For those PLplot developers who are in North America on Monday, August 21st (4 days from now) there is going to be an exciting solar eclipse visible to all of you who have clear skies. Most of you will only see a deep partial eclipse (e.g., 90 per cent of the sun will be obscured from here in Victoria) which is exciting enough (and even detectable in cloud) but the privileged few that live in or who visit the narrow total eclipse track from Oregon through southern Illinois (maximum totality near Carbondale) and then on to the Atlantic coast via S. Carolina will see a spectacular and rare event which is a total eclipse of the sun if you have good weather.
Barbara's sister (who lives near Carbondale) says they are now expecting something like 100 000 (!) vistors to Carbondale to view the total solar eclipse there which will likely completely overwhelm the resources of that small town. Barbara and I won't join those Carbondale visitors because we don't travel much any more. Nevertheless, this is a pretty exciting astronomical event so I have built an eclipse viewer out of an old cardboard box following the instructions at <http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/multimedia/activities/eclipse-projector.asp>. It worked very well today to show me the round solar disk so it should be good to go on eclipse day to show us the thin crescent left when the moon is obscuring the sun at the 90 per cent level (assuming we have good weather that day). Or if it is socked in that day we will throw away the eclipse viewer, but we should still be able to observe the eclipse effect since only the 10 per cent of the Sun's disk that is not obscured by the Moon will be providing our daylight. And similarly for virtually everyone else in North America if they just evaluate the dimness of the daylight when looking out the window at the right time that day. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
