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Ward's World + McGraw Hill Eclipse Facts

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Eclipse Article by: Jay M. Pasachoff, Hopkins Observatory, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Fred Espenak Goddard Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Greenbelt, Maryland. Access to this content is available to Ward's World readers for free from McGraw Hill's AccessScience, an award-winning, digital STEM resource containing exclusive articles written by expert scientists and engineers; biographies of well-known scientific figures; science news, videos, and animations; and much, much more. Instructors can use AccessScience to guide students on their research project journeys, to help students understand scientific concepts, to support distance learning efforts, in flipped classroom approaches, and in countless other ways. Ward's World and AccessScience have partnered to offer educators a no-obligation, free trial subscription to AccessScience. Request your free trial today to discover how valuable AccessScience can be for you and your students! Get your free trial now. The occultation (obscuring) of one celestial body by another. Solar and lunar eclipses take place at syzygies of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, when the three bodies are in a line. At a solar eclipse, the Moon blocks the view of the Sun as seen from the Earth (Fig. 1). At a lunar eclipse, the Earth's shadow falls on the Moon, darkening it, and can be seen from wherever on Earth the Moon is above the horizon. Eclipses of the Sun could be seen from other planets as their moons are interposed between the planets and the Sun, though their superposition is not as coincidental in angular size as it is for the Earth-Moon system. Eclipses of the moons of Jupiter are well known, occurring whenever the moons pass into Jupiter's shadow. An eclipse of the Sun visible from Uranus that occurred in 2006 was imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Certain binary stars are known to eclipse each other, and the eclipses can be followed by measuring the total light from the system. + ward ' s science Content • Solar Eclipses • Phenomena • Positions and timing • Scientific value • Annular eclipses • Recent and future eclipses • Observing a solar eclipse • Lunar Eclipses • Visibility • Frequency • Future lunar eclipses Fig. 1: The August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse, as seen from Hopkins- ville, Kentucky, USA at 2:25 p.m. EDT. (Credit: NASA) Key Concepts • An eclipse is generally defined as the obscuring of one celestial body by another. • Solar and lunar eclipses take place when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are aligned. This type of event is also called a syzygy. • During a solar eclipse, the Moon blocks the view of the Sun as seen from Earth. Solar eclipses can be central or partial. Central eclipses can be total (when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are in a direct line) or annular. • Visible phenomena during a total solar eclipse include dots of light shining through valleys on the edge of the Moon, known as Baily's beads; the diamond-ring effect, which occurs when the last Baily's bead shines through; and prominence of the solar corona with equatorial streamers. • During a lunar eclipse, the Moon passes through some part of the Earth's two shadows. Lunar eclipses can be penumbral, partial, or total. • A lunar eclipse can only occur during the full moon phase, and the Moon must be near one of the two nodes of its orbit.

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