Eclipse Ride

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wilcoy02

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Location
Marengo, Ohio
Started our ride at 5:15AM from Marengo Oh. Stopped at I70 and SR 42 to meet up with Leroy. We headed out I-70 thru Indianapolis to I-57 and headed to Carbondale Ill. Traffic was very light. Weather was great. We only stopped for gas and a candy bar.
Started south on SR 45 kept watching a big cloud the further we went. We got as far as Enfield.

We decided to stop and watch from an abandon farm shed. We were 30 miles short of totality at 2:25PM.
It did get dark and the crickets chirped but there was just a sliver of the sun still out.
If we did go further it would have been cloud covered as per the tv news. Plus we ran out of time.

Since we had not eaten we were hungry. Stopped at 4 different restaurants before we found one open.

We decided to take I-64 east to I-71. Traffic was very heavy. The left lane was traveling about 75MPH and the right lane was doing about 70MPH. No one was changing lanes and was going pretty well. THEN a construction zone slowed us way down. 75 mins to go 10 miles. It was like seeing the entire nation was evacuating the south. We finally decided to take the back roads home.

It was very warm and nice bike riding weather.

I got home at 2:15AM. 21 hours on the bike and traveled 875 miles.
 
Wife and I went down to a little place called Princeton, KY. Did not ride the bike since we have a new car to tool around. Lots of goodies in it like a wi-fi hot spot and Android Auto has a nice GPS that shows up on the center stack screen. We parked in a small local park with a bunch of other people. Was fun to hear everyone's reaction, oohs and ahhs. Totally worth the drive down there and a few backups coming back to Terre Haute through Illinois. Got one pretty good shot.

Eclipse.jpg
 
[url=https://classicgoldwings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=195034#p195034:a98ac4e4 said:
joedrum » Thu Aug 24, 2017 6:42 am[/url]":a98ac4e4]
Anyone want to.explain how the eclipse went west to east in a east to west world ?....nasa can't
Pretty basic stuff.

1. The Earth is orbiting/rotating the Sun, the Earth rotates on an axis (north/south) that is tilted.
2. We see the Sun "come up" in the east first since the Earth rotates east-west.
3. The moon orbits/rotates the Earth, but on a different plane than the orbit of the Earth to Sun.
4. The moon's orbit is elliptical, not circular to the Earth's axis (goes further away before coming around).

During a total eclipse, the moon's orbit can be seen crossing between the Earth and Sun from northeast down to southwest (from our perspective looking into the sky, meaning as we see the moon blacken out the Sun).

The moon orbits the Earth ever so slightly faster than the Earth rotates on it's axis. So, as the people in Oregon saw a total eclipse at around 10:20 AM, the moon continued heading forward on it's orbit (which from our perspective is from northwest to southeast). It took the moon (in it's orbit) about 70 minutes to reach the east coast. Hence the reason people saw the eclipse west to east based on their perspective looking into the sky.

Remember that Oregon saw a 100% eclipse. By the time the moon made it to New Jersey in it's orbit, we only had a 77% eclipse because of our position to the moon's orbit.

Pic of the normal orbits for a perspective:

image.php


When performing celestial navigation, all of the rotation information, time of day, month, year can tell you pretty much where you are!
 
Astronomy is a passion of mine. I have (literally) a room full of gear. And the Westfalia I refer to from time to time? It's an astronomical accessory that gets me way off the beaten path - in relative comfort.


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Actually, the rampant rumors of that being an eclipse are actually very much in err. It was a scheduled outage. My boss sent me over to do routine maintenace, I had to shut it down in stages to replace a few burned out LEDs. Of course, it only took me a moment, but we had to use OSHA lock-out/tag-out procedures. If we'd done it the 'old fashioned' way, with the 'old fashioned' lamps, I would'a just unscrewed the old ones and threaded new ones in with gloves, and you never would'a noticed.
 
[url=https://classicgoldwings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=195054#p195054:3vx1tp6u said:
dan filipi » August 24th, 2017, 2:59 pm[/url]":3vx1tp6u]
Actually, NASA changed the direction of the moon and earth rotation for this one event just to confuse everyone. I thought you guys knew that!?

They change it in non-leap years. Imperceptible to the human eye.
 
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