“Dad, you finally saw a total solar eclipse. Now you’re a real astronomer”, said my younger daughter in the minutes after the August 21 eclipse.
It was a joke, of course, but I still winced. This was a sore point with me. Forty-five years of stargazing, on and off, and I’d seen thousands of sights in the sky from earthbound satellites to the Moon, from icy flotsam from the outer solar system to the colorful cloud bands of Jupiter, and all manner of wonders of the deep sky including galaxies billions of years older than our solar system. But I’d never seen a total solar eclipse [Read more…] about Field Notes from a First-Time Eclipse Watcher
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