- Hi, it's Parris from Epic Review Guys,
and there's something exciting to watch today.
And no, I don't mean the Thursday Night Football game,
though I will be watching that, too.
But before that, I'm going to take the kids out in the yard
about six o'clock PM Central time to watch
the partial solar eclipse.
Now, do you have your telescope,
your binoculars, your high-tech gear all ready?
Well, put it all away.
You won't need any of that.
All you need is two sheets of paper.
♫ Epic Review Guys ♫
Now, in our house, we like eclipses,
solar eclipses and lunar eclipses.
Jimana's big on science,
and she always wants to see the eclipses.
She has a little trouble with the lunar eclipses, though,
that are in the middle of the night.
If I get up to watch them, she'll tell me the night before,
"Wake me up, I wanna see it,"
but I can't get her to wake up to go out
and see them usually.
But solar eclipses, she should be good with.
In any case, these eclipses remind us
that there's lots of interesting things to see in the sky,
which I got a real lesson on this morning.
I walked Jimana to school,
and we saw a really nice, beautiful red sunrise.
On my way home, when I turned the corner
so that my back was to the sun, I saw a rainbow
which isn't that unique, except that it was not raining,
and that all the clouds around the rainbow
were bathed in the red light of the sunrise.
Here is a picture of it.
Now, it wasn't raining anywhere around Austin,
so it may have been that the sunlight
was hitting virga, which is rain that falls
out of the clouds, but as it falls down into the drier air,
it evaporates and it never reaches the ground.
It's like that Madonna song, Like a Virga,
condensed for the very first time.
Or, maybe not.
But, it may also have been ice crystals,
little frozen ice crystals that caught the light.
But this was a full-fledged rainbow
with no rain, and it was a sunrise rainbow.
If they don't have a My Little Pony with that name,
they ought to.
There is always cool stuff happening in the sky,
so keep looking.
Now, for today's eclipse, it will be this afternoon,
and you'll be able to see it over most of North America.
I can tell you that here in the Central Time Zone,
where Austin is, that it will start at about five o'clock
and it lasts a couple hours.
So, you may not wanna go watch the whole thing,
'cause it's a slow process.
But you will wanna see it when it's at its maximum,
which is when the biggest chunk of the sun
looks like it's missing.
And that's about halfway through.
So, Central time, that'll be about six o'clock.
That'll be the prime viewing time.
Now, Jimana and I will be out there
observing and recording,
and I'll put up our video of today's partial solar eclipse.
It's gonna be partly cloudy here all day,
but it's supposed to be mostly clear by that time,
so we're hoping we'll have good luck with that.
Let me show you how we're going to watch
the partial solar eclipse.
No telescope, no binoculars, and no looking at the sun.
It's a clever way, that you probably learned about this
in elementary school.
Or, if you're still in elementary school,
hopefully your science teacher will tell you about this.
It's a really interesting lesson in optics and physics
and how your eyeball works.
It also lets you safely watch
a partial or complete solar eclipse.
You will need, all you'll need,
now there are fancier ways to do this.
You just need two old plain pieces of paper, and,
a pin, or just some sharp metal object
that you can take and poke a hole
in one of the pieces of paper.
Now, you want this to basically be a round hole.
And sometimes it sort of closes
after you poke it with a pin.
The paper comes back in,
so you may have to widen it a little.
You do have to experiment a little with this,
to see what works best.
So, you have your piece of paper.
Or, if you're fancy, a piece of cardboard.
Take your pin, poke a hole in it.
Preferably near the center, because this piece of paper,
it's a pretty good hole,
is going to provide the shadow over the other paper
that will allow you to see that.
I've got my piece of paper with my hole.
I don't know why I'm zooming in to show you this.
I'm pretty sure you know what a piece of paper
with a hole in it looks like.
But, that's what you're looking for,
as round a hole as you can get.
Now, you're not going to look through the hole.
Remember, never look at the sun
in any way, shape, or form.
What you're going to do is basically hold
this piece of paper up so that it's pointing at the sun.
And this is where it's a little easier if it's cardboard
and it's not doing this sort of stuff on you.
But, hold it as straight as you can.
That little hole there is gonna let through
just a tiny amount of sunlight,
and it basically works like a lens does,
in that it is going to flip the image over
and let you see, without all the blinding glare of the sun.
So, you gotta take this piece of paper with the hole,
point it towards the sun, without looking at the sun.
Then, you take your other piece of paper
and you're gonna use this as the projector screen,
sort of, and the sunlight,
the little bit that comes through the hole there will,
as it moves away from the hole,
will get larger, but also dimmer.
And it will actually let you see the sun.
Okay, the sun did come out, so I get to show you this.
Here's my piece of paper with the hole.
Another plain piece of paper.
Pointing this towards the sun,
and you notice it creates its own shadow,
so that's what's gonna let you see the sun.
Now, you have to get to the right angle.
I've got some leaves of the tree there.
Now, as I bring it in closer, it gets brighter,
but smaller.
As I pull it further away from the other piece of paper,
larger, but dimmer.
And you just have to experiment with that.
Now, of course, you're just gonna see a round circle
if you go out and do it right now.
But, at the maximum time of the eclipse,
you should see this circle with a chunk of it missing.
There is one other way that's safe
to look at the solar eclipse.
Now, nothing homemade.
Don't try to make something yourself with sunglasses.
No, not gonna work.
If you have an approved sun filter
that you've bought at a science center,
or something like that,
they can sell you a viewing device
like this Sun Peek Mask from the Pacific Science Center
in Seattle, that is made to let you safely look at it,
but that is the only time you can ever do that.
At this point, if you're just thinking of doing it,
you probably don't have the time
to run over and buy one of these,
so, you're going to be doing it
with the piece of paper with the hole
and the other piece of paper.
Again, experiment with the distances,
maybe different colored pieces of paper.
It's science, so try different things.
Also, if you are lucky enough to have
maybe a room in your house
that at that time of day, the sun comes in that window,
and you can turn the lights off in the room,
maybe close the blind part way,
and just let a little bit of sunlight in,
and then hold up your piece of paper
with the hole in it, and the other piece of paper
in the darkened room, you'll see it really well.
Now, if you're thinking, "Nah, I'll see the next one.
"Haven't there been like 20 lunar eclipses
"already this year?"
Well, not quite.
And as for solar eclipses in North America,
this is it until 2017.
So you're gonna have to wait three years
for another chance to do something like this.
Now, that next solar eclipse in August 2017
is gonna be a doozy,
because it's gonna be a full solar eclipse,
where the sky goes dark as night during the day
when the eclipse is at its maximum.
And that's gonna be for the central part of the U.S.
People who are around there won't get that full effect.
But, even using something like this,
whereas today you'll see some 25, 30, 40%
of the sun missing,
on that day you may see 80 or 90%.
You may just see a sliver of the sun
that's all that's left.
So, doing this today is good practice for that.
And if you really get excited about this stuff,
you may wanna plan to, even if you have to travel,
go somewhere to see that eclipse in 2017.
If you're a kid and you really like this stuff,
tell your parents now.
"Hey, where are we gonna be during summer vacation
"in August 2017?
"I wanna go somewhere where we can see that full eclipse."
I have seen one full solar eclipse in my lifetime.
I basically got up at four in the morning.
Why am I always getting up at four in the morning?
With two friends of mine.
I was a sophomore or junior in high school.
And we drove from Seattle, across the mountains,
to eastern Washington.
And basically, we didn't know where to go to see it.
We ended up on a hillside on the side of the highway,
that a bunch of people had stopped
and gone up on the hillside with no trees.
So, we went up on the hillside, too,
with hundreds of strangers,
and we watched as the moon went completely
in front of the sun.
The sky turned dark, you could see the stars.
It was just like nighttime.
If you experience something like that,
you will remember it your entire life.
You can bet, in August 2017,
I'm going to make sure my kids get a chance
to see that total solar eclipse.
So, think of today's partial solar eclipse
as a warm-up and practice for the big one
coming in 2017.
So, Jimana and I will be out at six o'clock this afternoon,
Central time, at the peak of this partial solar eclipse,
to see what we'll be able to see.
And we'll record the whole thing,
let you know how it worked for us.
If you go out and give this a try,
which I really recommend you do,
let us know how it worked for you.
If you really didn't find this satisfactory,
then sometime before 2017,
you might wanna go out and buy some kind
of a safe viewing device.
Even if you use this only once to view a full solar eclipse,
it is so worth it to be able to see that.
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