Solar Eclipse - Sixty symbols

Oh, it’s almost there, it’s almost there! Ooooh! This has to be one of the most phenomenal, astronomical events that you can see with your naked eye. I mean, I’m just looking at the sun right now. Ohh, it got a little bit brighter around the edge. MUSIC Well we are here at the University of Nottingham, in Nottingham, but we are getting ready to jump on a couple of planes to go to China so that we can still be at the University of Nottingham. Well there happens to be a total solar eclipse that’s happening in just a little over a day, and it passes, the path of totality, passes right over the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China. At the moment it looks like it is going to be cloudy, so I am really, really hoping that the clouds are not with us. Give us a smile LAUGHS Hello! AIRPORT ANNOUNCEMENT MUSIC The forecast looks very grim. It seems that there is a front moving in tomorrow morning…it doesn’t look good. MUSIC So here we are in China at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo Campus. We finally arrived. And so we are anticipating this big solar eclipse tomorrow, while we are watching occasional lightning bolts. Quite on cue, right there. They just cover the entire half of the sky, in the direction where the sun is actually supposed to rise tomorrow morning, where we are going to see this fantastic astronomical event. Maybe! So I am still keeping my hopes up but, I am not positive that we are actually going to be able to see it. MUSIC We have been travelling for two days, two and a half, I forget what day it is at the moment, but I know that tomorrow morning at 9:37 am local time… LAUGHS is when the big event happens. MUSIC Well its 4:54am and we just came out to see what the sky looks like and to see what the potential is for the solar eclipse this morning and it doesn’t look very good. Not very promising indeed. BIRD CHIRPS Beautiful, but not good for a sun … for a solar event MUSIC We went out for the sunrise this morning and the weather did not look terribly fantastic but after a little break and a cup of tea we came back out again to see the clouds not quite so thick and we can actually see the sun up there, so what I have right here is my very own solar filter that I made. This is a roll of black and white film. Now it has to be actually black and white and not the colour film that they just develop black and white but real black and white film. So you expose it to the sun and then you send it off to be developed and then it has this nice layer of sliver on there that acts as a filter for the ultra violet and the infra red that’s the most damage… most harmful for your eyes. But we have a good chance of actually getting a solar eclipse. Ok, now I am really excited! LAUGHS Yeah! In ten maybe! Ten minutes! MAN REPLIES IN CHINESE Ten minutes it will cover! MUSIC So we have just reached the first contact point and that’s when the edge of the moon first touches the edge of the sun, so it is now just starting to pass in front of it. We have about an hour now until the total eclipse phase starts. So it’s the sun, moon and earth in a straight line. The moon actually covers the sun. Well it might seem slow, it takes the moon a while to cover the sun completely but actually the shadow of the moon is barrelling across the surface of the earth at about 2,000 miles per hour. I am fascinated by the idea of what ancient people thought when the sun just completely went away. There are different stories about how they reacted. The ancient Chinese in fact, thought that dragons were attacking the sun and they were going to eat it and take it away so what they decided to do was just to make noise, beat drums, scream, make as much noise as they could to get rid of the moon and to keep the sun and so luckily every time that actually happened and they got the sun back. LAUGHS MAN SPEAKS IN CHINESE Well people have just decided to gather to watch, they have been using some of our solar eclipse glasses and the kids are playing with feathers, they don’t really know what’s going on. They think the sun looks like the crescent moon, or they keep saying “I see the crescent moon”. Because the moon is actually covering the sun. Yeah. MAN SPEAKS IN CHINESE So normally when the sun goes down the animals start to go back to their burrows and go to sleep and so right now they start to, they look like they are. The birds are kind of going away. There are small little floaty things that are leaving and the ducks just started to go hide in the trees, but a couple of kids went and yelled at them so they did not really know what to do. LAUGHS Oh it’s fantastic. Oh, it’s almost there, it’s almost there! Ooohh! Wow! LAUGHS Oh my gosh! LAUGHS Oh my gosh. This has to be one of the coolest things I have ever seen. You can see the corona glowing around the sun and the temperature just dropped completely and everyone started cheering LAUGHS It’s amazing! I completely didn’t think we were going to be able to see it like that. Fireworks are going off LAUGHS You could see a little bit of red at the very edge where the …. where we could see the last bit of light. It’s amazingly dark. When I look through my binoculars I can actually see some of the outer ring, some of the corona sort of flickering and I don’t think that is entirely due to the clouds. I actually think that has to do with the light coming out. Oh man, that is the coolest, coolest! I mean can you imagine, even thousands of years ago seeing something like this and having any idea what was going on. You can hear people yelling in the distance, screaming and cheering. LAUGHS Oh my gosh! If we could actually see, if there weren’t any clouds. Oh we can, there’s Venus. Hey there’s Venus! So we can see the planet Venus right there really bright. And if we could see the clouds around the sun we would be able to see Mercury. Yeah! This is amazing, this is amazing! The clouds are coming in a little bit more now so you can’t see it quite as well but… How does this rate on your astronomy experiences? I mean, even with the clouds this has to be one of the most phenomenal astronomical events that you can see with your naked eye. I mean I’m just looking at the sun right now. Ohh it got a little bit brighter around the edge. Ohh! And it just doesn’t happen very often in each spot on the earth. Oh my gosh! It just popped back out! That was a quick four minutes I have to tell ya! LAUGHS So the sun just popped back out on the other side of the moon so it is brighter again instantly so I am wrapping a foil around our camera so we can actually look at it again and now I have to use these. The next total solar eclipse will be in about one year from now, its July 11th, 2010 and it will go past, it will go over Easter Island and Chile and some of Argentina, so I have to figure out a good reason to go down there. LAUGHS So, a University of Nottingham campus, Easter Island maybe? We are just sitting here glowing with the enjoyment of what we just saw! It’s amazing, that four and a half minutes went so quickly! Wow!