Alabama's STEM explorers is made possible by the generous support of the Holle Family Foundation established to honor the legacy of Brigadier General Everett Holle and his parents, Evelyn and Fred.

Holle, Champions of servant leadership, science, technology, engineering, math, all coming up right now on Alabama STEM Explorers.

Welcome to Alabama STEM Explorers.

My name's Peyton.

Today, we're at the Christian Barry Planetarium at Stanford University.

Here's my friend Jim.

Glad to meet you, Peyton.

So, what are we doing here today, Jim?

We're here to talk about eclipses.

The United States has a couple of eclipses coming up.

One is going to be October 14th of 20, 23, and one is going to be April the eighth of 2024.

The one in October.

That's coming up very soon.

It's what they call an annual annular eclipse.

And the one that states will be a total eclipse.

And we're going to talk about how eclipses work, what makes an eclipse, how you can safely view an eclipse and what it's going to look like here in Alabama.

So what is an eclipse, Jim?

An eclipse is when the moon passes between the earth and the sun and blocks out part of the sun's light.

And a total eclipse is when it blocks out all of the sun's light.

And later on, we're going to go into the planetarium and have some friends of our show us what one an eclipse looks like.

That's so cool.

But what are the other different types of eclipses?

Well, eclipses that you can have lunar eclipses and solar eclipses, the ones we're talking about that are coming up are solar eclipses.

A lunar eclipse is when the earth passes between the moon and the sun.

So the earth's shadow falls on the moon.

But a solar eclipse is when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, and the moon's shadow falls on the earth.

And that's what we're talking about.

And those are the when the moon passes in front of the sun.

All right.

Depending on where you're standing on Earth, you can see several different things.

If you if the moon just blocks part of the sun, that's called a partial eclipse.

And that's what we'll have in Alabama for both of these.

If the moon passes directly in front of the sun and you are at the right spot on earth where that shadow falls, you can be in what's either called an annular eclipse or a total eclipse.

Now, the difference of those is kind of funny.

The moon's orbit around the earth is not round.

Sometimes the moon is further away from the Earth than other times.

And so if the moon passes right in front of the sun, when it's furthest away from the earth, it goes right in front of the sun.

But it's not big enough to completely block out the sun.

And so that's called an annular eclipse.

Some people, if you see it in the newspaper or are on television or something, they call it Ring of Fire.

I guess they're Johnny Cash fans or something, but they are the ring of fire.

They call it that because what you see is a ring of the sun around the moon.

Now, a total eclipse is when the moon passes right in front of the sun.

But the moon is close enough to earth to be big enough to completely block out the sun.

And that is a very special event that will later on in the show, we're going to discuss what happens when the when you're in a total eclipse.

And it actually gets dark in the middle of the day.

Well, these eclipses sound really cool.

How can we safely look at them?

Okay.

That is a great question, because safety is number one thing about eclipses normally.

And let me say this.

The sun is not any more dangerous during the eclipse than it is any other time.

But most of the time when you look up in the sky and you see the sun, if you try to look at it, it hurts and you go, No, you know, I shouldn't have done that.

And so you immediately look away.

What makes an eclipse unusual is two things.

First of all, the the the sun can be partially blocked by the moon and it may be blocked enough that you can actually stand to look at it.

The other thing is that it's not very often that you see the Cookie Monster taking a bite out of the sun.

And so it's it's kind of hypnotizing.

And you want to watch.

And that's where the danger is.

It's dim enough that you can stand to watch and you want to watch, but the harmful rays from the sun can still blind you if you keep watching.

And so the best rule of thumb is do never look out of at a at an eclipse of the sun without proper filtering.

And so that's what we're going to talk about it here for just a minute.

The number one thing that the easiest way to look at Eclipse is with Eclipse glasses.

They have special filters and these have an ISO international standards organization certification, which means these filters have been tested and they and we know they are safe.

And so when you get if you find the eclipse glasses, be very careful of the source of them.

Make sure that they have this international standards organization stamp on there, that they have been tested and that they are that they are safe to use.

So if you have these glasses and let me say this, in order to be safe to use when you put these glasses on.

The only thing you can see is the sun.

So when you put them on, you don't see anything.

But when you find the sun, wow, all of a sudden you can see something in the glasses.

And so that's the first way that you can safely see the sun is if you get eclipse glasses.

If you don't have glasses, you've got a box there that's called a shoe box viewer or a box viewer that you can easily make at home if you get on the Internet and you can see instructions on how to make this.

There's a hole in one in the box that has aluminum foil over with just a pinhole and the end of the box.

And the other in the box has a white sheet of paper taped in it.

So that to make it to act as a screen.

And so if you go outside and I actually kind of like this one, I was playing with it earlier today because this flap actually lets you make it, use it like a shade.

So if you go outside and point that at the sun, you can crack it open and look in there and see a little image of the sun that is projected onto that screen and you can watch the eclipse that way.

So that's a safe way to do it.

So you can either use a projection method like a pinhole camera or you can use solar glasses.

Now, I think the next question a lot of people ask is, can I look at this with my binoculars or with my telescope?

And the answer is you can, if it has the right filter.

And so there's a couple of things to keep in mind.

This this telescope is actually equipped with a solar filter.

And there again, this is this is a filter that is certified to be solar safe that you can make.

There's this one actually, this the filter is a 3D print that we made that I mounted the filter in and it has a little nylon screw so that when I put it on my telescope, I can tighten those down because one of the other rules of safety is if you've got a filter on the front of something, you make sure you can't knock it off accidentally or then it won't fall off because it would be really bad.

So people looking at the side of your filter fall off.

So if you have the right filter, you can look at it through a telescope.

Another thing that a lot of people have are binoculars.

And there again, if you make filters of the right material, you can it's perfectly safe.

And just like the glasses, you look through these binoculars, you don't see a thing except the sun.

Right.

One other trick that I will of that I'll point out is that if you don't have a 3-D printer and special solar filter material and you want to use your binoculars for viewing, you can actually take a pair of the solar glasses and cut out these filters and put them in front of the binoculars and use those to view view the eclipse.

Something very important, though.

Make sure you use good heavy tape and make sure there is no light coming around the filter.

When you when you put them together.

And so the and I guess the safety message here is that you can use almost anything to look at the eclipse.

But the filter always goes on the front of what you're using.

You can't put the glasses on and go, Now I'm going to look through my binoculars.

That would be very dangerous.

So you can use your eyes, you can use a telescope, use binoculars.

But at the filter always has to be one that has been certified and it always has to be on the front.

So, Jim, how did you get interested in astronomy?

I have been interested from a very young age, and I remember as a child staying up late to watch lunar eclipses and things like that.

And when I was eight years old, my dad took me out of school and took me to a total eclipse, which is an amazing experience to forget to get dark in the middle of the day.

And so and then through my life, I was just very lucky.

I had just some unbelievable chemistry and physics teachers when I was in high school and and just seem to have always have opportunities to do fun things in science.

And one of the coolest things that I've gotten to do as I've gotten older is that I got to work for almost 20 years on the James Webb Space Telescope that took me out to San Diego, California, for ten years.

But and the experience was just amazing.

And of course, I could not be happier about the performance of the telescope if you've been following it in the news.

So, Jim, tell me about all these telescopes around me.

There are a lot of different kind of telescopes around here, and I may not be the best person to answer that, but I know who is.

Dr. Don Olive is head of the physics department here at Sanford University.

And so I'm going to invite him to come in and tell you about these telescopes.

And now we're here with Dr. Don Olive High pay.

And thanks for inviting me.

Have you ever seen a telescope?

And do you know how they work?

I've seen one before, but could you tell me how they work?

Sure.

What telescope does, it's really a way to gather light, concentrate it so that you can see very, very dim objects that a lot of people think magnification is the most important thing.

But that's really not what astronomers want to look for.

We want to find telescopes that have the largest opening so we can gather more and more light.

This telescope here has a let's see, about a five inch diameter here, and it uses lenses to focus the light down here to a to a mirror that reflects that light straight up through an eyepiece.

And so effectively using a lens at the front and the lens at the back to concentrate that light.

There's also another type of telescope.

Can I show you over there?

Yes, sure.

On this telescope, it uses a combination of both mirrors and lenses.

And so at the top you see a lens.

The light travels down this tube and reflects off of a mirror back here, which is concave.

And that mirror concentrates the light even more to another mirror.

And finally, So after makes four round trips for round trip twice, the light comes off the other end that you can observe with your eye or put a put a camera there and do all kinds of good science.

That's cool.

Have you ever been in a planetarium before?

No.

Well, here at Samford University, we have a big theater, essentially with a huge 40 foot dome rising above our heads where we can predict the heavens on to predict stars, predict planets.

And we set up a little simulation so that you could see an eclipse on the planetarium dome.

Would you like to go in Yes.

Well, I have the distinct pleasure of working at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, teaching one hundreds of students astronomy.

I got interested in being a scientist when I was a young teenager.

I was walking home from my friend's house, and I looked up at the sky and I was filled with wonder.

I saw the stars and I just knew deep inside That I wanted the study of the stars astronomy to be a part of my lifelong career.

I found my passion for teaching undergraduates specifically.

This is a time of their life where they are exploring opportunities.

It's maybe the first time they're out of the house.

And so they are in those places where I was like learning, Oh, I like these different kinds of majors.

Or I could go intern at a planetarium.

You know, I want to help the students to understand that they have options.

And so we've started an astronomy club at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and we've given planetarium shows in collaboration with Stanford University.

And we recently did a dark sky adventure trip to Arkansas, their Dark Sky festival out there.

And for half the people that went, it was their first time camping and their first time seeing the Milky Way.

So yeah, we've been able to do a lot of fun things and I feel like in this job I'm able to support students in doing new and new things that they wouldn't have done otherwise.

Hi, Peyton, and welcome to the Crystal Marie Planetarium here at Samford My name is Arianna and I'm a sophomore here, and I am super excited to share with you some things about our planetarium.

So what is the planetarium?

A planetarium is like a theater where you can see the stars all around you and it can help represent what things look like and zoom in to certain objects and go really in-depth.

Some shows that we're going to do this semester that I'm very excited about is one over Messier objects, which aren't quite stars, but are things that still see stationary in the sky and another one of our shows is our annual Star of Bethlehem Show.

That happens around Christmas time.

And we talk about the different events that we think could have caused the Star of Bethlehem.

So I can come back here with my family.

Absolutely.

And we do a lot of our publication through Facebook and Instagram.

If you just look up Christian Mary Planetarium, Stanford University, I'm sure you'll find there.

All right.

So here is the show.

So do you know what we're looking at here?

Our solar system?

That's right.

This is our solar system.

And they all have their own little orbits, as you can see in all the colors.

But it's not just the planets that have orbits.

The moons do, too.

Isn't that cool?

And they have different shaped orbits.

They're elliptical, they're not perfect circles.

And that kind of creates an effect that we'll see later.

But yeah, so one thing I want you to remember, Peyton, is that everything we're seeing here is not to scale.

Everything is a lot larger than it actually is in our solar system.

And there's a lot of space in our solar system.

So if you had a marble, it would take seven miles in order to show the entire solar system accurately and the marble would be the size of earth.

So you can see the moon right now it's completing one month.

It's going all the way around.

And as we're zooming in, this is what a lunar eclipse would look like.

So the order is going to be you've got the sun, the earth, and then the moon.

So the lunar eclipses happen at nighttime where there is a full eclipse.

And what happens is light from the sun is reflected off and there's Earth's shadow.

And you can see the moon will change colors.

So have you ever seen a blood moon before?

Yes.

Yes.

So a blood moon is because of those light rays.

So if anyone ever asks you why the sky is blue, it's because of those blue light waves that are outside.

But on the inside is those red light waves, which is what happens when there is a lunar eclipse, a full lunar eclipse.

So now we're going to go to 14 days ahead or 15, depending.

And do you know what moon phase we're going to go to?

No, we're going to go to the new moon phase, which just basically means that we can't see the moon anymore because there's no more light being refracted off of it.

And yeah, so now they're going to line up perfectly.

The order is going to be we're going to have the sun, the moon and then the earth.

And this is our solar eclipse.

So solar eclipses, like I said, happen when there is a full moon.

And these occur during the daytime.

They're a lot shorter than lunar eclipses.

And depending on the type of solar eclipse, you have to be in a very specific place to see its full effect.

But they happen in the daytime, and this is when the moon seems to surpass the sun.

And depending on where the moon is in its orbit, sometimes it can just grazed by the sun.

Other times it will go by the sun, but you can still see it surrounding it.

And the most fascinating ones are when the moon and the sun completely align.

And it becomes totally dark.

And this is because in that orbit, there's three different places where the moon can fall.

So the umbra is the one that we usually think of the total eclipse.

And so that's when the moon appears to be the same size as the sun in our sky, and they pass over the is when the moon completely goes inside the sun, but it's farther back in its orbit.

So you can still see the ring of fire.

And the is when the moon surpasses the sun, but it doesn't quite go through the middle and it just grazes by it.

So you said that the moon makes a full orbit every month.

Mm hmm.

So is there a solar eclipse every month?

No.

So that totally depends on the orbit.

And it's almost like have you ever seen a like a this kind of wobbling?

Right.

So that's sort of what the moon is doing, except for it never comes to that completion point.

But every so often it comes to a point where it perfectly lines up.

So what we're looking at right now is a partial lunar eclipse.

And this is where you can see the shadow over by the the moon.

And you can see that even though it's a full moon, it's appearing to get a little bit smaller.

And that's because it's entering that penumbra, that little part of Earth's shadow.

But it's not totally going within the shadow and the two planets by it.

You may recognize that Jupiter over there and the one with the hula hoops is Saturn.

So now we are going to look at our next type of eclipse, and that is called the annular eclipse.

So we just looked at the the one where it's on either side and the antenna is the upcoming one on October 14th.

And this is going to be a solar eclipse where it happens during the daytime and the moon is going to go right in front of the sun, but not not totally covering the sun.

So it won't look like nighttime randomly, but it will be fascinating to see it surpass the sun.

And Payton, if you go and see this, I hope you remember to take your glasses like we were talking about earlier, or just make sure to not look directly at the sun.

And this is that sort of ring of Fire thing we're talking about, right.

So you can see all the light of the sun and the moon and it just it's a total it's totally fascinating.

So what actually happens during a solar eclipse?

During a solar eclipse, that is when the moon goes right past the sun.

And it's because that orbit is in its perfect area where we're able to actually see it do that from our point of view.

And and yeah, you can see it almost looks backwards.

The sun sort of looks like a crescent moon.

So now we're going to go on to what I would consider to be the most fascinating of the eclipses, the total solar eclipse.

So this is the one where they happen really, really rarely.

But when it does happen, it looks like nighttime in the middle of the day.

Ben, what's what's important to note here is that only happens in a very specific part of the earth under the umbra when it's in that full eclipse.

But if you're in the you will only see the partial eclipse because our view is isn't exactly lined up so that this is the one that we're going to have an April 20, 24 here in Alabama.

It will be a one.

But if you go somewhere and like West Texas, you can see the full effect and the moon actually casts a shadow on earth.

So if you are in that dark spot that we can see on the screen right now, that is where it is totally dark and everyone is going, Oh my gosh.

So here we go.

This is a simulation of the total solar eclipse that I was telling you about.

And once again, you can see Jupiter over there and Saturn over there.

And the moon is totally surpassing the sun right now.

Now, the cool thing about this is it would be dark right now and you can see a simulation of what that would look like in just a second.

But this usually lasts for anywhere from one minute to 7 minutes.

And it totally varies depending on how big the amount the moon is appearing at that time as well as the sun.

And there's a lot of different factors that go into it.

But it's really fascinating.

And the animals even get confused because they're like, Wait a minute, where was the sun set?

Right?

And it's all of a sudden nighttime and you've got the owls out and they're trying to hunt.

And things that would usually be asleep are now awake.

And it's it's really crazy.

And the other thing that's really cool about Total Eclipses is you can actually see what's called the Corona and that that is the little parts that protrude out of the sun.

It's like little things of fire that you can see.

And now this is the end of that eclipse and the moon is going back.

It's no longer going to be blocking the sun.

Another cool thing is when the sky gets dark, you can actually see some of those really bright planets like you might be able to see Jupiter that we can see there.

But you'd also be able to see Venus.

Those are two of our brightest planets in the sky.

And so now we are going to go a little bit deeper.

We're going to go ahead.

And so there's the sun.

And do you remember what the first planet from the sun is?

Now, why don't you tell us it's mercury?

So it's that one that almost looks like the moon.

It's actually gray, which I find fascinating.

And then Venus is the second planet.

It's it's a lot brighter and it's orange.

And then, of course, we have Earth and after earth is Mars.

So you can see Earth and the moon is the first thing that we'll see here.

So with the order as sun, moon, earth, that would mean that from the Sun's perspective, the moon would be sort of eclipsing the earth.

But it's it's a solar eclipse from our perspective.

And and yeah, it's just really fascinating to me that we've experienced this.

And it's not just us.

People over time have experienced this.

And I want to remind you also that total lunar eclipses occur.

And this is where the it would be in that umbra part where there's total focus and this is what we know as the blood moon.

And that's because of those light rays that I was telling you about.

They are kind of refracted off words.

So we can see all the red light and it appears to make the moon look red.

And lunar eclipses actually last a lot longer than solar eclipses do.

Solar eclipses only take about minutes when they're in the totality with the total solar eclipse.

But lunar eclipses can actually last about an hour or even longer.

And they appear to kind of go backwards in those lunar phases that we see over the month.

But all this happens within the span of hours.

And just as you would think that we're about to lose the moon, it turns that bright, fascinating red.

Well, thank you, Ariana.

Thank you so much for coming.

And you and your family are welcome any time.

I'd like to thank Dr. Don and Jim for having me here today.

Come back for another episode of Alabama STEM Explorers.

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Alabama STEM explorers is made possible by the generous support of the Holle Family Foundation established to honor the legacy of Brigadier General Everett Holle and his parents, Evelyn and Fred Holle, champions of servant leadership.