The Total Solar Eclipse of  22nd July 2009 is going to bring all of India out for safe observing of the eclipse.

All? During the eclipses of the 1980s most people in India, other than the very few seriously interested, stayed indoors through fears and superstitions. The solar eclipses of 1990s started interesting a slightly larger fraction of people who broke with earlier superstitions and ventured out to observe the eclipses with help from educators of their neighbourhood. The last few years have seen a tremendous increase of interest in astronomical phenomena - thousands come to the planetarium to view some of the rarer astronomical events through telescopes. And yet, the fears and superstitions associated with eclipses do linger on. We see far fewer people coming for our Solar Eclipse watches than for our other skywatch programs.

It will be our endeavour to reason people out of that lingering fear and superstition and yes, fight that mischief making demon being unleashed by the electronic media - so much of useless television footage being given to astrologers out to sell their ware, ensuring through that process a resurgence of many meaningless superstitions and obscurantist notions.

July is going to be the monsoon season - none too happy a time for a total solar eclipse to occur :-(

Look up the global eclipse maps arranged in decades at the NASA site here, and you will see that this is the one total solar eclipse for several decades that cuts through India. The next Total Solar Eclipse visible from India, after this, is the March 2034 one, which will be seen as total only from the very northern portions of Kashmir.

So, we have to make the most of this eclipse!

What should we do, to make the most of it? Maybe the following?

I. NASA maps, calsky, the Indian Astronomical Ephemeris published by the Positional Astronomy Centre, Kolkata and so many other resources enable us to find out the eclipse timings easily for each and every town and village of India. However, not everyone would be aware of the ease of usage of these resources - there is a need for educators to disseminate the eclipse timings for as many neighbourhoods as possible. We have started the work on compiling information in this direction and it is stored here. Additions to this would be so very welcome!

II. We need to make available inexpensive, safe equipment for everyone to observe the eclipse. The binocular box projection apparatus and the Galileoscopes (fitted with projection mechanism) that we are planning to help student groups assemble, would be one small input in this direction. There are likely to be much larger efforts by several institutions and groups in this direction. Please do let us know the efforts in this direction, so that they can all be linked here for additional visibility of contact information for students.

III. What would be interesting observing activities for students, related to the solar eclipse? (some possibilities are mentioned here, watch this space for more inputs on this)

Eclipse images captured at regular intervals can be printed on graph sheets to be used for many interesting measurements.

Eclipse obscuration fraction measured and compared with theoretical data, by amateur astronomers at Nehru Planetarium, New Delhi, during the March 2006 Solar Eclipse.

What price temperature measurements?

Images of the Total Solar EClipse of March 2006, from Antalya, Turkey, by Ajay Talwar of the Amateur Astronomers Association, Delhi. Included in this collage are his temperature and humidity measurements during the eclipse.

During totality, one might wish to spend all possible time viewing the eclipse. The thing to do is construct equipment for automated temperature measurements. There is an ongoing project at making inexpensive apparatus for automated ambient temperature measurements by some engineering students working on a project with the Nehru Planetarium, New Delhi. The details of this will be uploaded soon.

 

 

 

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