yorkiefan_ | 04-16-2014 08:48 AM | Of course, the eclipse you really don't want to miss is the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. NASA - Total Solar Eclipse of 2017 Aug 21
It'll be visible in a tiny thin band from Oregon through Wyoming to Nebraska then Kentucky through to South Carolina. In a total solar eclipse the Sun will be completely blacked out, and you'll be able to see the extremely hot corona (the corona is millions of degrees Kelvin while the Sun's surface is only a few thousand). What's really cool about solar eclipses is they dim the Sun enough so that stars whose light passes near the Sun on the way to Earth can then be seen, and the gravity of the Sun deflects these rays of light slightly so that the stars appear to be in different places! It's not something measurable unless you're taking photos with a professional telescope, but this is exactly how Einstein's theory of general relativity (that heavy objects bend spacetime, and that we feel as gravity is just the curvature of spacetime) was first verified. Einstein begged astronomers to measure the positions of stars whose light beams passed near the Sun by going out and looking for solar eclipses so that these deflected beams of light could be seen. It took 3 years before they were finally verified! The first team that was going to do measure this deflection (in 1914) got captured behind Russian lines as WWI has just broken out days before. The next two teams got horrible weather. But it was finally verified in 1917. It has since been verified by a few other experiments, and general relativity is also critical to the operation of GPS. If we didn't have this theory we could not have GPS, as predictions using Newton's theory of gravity wouldn't be accurate enough for it to be useful to us.
August 21, 2017 would be the time to visit Grand Teton NP, as the shadow of the moon passes almost directly over the mountain so that you'll get nighttime and total solar eclipse there in the park. I'm going to try to go out to Kentucky or Nebraska probably for it though, as I'm sure camping spots will be really tough to get that day and I don't want to pay the high prices of staying in the park or in Jackson, WY. God I hope the weather cooperates, as I have never seen a total solar eclipse from inside the path of the moon's shadow (it's very very narrow since the moon is so tiny in comparison to the Sun). |