| Show ECLIPSE OF THE SUN AUGUST what a piece of work Is man and how marvelous his achievements there will be an eclipse of the sun oa ou august slat 1932 and so great is the skill of higly trained astronomer scientists that already for some time past all of the elements of the eclipse have been determined when with in a second where visible shown by plotted curves as to who will see it at sun down who at sunset and who on each hour of visibility how much pt pf the sun will be cut by the moon as shown to a person living at del a the path ot of the shadow of the moon on the earth how wide that shadow Is how fast it will tra travel V eel it how ow long the sun will be obscured by it and the marvel ot of all these th as bounds one whose education falls fall short of that wonderful attainment ahe complexity of it sixty various motions to the moon for we have the earth whirling around the sun not in a circle at a fixed d stance but in an ever varying ar ying ellipse no single factor of which Is the same as the immediately pieced ng one until the return Is being made from the opposite focus ev ery second we are closer or farther away from the sun every second we wo similarly vary in distance from the moon yet again our speed is much faster around the sun in december than in june and as we go we in turn carry the moon with us so that Us its speed Is not ton constant stant ot of course as we travel and carry the moon with us and as it in turn revolves around us it travels faster than we ve and sometime sometimes slower and sometimes faster f nor is the plane of the moon our plane but tilted 50 5 to it adding to the complexity of trigonometric calculations then again neither is the orbit of the moon a true circle so that every hour its distance from us varies then again it wobbles for as the sun pulls on it in vary ing strength the moon s orbit is ever so slightly wavy without getting tedious nor over technical the moon has about sixty different motions to unravel and plot yet out of all this maze of complexity so great is the skill of astronomers that all these variations are known the track ot of the moon charted and all the various mathematical formulas harmonized each to each to give the correct course of the moon in the sky the movement of the eaith eai th is sim sini pier the cause of eclipses and the kinds when sun moon and earth are in line which can happen only at or near the nodes of the moon there is an eclipse that is the shadow of aup falls on the other in the eclipse to occur in august the moon comes be tween tweet us and the sun and conse its shadow falls on us its disc cut off the bigl t of the sun now on that day we are approach ing the sun perigee but the moon is is traveling that day about sixteen times as fast as we also the moon is approaching us so that as the eclipse goes on the shadow of the moon on the earth grows slightly sligh lv wider than when it began not only is this because of our increasing ap but also because the revola tion of the earth brings the equator toward the moon by as much closer as the distance of that spot from the center of the alth during the time of the eclipse on the other I ind of an eclipse the moon travels in 0 our shadow an eclipse of the moon think of all the wonders of man s knowledge out of all this turmoil ol 01 ent with the ild of alge bra spherical trigo nome try and celest al mechanics with a little of calculus thrown in n man sifts and boits ar computes and plots and gives you and me tar far in advance of its actual happening the following facts of this coming celes bial phenomenon jailie the tile A mill v III hit lilt Us ind al adhere here it will go the shadow of the moon will come in contact anith the earth just slig it ly to the west ot of the north pole as the moon and we are traveling east but t taster faster than we the shadow will travel over us from the west to the east sweeping down in a southeast ly course from the north pole thru contrael Mont rael and portland maine in a path beginning at the pole with a width of about 98 miles and curve gantly forward and to the eat until fai fal out in the atlantic ocean that shadow will leave the revolving earth wirth and beginning at the pole close to the center line of the earth as compared with the moon the rev alution earth of the earth presents pie the arc are toward the equator which of course swings nearly tour four thousand miles of bulge toward the moon thus presenting a portion ot of the earth to the shadow ever closer and closer so that the shadow grows ever wider and wider during the tour four hours since that shadow contat conta ced teed with us it begins at 98 miles width and ends at in the ocean at portland maine the center of the time odthe eclipse will b about 3 30 p in we will see it here in del ti vt between noon and one 0 clock it will last in portland me 1 hr and 38 min the cone of the moon s shadow has ben benn carefully computed its ex a t length is known and its width where it contacts the earth and the comparative sue side of both moon and sun are known in all the maze ot of the movements ot of each hence they can compute whether or not the entire face of the sun will be obscured over tle path of the shadow all those c imputations give the result that the satire entire face of the sun will be hid were we but a little farther away the eclipse would be annular that Is show a margin of white all around the outside of the moon where the i sun shines past nautical picked compit irions the computations in the nautical almanac occupy four closely packed pages and in addition to that ref arence is made to many other form ulas and standard texts on astron omy only so that even to work all this out even when the elements of the are given Is n no 0 easy matter in tact fact it requires math ema skill of 0 high order orde r but man is capable and conquers the task boston will be just outside of the shadow we will be far away mon treal will se a total eclipse boston will see almost an entire eclipse but not quite we at delta will see about 39 per cent of the sun hid that is to us about one third of the sun will be nicked off devoured by the evil dragon not to make this so technical that it repels we ne will chose a few more data that afternoon when people in portland maine 1001 up to the heavens west of the dim mod sun in the less glare by reason of the eclipse they will see very close the planet jupiter farther away the planet mercury which many per sons have never seen between ju piter ard mercury the bright star regulus of the constellation of the lion v ill III shine and be quite plainly distinct the aloon moon will be moving that at hernoon about seconds of arc are in an hour and the sun apparently moving about 9 the suns sun s apparent movement is really our own the faster moon will carry its shadow aver us in the same direction it la is traveling which is from west to east when its comes in contact with us at near the north pole the tile pun will have a comparan com ve diameter of 15 and the moon a comp comparative aratine diameter of 16 so that the moon will completely cover the sun in the path ot of the central eclipse the moon Is thit day approaching us so fast that in but just one day it has grown to size 16 2 but it takes the sun from august to about september to grow to the same size the moon was during the hours of the eclipse then proceeding into matters of extreme technicality far fr over our heids heads astronomers on that day will be very vey busy some singled out to study proofs or dis proofs of ein stein s theory of relativity and whether or not rays of light bend others take spectrographic photo others take photo graphs of the others get records of fall in temperature and ind so on each man a specialist each with a specific task on which h has practiced so as to familiarize himself with its routine and that task he will perform irn to the utter exclusion of everything else longitude of nodes hour plotting to the second when all will be in lin line he relative reli tive size the angle in dealin aaion and then the blending of all the various inter related factors until every element is arrived at to a mathematical exactitude truly what a piece of wor won c Is man how ilow marvelous his achievements to be continued next week |
