Hmm I'd be stupid not to go to Namibia while this is going on: total solar eclipse, then a Skeleton Coast road trip, then safari in Botswana would be just the thing...

#eclipse #totaleclipse #solareclipse #totalsolareclipse #eclipsechasing #eclipsechaser #self #travel #thoughts #dreams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_November_25,_2030

Coronal spectra of the 2024 Total #SolarEclipse with the ALIMAS and UV-PAMIS spectrographs flown on a WB-57 plane - as explained in https://agu.confex.com/agu/agu24/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1645372 with the plane in question in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14562/ - shown by Adalbert Ding at the SEC. 18/n

The perils of observing a Total #SolarEclipse from the stratosphere: how the Romanian 2012 flight over Australia - https://www.astrofoto.ro/wp/?p=880 - had ended; the tree had to be cut in the end ... for AUD 200. No plans to repeat that effort. 17/n

More slides about the 2028 Total #SolarEclipse from Terry Cuttle at the SEC - and about coming attractions down under. Relevant websites: https://eclipse.asa.astronomy.org.au/ and https://www.eclipse.aaq.org.au/ 16/n

No more Spain for the next Total #SolarEclipse in 2028: SEC slides by Terry Cuttle and Jay Anderson about the Australian track and weather stats. 15/n

Next Total #SolarEclipse - 2027 in Spain again and a lot of North Africa: some aspects highlighted by Jay Anderson at the SEC in Belgium. 14/n

O.k. four more slides by Eduard Masana at the Leuven SEC about the 2026 Total #SolarEclipse in Spain, namely what the Comisión Nacional del Eclipse is preparing: see https://www.iaa.csic.es/page/comision-nacional-eclipse and https://eclipses.ign.es and https://eclipse-spain.es/index.php/en/ for relevant websites. And some Final Thoughts and Recommendations about the expected eclipse experience in Spain. 13/n

And yet more Masana slides about the 2026 Total #SolarEclipse - which largely hits a sparsely populated region of Spain. Which has a lot to offer besides the eclipse, of course. Also a helpful matrix comparing the five zones of the eclipse in Spain. 12/n

More Masana slides about the geography and road network of relevance for the 2026 Total #SolarEclipse - beware of shadows and traffic. 11/n

Tons of valuable information about the 2026 Total #SolarEclipse at the Belgian conference today, esp. about the preferred Spain: some slides by Jay Anderson - see https://eclipsophile.com/tse2026/ for his full analysis - and Eduard Masana. 10/n

O.k., more screencaps from Michael Zeiler's #SolarEclipse Conference talk: stills from animations of the umbra moving over Spain in 2026 and 2027, setting the stage for tomorrow when most of the sessions will deal with future eclipses and planning. This summer a new website, EclipseAtlas.com (not up yet) will collect all old and new eclipse maps material. 9/n

Yay, the German math and astronomy wizard Erhard Weigel - see https://bonnstern.wordpress.com/2022/06/02/auf-den-spuren-von-erhard-weigel/ for other achievements - is credited with the first-ever published #SolarEclipse map by Michael Zeiler during the final SEC talk, and it's already a pretty modern and clever one! 8/n - more tomorrow.

What a valid lab test report for #SolarEclipse glasses looks like - from an SEC talk by Richard Fienberg who also co-authored a scientific paper on this topic in 2021: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac013e 7/n

Hey, Jörg Schoppmeyer opened his talk at the #SolarEclipse Conference in Leuven on imaging annular eclipses without filters with one of my Australian pictures from 1999 (upper right): see https://geocities.restorativland.org/CapeCanaveral/5599/aus99/story.html for how they originated. Schoppmeyer's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbtQrHdl5Og of the 2023 ASE actually found scientific use: https://www.iota-es.de/JOA/JOA2024_2.pdf#page=3 (once again confirming the larger solar diameter https://scicomm.xyz/@cosmos4u/114681336115327260 had determined by an entirely different technique). 6/n

Four teaser slides from the amazing talk by Nicolas Lefaudeux at the #SolarEclipse conference about his vast - professional - experience in imaging and image processing applied to the solar corona: see https://hdr-astrophotography.com/solar-eclipses/ for his results in high resolution (and hopefully the highly instructive talk will become available as well eventually). 5/n

In the final talk of the morning sessions of the #SolarEclipse Conference Thoby Dittrich talked about the Modern Eddington Experiment (the website https://moderneddingtonexperiment.org is under heavy construction): the best observing result of gravitational deflection of starlight by the Sun in the optical during solar eclipses is still Brun's from 2017 - https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00343 - while others have tried with a vengeance since. The goal remains to observe the significant deflection of star positions between 1 and 2 solar radii from the center of the Sun: this is known as the 'forbidden zone' because the corona can be very bright here and only bright stars can be measured reliably - but those in turn are rare. It turns out that the star fields around the totally eclipsed Sun in 2027 and 2028 will be unusually rich in good candidates so there is (or should be) considerable interest in the physics didactics community to make use of these eclipses in southern Spain / northern Africa and Australia, respectively. 4/n