On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will be visible in America and we are excited! In Illinois, we would have to travel 5 hrs to Carbondale, IL for the total eclipse experience but instead, we opted to have a company lunch outside to see a partial view.
Come on over and join us in the parking lot. Our menu includes all things orange, yellow and red to match our sky. Enjoy half-moon cheese tortellini salad, Bloody Moons (sans vodka), sweet potato casserole with banana moons, corn souffle, veggie tray, salad, fruit, macaroni sun balls, and Italian sausage with sun dried tomatoes in red sauce. Bring a dessert—Moon Pies, perhaps?
We even have ordered 30 pairs of glasses, if you can't make it to this company event, so come back and check out our fun pictures.
Don't forget to order our Solar and Lunar Eclipse poster that is on sale through 8/10/17!
Get the poster.
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From NASA Space Place:
An eclipse happens when a planet or a moon gets in the way of the sun’s light. Here on Earth, we can experience two kinds of eclipses: solar eclipses and lunar eclipses. In a solar eclipse, the sun gets darker. In a lunar eclipse, the moon gets darker.
A solar eclipse happens when the moon gets in the way of the sun’s light and casts its shadow on Earth. That means during the day, the moon moves over the sun and it gets dark.
This total eclipse happens about every year and a half somewhere on Earth. A partial eclipse, when the moon doesn’t completely cover the sun, happens at least twice a year somewhere on Earth.
But not everyone experiences every solar eclipse. Getting a chance to see a total solar eclipse is rare. The moon’s shadow on Earth isn’t very big, so only a small portion of places on Earth will see it. You have to be on the sunny side of the planet when it happens. You also have to be in the path of the moon’s shadow.
On average, the same spot on Earth only gets to see a solar eclipse for a few minutes about every 375 years!
During a lunar eclipse, Earth gets in the way of the sun’s light hitting the moon. That means that during the night, a full moon fades away as Earth’s shadow covers it up.
The moon can also look reddish because Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the other colors while it bends some sunlight toward the moon. Sunlight bending through the atmosphere and absorbing other colors is also why sunsets are orange and red.
During a total lunar eclipse, the moon is shining from all the sunrises and sunsets occurring on Earth!
You can easily and safely observe the Sun by projecting it through a tiny hole onto a white sheet of paper. This simple device is called a "pinhole camera".
You'll need:
• 2 sheets of stiff white paper
• A pin
• A sunny day
• Perhaps a friend to help
With the pin, punch a hole in the center of one of your pieces of paper. Go outside, hold the paper up and aim the hole at the Sun. (Don't look at the Sun either through the hole or in any other way! ) Now, find the image of the Sun which comes through the hole. Move your other piece of paper back and forth until the image looks best. What you are seeing is not just a dot of light coming through the hole, but an actual image of the Sun!
Experiment by making your holes larger or smaller. What happens to the image? What do you think would happen if you punched a thousand holes in your paper, and you put little lenses in front of each hole to refract (e.g. bend) the solar images to all fall on top of each other. What do you think you'd see? In fact, optical telescopes can be thought of as a collection of millions of "pinhole" images all focused together in one place!
