Astronomer’s excitement over a solar eclipse is contagious

Image: Alaska airlines/youtube

If you spend all of your time studying the stars, and you get the rare chance of seeing a total solar eclipse from an airplane, you may sound something like this thrilled astronomer.

That contagious excitement comes from astronomer Mike Kentrianakis. While many woke up early in Southeast Asia to witness the event, others took to the sky.

Flying somewhere between Honolulu and Anchorage, Alaska Airlines Flight 870 was packed with "eclipse chasers" hoping to see the first total eclipse in about a year, according to a blog post on the Alaska Airlines website.

The airline delayed that flight on purpose by 25 minutes at the request of Joe Rao, associate astronomer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium (which is famously run by Neil DeGrasse Tyson), in order to ensure that the scientists would not miss their window to see the eclipse.

For context, here are some of the words being shouted:

Totality: The "path of totality" refers to any place on Earth where you can see the total phase of the eclipse. Lunar eclipses can be seen nearly anywhere with clear skies, but solar eclipses like this one have really narrow windows. The plane just barely landed in the path of totality for this eclipse, which let everyone see it, and which is why it's shouted so many times. 

Corona: The outer atmosphere of the sun. It's normally invisible to us, because the sun would destroy our eyes before we could get a good look. But the "melts your eyes" part of the sun is largely blocked by the moon during a solar eclipse, and you can see it.

Prominences: Dense clouds of sun-gas that stream out through the corona, again normally invisible without special equipment, except during a solar eclipse. Prominent prominences can be very exciting to astronomers and space enthusiasts.


What's New

What's Rising

What's Hot