons observe the eclipse safely. If only we could come together this well about other things!

Click on the images to see them bigger.

Our Astronomy Lecture Series Has a Million Views on YouTube

As regular readers may know, I have the pleasure of organizing and moderating a series of public talks at my college called the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures. Thanks to a generous anonymous donor, we are able to record, edit, and publish each talk on YouTube (now in High Definition). Yesterday, the counter at our YouTube channel passed one million views of the lectures from around the world!

Recent speakers have included Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader for the Cassini mission to Saturn; Robert Kirshner of Harvard and Alex Filippenko of Berkeley, both members of the teams that discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating; Caleb Scharf of Columbia, explaining his book, "The Copernicus Complex," about humanity’s place in the cosmos; astronaut Ed Lu about discovering asteroids that threaten the Earth; and NASA’s Jeff Moore, from the New Horizons science team, explaining what we have discovered about Pluto this year.

Older lectures include Frank Drake explaining his current thinking about the Drake equation, Michael Brown (who discovered many of the Pluto-like dwarf planets out there) discussing "How I Killed Pluto...," Leonard Susskind on his battle with Stephen Hawking over black holes, and Helen Quinn on the mysteries of antimatter.

You can enjoy all the videos, free of charge or advertising, at:http://www.youtube.com/svastronomylectures

Even an astronomer like me, used to big numbers, is kind of impressed by a million views! I'm glad there are so many fans of astronomy out there. Or maybe, when people think about what's happening in the country and in the world right now, their thought have to escape into the larger universe to stay sane!

My First Science Fiction Story Published

As some of you know, I have long enjoyed science fiction, both as fascinating reading and also as a nice addition to my introductory astronomy classes. For 30 years, I also kept a diary of science fiction ideas that occurred to me, and might make the basis of good stories.

In the last year or two, I have joined a writing group and am trying to create some SF short stories of my own. I have a full bulletin board of eloquent rejection slips from some of the finest science fiction magazines in print (as, I gather, all beginning writers must collect,) But now, one of my stories has been published, in a Mars-theme anthology called "Building Red," from a small independent press in St. Louis called Walrus Publishing (and the book is available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Mission-Mars-Building-Ja…/…/1940442079 )

The story, based on a real discovery about Mars, takes place in part inside a cave on the flanks of one of the four giant volcanoes on Mars' equatorial bulge. Instead of the sanitized, squeaky-clean NASA version of a future Mars colony, I tried to imagine one that's crowded, smelly, and has its share of loners and misfits.

The story is entitled "The Cave in Arsia Mons" and it appears together with Mars stories by a number of writers, some of whom have a longer publishing record in SF than I do.

More generally, for a topical index to science fiction stories that have good astronomy in them, see my web page at: 

http://www.astrosociety.org/scifi