More on the eclipse

If you hurry to Chile right soon
You’ll see the Sun blocked by the Moon.
The right time and place
Are the keys to the chase
Of the drama of darkness at noon.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

That may help you forgive me for the brutality of my political limerick of yesterday.  Don’t kick a man when he’s down, Even a thug or a clown –   I’ve been on a limerick streak since John Goss asked me a few days ago to compose some for the amusement of the next meeting of his Roanoke Valley Astronomical Society.

Them stars you can hardly rely on:
There’s a Snake and a Fly and a Lion,
There’s Lyra the Lyre
Which sounds just like Liar,
And an Irish spalpeen called O’Ryan.

That scene is the sky seen from Chile, but there’s no useful rhyme except chilly, and it’s summer down there, so we’re going nowhere, and we’d better relapse back to prose.  The view is northward, so the stars are moving to the left instead of to the right, and the Moon is moving rightward to overtake the Sun.  But the Chileños will do better to lie on their backs, because the eclipse is almost at their zenith.

Venus almost always becomes visible in the darkening blue sky before totality, and this time the almost-combined star made by Jupiter and Saturn may do the same, though Saturn adds surprisingly little to the magnitude of Jupiter.  Little Mercury might be seen during totality; it couldn’t otherwise, being so near to the Sun – the Moon passes a degree north of it about two hours before totality, therefore about the time partial eclipse begins.

In mid December the Sun is near the southernmost part of the ecliptic, on the Ophiuchus-Sagittarius border, as shown in this detail from our Zodiac Wavy Chart for 2020.

That is why, in yesterday’s space view of Earth during the eclipse, the background stars were in the opposite north-ecliptic region, on the Taurus-Gemini border.

In mid and late December there is a cluster of events: the Geminid meteor shower od Dec. 13-14, the northern midwinter solstice of Dec. 21 and, this time, the eclipse.  The Moon is busy with activity: smallest libration of the year on Dec. 12, besides the descending-node and New moments that cause the eclipse, and the perigee of Dec. 12 that causes the eclipse to be total.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after piblishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

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