Join eclipse-chasing geographer and cartographer Michael Zeiler on a multimedia tour of the path of totality on April 8, 2024. This includes an animated flyover as simulated from the view of a spacecraft 100 miles high and detailed maps of the eclipse path. Special attention will be given to the Midwest and Texas, an eclipse destination for many amateur astronomers. One obsession of all eclipse chasers is to maximize the odds of clear skies during totality. Mr. Zeiler will discuss how to weigh many factors, such as proximity to the longest duration, ease of mobility on the local road network, climatological records for April, and how weather systems respond to local topography. He’ll also explore the wide variety of eclipse viewing venues, everything from a stadium to a mountain peak, major cities or national parks, and museums or zoos. Mr. Zeiler will also present his research on how many people will travel to totality’s path on Eclipse Day and discuss the economic impacts for regions in the U.S. He’ll also preview what comes after the 2024 eclipse, both in North America and around the world.
About the Speaker:
Michael Zeiler is a geographer who recently retired from the leading provider of geographic information systems (GIS) software. He has witnessed total solar eclipses since 1991. In 2009, while writing his book, Modeling Our World, he realized how advanced GIS technology could be applied to publish new eclipse maps of high precision and good cartographic quality. After creating his first eclipse map for the total solar eclipse of July 22, 2009, he launched eclipse-maps.com in 2010 to showcase new and historic eclipse maps. Recognizing the widespread public interest in the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse, he launched GreatAmericanEclipse.com on August 21, 2014. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union Working Group on Solar Eclipses and is honored to have an asteroid (53253 Zeiler) named after him.
Recorded: February 2, 2024
So without further Ado let’s get right into it here um tonight’s guest speaker is a geographer who recently retired uh from the leading provider of geographic information systems called GIS software and he has witnessed a total solar eclipses since 1991 and in 2009 while writing his book modeling our world he realized how
Advanced GIS technology uh could be applied to publish new Eclipse maps of high precision and good cardgraphic quality so after creating his first Eclipse map for the total solar eclipse of July 22nd 2009 he launched eclips maps.com in 2010 uh to showcase the new and historic Eclipse maps and recognizing the widespread public
Interest in August 21st 2017 the big Eclipse that year um he launched Great American eclipse. comom on August 21st 2014 and that was the The Talk of the Town at the Saskatchewan summer star party as I was telling our our guest speaker because I was at that star party when the when the
Site launched and everybody was talking about it because uh you know that was the kind of threeyear marker toward the eclipse and so he is a a member of the international astronomical Union working group on solar eclipses and is honored to have an asteroid Nam after
Him and I just want to say to the members present here tonight where’s my asteroid I’m waiting just a subtle hint there H so without further Ado please welcome Michael Zyer okay thank you so much Richard and thank you to the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society for staging this wonderful Eclipse
Series it’s the only astronomy club in the country that I’m aware of that’s doing anything remotely like this for the eclipse so kudos to kazou and uh so I’d like to present uh the C moou Astronomical Society with two of the books that I’ve written on
Eclipses and uh this one here is the field guide to their annular eclipse last fall and the coming April Eclipse so this has all the detail that you want to know about the eclipse it’s designed it’s a field guide which means it’s designed to be used um on the road so if
There’s if you’re in an area where there may be patchy clouds and you need to scattle and get out of town this is your guide because this will show you detailed maps of where to go to get the best view and then after um in the afternoon of April 8th
Some of you might get the idea that you might want to see more total solar eclipses after you’ve seen your first this coming April 8 and if you get by the bag then this is your vacation planner for the next 25 years it’s my vacation planner because most of my
Vacations are are determined by where solar eclipses happen and it it it’s a wonderful um It’s a Wonderful hobby because you get to combine beautiful places on our planet with the most magnificent Celestial sight so these are for the astronomy club and thank you so much to Richard
Bell for um doing the M of fire behind all of this um you’re lucky to have them in your community curious so I’m going to present a tour of the eclipse and it’s going to be in several parts first of all as as Richard said um
This is just a summary of of my biography um I’m a professional cartographer also Eclipse Chaser and starting around 1909 I realized no one else was producing a Eclipse maps of high quality and precision so I decided to step up and and make them myself I
Made them initially for a cruise that I was on in 2009 so I I’ll talk about this more in a little bit um I’ll speak a little bit about how to create extremely precise uh Eclipse Maps but the short answer and and and the reason we’re creating these precise Maps is
Because we can we have the data now we have the laser altimeter data first from the Japanese spacecraft called kaguya and Then followed by the US NASA spacecraft called lunar reconnaissance Orbiter that data which became available for about a dozen years ago for the first time made these extremely active accurate Eclipse Maps
Possible and um later in the presentation I’ve made a a variety of of different types of eclipse maps and I’m going to show you a world premiere of a brand new type of eclipse map that no one besides myself and my wife have seen so that’ll be
Fun so the topics we’re going to be covering are applying with the moon’s Shadow what’s special about eclipses the path of totality venues to see totality there’s some very interesting places to see what the impact of totality on our nation will be maps of special Eclipse phenomena as
I just alluded to you’ll get a world premiere and then I’ll close with a survey of coming eclipses and so we’ll review that now this is an animation that I made uh it took a lot of time to make this it took months to make this um and this shows the precise
Shadow of the Moon Crossing from Mazon Mexico all the way to New Finland on this on the side you can see the local time and the duration of totality if you are in the center of the path plus the speed of the moon’s Shadow as this video goes on keep an eye
On that speed because it turns out that the speed is slowest at where the eclipse is longest and where the eclipse gets a little shorter as you go on speed picks up and it makes sense if you think about it and know a little geometry the the width of the path will
Also vary it’s a little over it it’s a little over 120 miles at the beginning but then you’ll see it steadily getting a little bit shorter as the geometry of the moon’s Shadow diminishes as it crosses now we just crossed Dallas and we’re reaching Arkansas a great spot for the
Eclipse you can see Little Rock is on the edge while this is progressing I want to point out that the moon’s Shadow is not a perfectly smooth oval but it has these these points in it these I I call these inflection points and we’ll talk about that a little bit later that
Actually turns out to be something very cool that you can see if you are at that inflection point now we’re coming close to the area for example WETA is probably the closest destination in the center line from here so many people from here will go to that
Region and now we’re coming to the Cleveland land um Lake Hy what a Scenic spot this will be Niagara Falls during the eclipse hopefully it’s clear that day and hopefully it’s uh clear in many of these places it may be a little bit of a challenge but I’ll speak briefly on
What you can do to improve your odds of of clear weather on Eclipse day and now we’re about to leave the United States and the eclipse will finish its track through the Atlantic provinces of Canada and here’s New Finland now watch the Speed the speed is is going very
Rapidly and there’s a reason for that okay now I’m going to speak about uh what’s so special about Eclipse Maps I personally am beguiled by Eclipse Maps I think they’re really cool and what’s really cool is this is the first ever Eclipse map that was produced in
1654 and I’ve made a modern map uh to compare against this and this was remarkably accurate for the time and um so why do we take the effort to create a an an eclipse map it’s a lot of work it’s a lot of computation it’s only good for
One day a few hours in one day so why do we bother because Eclipse maps are treasure maps they’re your Guide to the most beautiful celestal site you’ll ever see it’s such a special event that’s worth making a map for for a single event that lasts only a few
Hours and we’re going to be taking a tour of a lot of different types of eclipse Maps this here is the first Eclipse map from the Americas this Eclipse map is from 172 seven and there’s a lot to say about this map for for the real Geeks I could
Speak an hour just on this map alone but what’s interesting what what this map was really used for back then the treasure this map was seeking was longitude because it turns out that an eclipse is a good way if you record the eclipse accurately it’s a good way to
Record determine your longitude in the new world so so that’s why this map was constructed so that people there knew roughly where where the path was and they could prepare themselves and and this is the path of of total solar eclipse generally correct what’s interesting about maps in this day too
Is that our Geographic understanding about eclipses is much better than our Geographic understanding of continents at that time that’s an interesting thing this is the first US Eclipse map this was produced in 1834 more than a hundred years after the first Mexican Eclipse map which we just looked
At and here’s a little bit of a detail look at this Eclipse map it makes me wonder why did it take the US 100 years longer than Mexico I’m not sure um but but that’s that’s a historical record beautiful map and this map was also U modified for another
Eclipse now we’re going to take a tour through the path of total solar eclipse in um on April 8th this map gives you an overview the figures on the side show the maximum partial eclipse that you’ll experience on Eclipse day but the real emphasis the visual focus is the path of
Totality and so I made a color ramp that shows where the duration of totality will be long which is the yellow zone down in Mexico and Texas um but the duration is not too bad as you go further up you can get a full four minutes of totality for quite a
Distance now this is one of my most popular maps and uh the the the the beauty of this map is that it drives home that if you possibly can don’t watch the partial eclipse do whatever you can you know uh to to get to the path of totality and
It’s not very far from here so you’ve got a good chance um and and people love this but it it this is so true um you’ll still see something interesting um when you’re in the partial eclipse but not like totality this is an animation that I made with my friend Fred
Espan that shows the eclipse and this is another one that shows the shadow creeping across the United States this is um another type of Animation different from the flyover animation you saw earlier but this shows how the shadow uh crosses the nation now one thing you’ll notice as the shadow
Progresses is that at the beginning in Texas the shadow is relatively compact but you’re going to see it spread out as it moves along its path and the reason why that oval shape becomes more elongated is because the eclipse ends at sunset in the North Atlantic and over New England it’s already late
Afternoon so the sun is lower and if the Sun is lower then objects cast longer Shadows when the sun is lower same thing with the moon’s Shadow during an eclipse that’s why the shadow becomes elongated it moves faster the speed is faster too this is a map that I made I made a
Series of maps of for each region of the United States that gives you quite a bit of detail so this map can be used again as a navigation on Eclipse day um one thing you’ll notice too is um there’s a tiny bit of Michigan that’s inside the path of
Totality now sometimes in news stories you’ll see that you’ll hear that there are 13 states within the path well that’s not quite true there’s actually 15 states in the path but two states just have a tiny Corner Michigan is one and Tennessee is the other Tennessee has
A tiny Corner in the path of totality so there’s 15 states within the path of totality and this gives you a good overview of the eclipse it tells you the times the duration how much partial eclipse uh this has been a very popular map now I’m going to show you some maps
From the Field Guide to the eclipses that I did with my friend Michael bakit who is uh retired senior editor from astronomy magazine this is a cover of the book and um so these uh are pages from our Field Guide that go into great detail um so you can determine pretty much down
To the second if you are near the center of the eclipse path for how much duration you’re going to reach these are extremely accurate calculations and the calculations that I make in collaboration with my friends zavier juer and Fred espac calculations that I make take into account the rough edges of the
Moon in the old days um 15 years ago in in the old days um Eclipse mappers assumed that um that that the moon was perfectly round and that’s not an unreasonable assumption because it’s pretty close but if you look at the Moon with binoculars you can clearly see that the
Limb of the Moon the edge of the moon is a bit rough you can see some mountains and craters and and valleys right on the edge so using that data that became available about a dozen years ago from the Japanese and American spacecraft we now have a very precise
Model of the moon’s shape and using that very precise model and it gets even worse because the moon isn’t fixed or it’s not showing it it’s showing the same face to us it’s tily locked but it’s got a little bit of a wobble and that wobble is called
Libration and so we also have to take into account libration and how the the moon’s shape changes with each each little wobble that that it encounters so so there’s quite a bit of computation that goes into this but um the end result now is that accounting
For um the moon’s shape uh we believe that we have less than uh we are within 1 second Precision of eclipse Precision of of of eclipse predictions um before it was several seconds um now it’s less than one second and we can also determine the edge path very accurately as
Well right now we’re scrolling through some of the pages in the field guide and um the information that you can get from these Pages this shows you the times of greatest Eclipse so um this area here has great The Cliffs at 20:3 p.m. central daylight time that’s how you would read that and
A duration of 3 minutes and 40 seconds um in this map I don’t I intentionally don’t give any information about partial eclipse because if somebody is here I don’t want them to think that they’ve got 99% partial eclipse so because I I’ve encountered people who believe if
They have 99% partial eclipse that’s 99% of everything 99% of a partial eclipse is z% of a total eclipse the difference literally is night and day it it literally is it’s the difference between a a daylight uh certainly a very dim daylight but sudden darkness and an astonishing sight it it
It’s a qualitative difference between the two so um I hope everyone in this room can drive at least the what what is it 100 miles or so to wanetta or that area 100 miles or so maybe 150 that’s nothing compared to the glory of seeing a total solar eclipse so I would
Encourage you all to make that make that uh trip you’ll probably get I I didn’t look it up but I’m guessing you probably have 96 97% partial eclipse here something like that but again it’s 0% toal Eclipse so make that drive okay now we’re covering the the
Great Lakes the duration of the eclipse is diminishing a bit now it’s 3 minutes and 39 seconds is the maximum Eclipse but that’s still a very healthy duration what’s interesting about this eclipse is that the duration is nearly twice as long as the 2017 Eclipse so it’s a very good duration
I’ve seen longer eclipses but this will be one of the longer ones I’ve seen typically recent eclipses uh have been one or two minutes the one in 2017 was two minutes and 40 seconds um last April if you can believe it I traveled to Australia for total solar eclipse
Less than one minute I literally traveled all the way around the world but it was worth it let me tell you because the it it was one of the most impressive eclipses because we had a giant solar prominence embedded in the corona during eclipse and that was
Magnificent and all of us who went were were thrilled for even for less than one minute of of totality it’s worth traveling to the ends of the earth and now we’re coming to the end of our Clips path Prince Edward Island would be an interesting place um
I understand there’s a very Scenic ligh house on the very tip that will be a popular location if if it’s clear that day and now we come to the very end New Finland and the island of New Finland and um after New Finland the eclipse will progress into into the
North Atlantic Ocean it will come not too far from the British Isles but not quite the British Isles will see an interesting site though they will see a sunset partial eclipse which be very dramatic um I’ve seen some very cool Sunset eclipses um so so that’s what the people in the UK
Get so these are these are the core maps in our Field Guide uh that relate to the 2024 path as I said earlier this is designed to be used on the chase okay now we’re going to visit some interesting places some interesting twists to see the eclipse did you know
That there are five NASA crude spacecraft in museums inside the path of totality isn’t that amazing that’s remarkable including W canetta I think two Apollos a Skylab a g and two Geminis so if you’re going to any of these places or in in around that would
Be a great side visit to see and probably all of these places uh will have great Eclipse viewing events on Eclipse station so that’s that’s one little um twist or wrinkle uh for for finding a great place to see the eclipse this is a really cool
Map this is one of my favorite Maps um how much sun shine you can simulate sunshine on outer planets uh during a partial solar eclipse so if you are here at maximum partial eclipse you get the same sunlight as you would if you were standing on Mars here you’re standing on
Series a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt here you’re standing on Jupiter and then Saturn and then these detailed maps show it get closer Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto so um if you can’t get to the eclipse you can at least think well I got to Jupiter or something actually that’s probably
Roughly where Kalamazoo is I would say is roughly a Jupiter level brightness of sunshine so all right and if you want to see the eclipse from Corona or Sun Valley or Shadowland or moon or best of all Eclipse Island and New Finland you’ve got choices so these are not all but well
These are all the the key and this is Moon Shadows these are some of the key places um that I found with Eclipse related names so that could be a cool destination to go all right now another cool map these are the national parks inside the eclipse
Path okay a national park is a great place to see the eclipse because um you’re surrounded by natural beauty and and um uh you’re you’re but but also what’s interesting about visiting um national parks for the eclipse is generally they have dark night skies and the eclipse by definition
Happens during the new moon when there’s no interference from the moon at night so uh you can enjoy the eclipse during the day and the Milky Way at night that’s good combination some people like to see the eclipse from a very high location there have been some very interesting
Historical records of people who saw the shadow racing across the landscape from on top of Pikes Peak in 1878 and and other eclipses so this is a guide to some interesting places to see um in New England uh actually there’s quite few ski areas that may be running chair lifts so in Upper
Vermonter New Hampshire you might be able to just take a chair lift up and see the shadow racing across a landscape if it’s clear that day these are planetariums inside the eclipse path of course you don’t want to be inside the planetarium but the planetarium is is
Going to be your local source of information for for uh for eclipse and pro and maybe where you get your eclipse glasses and and they will certainly have programs going on so um so this is a list of great places to go uh in this area it looks like
University of Toledo Bowling Green State universities Armstrong Aon Space Museum that’ll be a cool place to go stadiums and Speedways the people who like to be on a Mountaintop will enjoy what I call a me clips people in the stadium will enjoy a we clipse okay and it’s a personal choice
It’s it’s an amazing experience to to be in a stadium with thousands of other people and and totality comes um and then that happened in 2017 in several venues um but uh it’s not for everyone but if if that’s what what you would like then this is for you there’s two
Major league baseball stadiums inside the path and they both have home games that day and I’m pretty sure that they both are going to arrange their schedule so that the game starts probably right after the eclipse or something so that that’ll be an interesting choice or
Venue now these are zoos in the path okay and everyone’s heard stories about the reactions of birds and bees and animals to an eclipse well if you want to do some citizen science go to one of these zoos and uh looks like the closest one here is Toledo Zoological Gardens
Cleveland has a Zoo Indianapolis and so forth I would like the African safari Wildlife par that might be the best one okay now we’re going to talk about the impact of the eclipse and um it’s going to be a big deal I made this very detailed calculation of estimating how many
People will come to see the eclipse and this is based on two assumptions that people will drive the shortest path from their location to the center line of the eclipse and the second assumption is that if you live near the eclipse you are more likely to come that
See the eclipse so putting some numbers on that um this is the analysis that I came up with so you can see how the the drive patterns if if people drive the shest path they’ll Converge on these places and the places with the larger circles are going to receive more people
Um uh down in Texas uh by Ken there my model predicts that they will have about um half a million people coming to that one spot alone so watch out so now I isolate some of these what I call Drive sheds by destination States so these are the
Destinations uh for Indiana so you can see Indi is going to draw people from South Carolina through North North Dakota of course this isn’t 100% accurate but I’m working on averages on average most people will drive the shores path some people will go left some people will go right but
I’m I’m trying to look at the big picture and determine averages this is the drive sheds for Ohio and uh this is where some of you will end up on ecliff C see Ohio draws a lot of people from Detroit um and and through through most of
Michigan and I also used very detailed sensus demographic data to compute with pretty high degree of accuracy how many people live inside the path by State for the entire United States it’s about 31 1.6 million people that’s almost 10% of the entire country already living inside the
Path and of of that 31 million people if you assume 10% will have friends and relatives come to visit for the eclipse just from that you’ve got a big Eclipse crowd Tennessee just a tiny quarter has 80 people um this is another view thir as I said
31.6 million people live inside the path um but if you look at this you’ll also see um that over half of the United States lives within 250 miles of the eclipse path that means over half of the US it’s not an unreasonable drive to come to the
Eclipse now this is what the sky will look like during the eclipse um and these are What’s called the Sara cycle the Sara cycle is a periodicity or a rhythm in Eclipse patterns there is a rhythm to eclipses you don’t see that Rhythm so you don’t see that Rhythm at
All from one Eclipse to the next one but there is a pattern of 18 years 11 days and 8 hours called the Sorrows where you see this Rhythm and so they happen to have similar circumstances the eclipse in this Soros on happens to be in the same Soros as the eclipse of
2186 talk to any serious Eclipse geek and 2186 is on their calendar because because it’s an exceptionally long Eclipse 7 minutes and 29 seconds the theoretical longest possible to solar eclipse is 7 minutes and 31 seconds so that’s awfully close this is a view of of all the Sorrows these are all
Of the solar eclipses of the 21st century partials annular TS all of them and they’re organized by this Rhythm called the Soros and so we’re going to slowly zoom in on our eclipse coming up which is right here here it is this is the 2024 eclipse coming up the next one in
This Soros is 2042 in 18 years 20 60 2078 and and so forth um so this is how all the eclipses are organized now we’re we’re back to this view you will you will definitely see Jupiter Mercury and Venus Saturn and Mars maybe maybe not if if you really
Look for them you’ll you may see them but what I’ll be looking for is I’m going to be allocating maybe 10 seconds of the precious four minutes with binoculars and I’m going to look at Jupiter because within one degree of Jupiter there’s going to be a comet it probably won’t be
As bright enough to see with your eye but it’ll be visible with binoculars if you know where to look so I will look but I will only allocate a small amount of time to that now here are some uh this is from the annular eclipse last October and I actually went to this
Place called the Vista Grande Overlook for an annular Eclipse um I went to the very edge of the eclipse path to see an extended duration of a phenomena called Bailey seeds and it lasted for over five minutes if you’re in the center during an annular it only lasts a few seconds now here
Is I I showed this to you before during the animation but note that the shadow here has these inflection points and when I first started making these Maps I noticed these straight edges and then these turning points and I I wondered to myself what does this mean
And in collaboration with uh a couple of experts um we we all came to the consensus that each of these straight segments means that you will see one particular Bailey bead as the diamond ring if you don’t know the diamond ring happens at the very beginning and very
End of total solar eclipse it’s one of the the peak moments of the eclipse and um it’s it’s actually the very last baile speed that that is a diamond ring but something happens interesting here and um after puzzling over it for a while myself and a couple of colleagues
Figure it out we figured out those turning points can predict where you will see uh a phenomena called the double diamond ring and that is instead of Bailey be Bailey’s beads converging to a single they converge to two separated single beads you can see these inflection points more clearly in this
Map for example here is one and then this area very clearly shows that inflection so if you position yourself here then you’re guarant to see a double diamond ring during either the beginning or end of total solar eclipse so this is the world premiere these are the first ever Maps
Produced that predict exactly where you will see the double diamond ring either at the beginning for the green or at the end for the blue so if you want to see a double diamond ring um this is your guide the thicker lines are the Double Diamond rings that I
Expect to be more prominent the thin lines they might be subtle you might see it in a photograph but it might not not have been so obvious to the eye but uh I’ve uh produced a series of 15 Maps I haven’t published them yet I’m going to be publishing them in the
Coming weeks so you are the first to see these maps and um I I’ll say a couple of other things about it too is um there’s some nice okay this is another map showing the area where many of you will be um wetta myy and so forth and and one thing
I’ll say about this is there there’s some enticing thick lines where you’ll see Double Diamond rings but if you’re on the edge you’ll only get one or two minutes of totality so I would advise people to seek if they want to see a double dime ring seek these spots out in
The center of the past so you’re not sacrificing totality um and here’s a closeup of these lines so sometime next week if uh you go to my website Great American eclips uh you’ll see these new maps prominently published where you can see the double diamond ring here’s an interesting circumstance see that blue
Line right along Lake y Coastline where Cleveland is that’s going to be an amazing view Cleveland is close to the center line so they’re going to get a great double diamond ring on top of it future eclipses this is our last section this now we’re going to present some
Maps from our atlas of solar eclipses this was a big project that uh Michael Bach and I worked on this this book took a year of my life to produce it was it was a lot of calculation and uh so first of all for coming eclipses when was the last eclipse in Michigan
1954 when will the next one be 2099 and I I did the meth I used my GIS software um this took a lot of work too but I I was able to compute this with the gis software the state with uh I think Arizona has the longest Gap to the next
Eclipse which was 2205 and um I think Delaware also had 2144 okay now this is the very next to solar eclipse it starts in um it starts actually it starts in in Siberia and then it crosses Greenland Iceland and ends at Sunset over Spain it’s almost sunset in Spain and it will
End very close to sunset in the mayorca the baleric islands um in the Mediterranean so um if you get the bug after April 8th buy a plane ticket for Spain in 2026 this is a detail of of the path through Greenland uh there’s a large FJ down
Here that my friend Jay Anderson said has a microclimate that may be very favorable on Eclipse day it may be cloudy in the surrounding area but this particular fur um may very well have clear skies so there’s going to be uh some ships that that go to those
Locations um I’d like to go there but I’ve committed to taking my whole family to Spain so we’re going to find a big house in Spain and just have a big Eclipse party there so here’s a little more detail on the next total solar eclipse in Spain so and after oh even more
Detail you can see that um since a shadow is at such an oblique angle it becomes very elongated that happens at every Eclipse Shadows get long and skinny both at Sunrise when they begin and at Sunset when they end it’s not a very long Eclipse but as
I said um I travel the world to see a one minute Eclipse because they’re all so remarkable now after 2026 this is a very long duration eclipse in the summer of 2027 you can see it goes over Gibralter the far south of Spain Morocco Algeria um Libya and Egypt I will be
Right here in Luxor I’ve already made my booking for the 2027 Eclipse um to to see the eclipse from the ancient ruins of Luxor wow what an opportunity so I grabbed that opportunity so um that’s only three years from now and um again if if you get the eclipse bug
This is a great trip um there’s there’s going to be ships um in the Mediterranean now when is the next us Eclipse turns out that a lot of journalists in in the clip stories recently get it wrong they think it’s 2044 and 2045 but they always forget the
2033 total Eclipse that passes over Northwest Alaska and uh so that’s less than nine years after the April 8th Eclipse so it’s it’s not that long until that Eclipse now unfortunately there there aren’t uh very many hotels and and places in in this path but the Intrepid
Will go I I’ll certainly go I haven’t made my booking yet though that comes later um an interesting fact about the Alaska eclipse is the same corner of Alaska is the only part that doesn’t get a partial eclipse in April and they get a total eclipse in 2033 now
After um this is the second to to next eclipse in the US this is in 2044 it begins in Greenland at Sunrise and it progresses over Canada and ends at Sunset over North Dakota and Montana so um it passes over some great spots in Canada as well and this is the big
One uh you think this eclipse is going to be long with 4 minutes and 28 seconds seconds how about 6 minutes and 6 seconds because that’s a treat that we have coming on August 12th 2045 and um this Eclipse passes the US from California to Florida and uh it you can
See um the the longest duration for this Eclipse um is going to be just off the coast of Florida Florida will be a key spot uh because of the long duration um but also uh good weather prospects so in in Florida you’ve got two great choices for the total solar
Eclipse you can if you’re a Disney fan go to Orlando go to Disney World if you’re a space nerd go Cape Canaveral and watch the eclipse and I’m not sure yet where I’m going but and actually I’ll be 89 years old so um I’m trying to live a healthy
Lifestyle so that uh I have the longevity to make it to 2045 and hopefully Beyond so these are the these are some of the coming eclipses uh here you’ll see Florida this whole band of Florida gets over six minutes of of total solar eclipse that’s remarkable that’s a very long Eclipse
Like I said earlier the theoretical maximum is just over seven and a half minutes and now uh these uh uh these are alal and annular solar eclipses around the world solar eclipses aren’t particularly rare people often say that it’s rare what’s rare is not that they happen
Somewhere in the world it’s rare that they come to you and there’s an eclipse coming very close to you 100 150 miles from here so um that’s a very rare circumstance and so of course I would urge you all to make the the short trip to the eclipse from
Here um and once you really get the bug this literally is your vacation planner um I I can look at these and I know pretty much where I will be for each of them and um I’d like to now uh open this up for question and answer
Now in a few seconds behind me there’s going to be a video that starts and this video I took from Chile uh from an eclipse in Chile and so this will show you um what what changes in the sky brightness you’re not seeing the eclipse itself but you’re seeing the shadow
Moving over the landscape and to set some con context uh this was our location uh we were in this location vuna in a valley with uh several major observatories on the ridge line as you saw before the eclipse is coming very close now and this is happening in real time
This is not a time lapse this is real time and so while we watch this and you can continue watching this it it’ll be two or three more minutes um I’m happy to take any of your questions all right thank you Michael that’s great let’s give a round of applause real quick
And I just want to reemphasize before we take questions you know maybe some of you members uh saw me give the eclipse talk back in September at the Nature Center and I used a few of his Maps but remember throughout this whole presentation those Maps were his he made
Them so I think that deserves a round of fluse right there amazing work all right so let’s go ahead and take questions wait for the microphone so the folks at home can uh hear you we uh maxed out around 164 at home so that’s great we had a huge crowd here
And and at home hi Michael welcome to kalamazo um you explained or you showed a slide about the SOS cycles and I understand that there’s a periodicity of 18 years and plus plus or minus uh but what I don’t understand is why they’re overlapping and not consecutive can you
Explain that a little bit please okay that’s a great question because I I expected that as well when I made the same diagram for the last eclipse or other eclipses they were not overlapping that you saw a neat progression um but then the second one that I showed which showed the ones from
2024 to 2186 they showed that knee progression without overlaps and I emailed my friend Fred esac and I asked him that exact question and he gave me a long technical answer but the answer boiled down to that um he said don’t forget that while the latitude shift is more prominent
There’s also a longitudinal shift and uh I I can’t recall the explanation well enough but it has to do with with combining those shifts and and Fred had had a clear explanation for it did I answer your question no okay they’re all from different Saros cycles and I just don’t understand how
The Saros Cycles can be overlapping rather than cons oh okay um that was my that was my yeah it it it it’s uh the sarus is is basically a a beat phenomena between um three different types of months there’s a lunar month and then uh it’s called Sonic and I I I
Can’t remember all the details but it’s it’s a it’s a beat phenomena where different um different types of months repeat a pattern uh there’s a small Co in there if you have that email from espan send it to me and I’ll make it into a newsletter article okay Karen
Ken so I really enjoyed your presentation um and I was intrigued by The Double Diamond map and I’m not sure I’ve completely understood it in order to see the Double Diamonds do you have to actually be right on one of those lines or is it like lines you would
Pretty much have to be very clo either on or very close to the line to see the double diamond ring um but you know um I I plotted out um I plotted out uh um you know all of those shapes and and I basically did a connect the dots I I
Had to do it manually I I tried to find an automated way to do it with the gis I just couldn’t so I had to manually do the connect the dots to to draw those lines but it’s very clear um when when you compare those lines to the underlying shapes of the men’s
Shadows thank you the lights I I’m Jack from Papa outstanding presentation can you explain why what it is about the distance between the Moon the Earth and the Sun that varies that causes these different patterns sometimes it’s like I would expect a long straight one but sometimes you got
A backward C and sometimes you got a inverted SE what’s going on between the the ones that seem to go backwards are always in the polar regions or or part of it is in the polar region has to be in the polar region because for an eclipse to
Go um east to west instead of west to east the normal Eclipse path is west to east but at very high latitudes if the Earth is tilted towards the Sun a bit which can it can be tilted up to 23 and a half degrees uh depending on the
Season then the shadow can actually go nor uh above the North Pole and hit the Earth above the North Pole and then curve around and that’s why you see the backwards and and those C shapes they all happen at high latitude the other major factor is the time of year so so
That heavily influences the shape the you know because typically there’re it’s a boomerang shape so so there’s several factors but it depends the main factor is where the shadow hits the Earth at a high latitude or equatorial region well thank you for coming to kalamazo and thank you for your good
Work it’s wonderful um my wife and I planned to go what we thought was the Obscure little town of Mentor Ohio and we were not a question just a comment we’re surprised to see you actually had it listed on uh on one of your Maps so good job thank you
Yeah I I I’d like to say a little bit about how an eclipse Chaser thinks and um obviously the most important consideration is weather okay that’s by far the most important consideration but after weather then it’s Mobility what are your Mobility options and I personally chose um Fredericksburg Texas
Because um it it’s got reasonbly good weather prospects and it’s very close to the center line but if you look um at a road map of Texas Fredericksburg has six highways radiating out that means on Eclipse morning if I have patchy clouds in Frederickburg I’ve got six ways to
Go so when an eclipse chaser a serious Eclipse Chaser chooses a location not only you choose uh for weather and duration but you also choose for Mobility I did the same thing in 2017 I chose cter Wyoming because Interstate 80 had a long section that was close to the center line and
Castra was right in the middle of that long section so I had that Mobility options so I really appreciate your presentation but I have to ask one thing for those of us who are hoping that we live to be 144 years old to see the 2099 solar eclipse
Over Southwest Michigan when are you gonna publish that map I want to know uh I medical science is on its way Over My Dead Body no I I I I I haven’t published anything detail that far out I I published very detailed maps out to
2045 um I’ll probably do more um a after April you know I I run the website called Great American Eclipse I know things are going to quiet down and kind of slow down after the eclipse and I’m thinking of Shifting my focus from America to more of a global thing
Because there isn’t going to be one in the US for quite a while so um I I’ll keep active um but it’ll you know it began for for me it began as a hobby and then my wife helped turn it into a business she runs the business side of
It and uh now I’d like to take it back to just being a hobby thank you so much uh early on in your presentation you mentioned about theh speed of the Shadow moving and the geometry involved can you explain a little bit more of that again there’s actually a really interesting fact about
That um that I’ll get to um but first of all um so your question is why does the speed increase well the uh a total solar eclipse the shadow is slowest um when it is um at the point of grest eclipse the center point of the
Eclipse um and it has to do with thinking about how Shadows get projected um at at the midpoint of the eclipse the shadow to the Earth’s surface okay and then as a shadow progresses it wraps around the earth and because of the curvature of the earth you have an oblique angle well that
Oblique angle not only makes a shadow longer but it makes a shadow faster okay but now here’s the really interesting mind-blowing fact that even some people who are experts don’t understand this but I’ll I’ll say this um for an extremely brief moment in time the speed of the Earth’s Shadow at
Sunset at the moment the shadow lifts off the Earth and is at the very edge of the Earth for an extremely brief moment the speed of the Shadow is faster than the speed of light it’s super luminal and how can that be and that that trips
Up a lot of people people it’s because a shadow is not a physical thing it’s a projection a projection can move faster than the speed of light you can shine a laser pointer at night from one galaxy to the next and that projection is moving much much faster than the speed
Of light but it’s just a projection Shadows are the same so for a very brief moment it’s super luminal faster than the speed of light but that moment is extremely short a friend of mine actually calculated it’s a small fraction of a second we will try to get to some
Questions on Zoom by the way so we we’ll do the best we can but we do have a lot of people that actually came to the meeting so H thank you so much Michael this is wonderful um a so I caught the eclipse bug a few years ago in
2017 luck uh uh Smiled On Me that day I was just in a friend’s backyard in Kentucky because she was in the path of totality and weather happened to be perfect you mentioned that you’ve chosen a location based on Mobility um because clearly you you know know the value of
Getting out of the way of clouds have you as an eclipse Chaser ever been struck with clouds at that most inopportune time and what did that feel like and how did you recover great question um I’ve seen I’ve seen 11 toll solar eclipses and four annular eclipses and I’ve only been clouded once
And it was for an annular Eclipse my first annular eclipse and that’s a Pity I I’ll explain to you why um but of the 11 total solar eclipses um I’ve seen and I have a perfect record three of them I had to take aase of
Action okay uh I drove in 1999 I drove from Germany down into Austria because the weather was was rotten on Eclipse day in 1999 and I drove far enough and and it worked out for me um and it also happened a couple of other in Australia
I had to drive couple of hours Inland to evade the coastal clouds on Eclipse morning um so three times I took evasive action and three times it worked um so uh but now I I’ll come back to that first annular that um I missed and and that actually was a
Heartbreaker um okay now uh a total solar eclipse is far more dramatic than an annular Eclipse except there is one type of anular eclipse that’s very very dramatic to see not quite a total but it’s worth seeing and that’s um Sun uh annular Eclipse exactly at sunset or sunrise
And what’s so special about seeing annular eclips at sunset or Sunrise is two things one is that you’re looking through some heavy atmosphere with a lot of refraction and refraction of of different levels so so you’ll see this amazing squashed ring uh so that that’s one thing that that you’ll see um and
Uh and and then the uh other advantage of of a sunset or Sunrise is if if you’re where the atmosphere is heavy enough you can look directly at it without any filters okay and um and and that’s that’s a circumstance I had for my very first annular eclipse on January 4th
1992 I was on Catalina Island where the eclipse was supposed to be maximum at Sunset and I got clouded so um so I I at someday I I will find another annular Eclipse that I can see it sunset or Sunrise I’ve got a few ideas all right let’s go ahead and get
One from home so uh Greg why don’t you go ahead and ask your question from home oh okay um excellent presentation by the way um I’ve I’ve actually an eclipse Chas so I’ve been on a 13 total and three uh annual and I have a 77% uh success rate for the totals and
100% for the annular and I want and I saw both transits of Venus from beginning to end and um my my question is just the comment uh you mentioned for Florida you know the August 2045 Eclipse um I I reside in Florida on the Gulf Coast and I’ve been here since
1990 and August and September are the worst months in Florida because it’s hurricane season and and as a matter of fact um the August um the August eclipse in 2017 one week later we got hit by a category five hurricane Irma luckily it it was category two by the time it hit
Us it went right through the middle of the state there was absolutely nowhere to hide so and and then if the hurricanes are side what happens in the morning it starts out clear and this clouds start building and then by noon time it’s either totally overcast or it’s raining
Out and then it starts clearing in the evening again so it’s very very iffy if you know I wouldn’t recommend to come to Florida you know for the due to the weather for the uh August Eclipse yeah it’ll pass right through the Disney parks which is amazing that’s going to
Be great PR for Disney and Universal and but um that that that’s just you know for my experience living here 30 years your your comment brings up another related interesting point of a circumstance for this April Eclipse I didn’t show it in my presentation but I
Made a map that showed all the tornado tracks in April and it showed the path of the eclipse and there’s very strong correlation between them two so uh some people are going to have fun chasing a tornado and an eclipse on the same day I’m sure someone will do it uh
Tornado tornado all spring I actually April 8th oh well no what I did was I I took the data from a couple days before and a couple days after so I would have enough data yeah do not observe the eclipse from a trailer par Park on April
8 you’re a goner we have one more question here no okay uh I I did see some nice technical questions on Zoom but I’m gonna encourage those people to join us uh next month for the general meeting because we will have none other than Mr Eclipse some South Fred espac uh via
Zoom because he didn’t want to come to Kazoo he’s afraid to get Co and miss the eclipse that’s how obsessed he is he doesn’t want to take any es uh so just want to again thank you to Michael Zyer for coming all the way from Santa
Fe thank you very much and again because uh Jay Anderson last month got snowed in or we had to kind of cancel on them because things were canceled here again Michael is our only live speaker in the entire Series so we really really appreciate him coming coming here