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Christmas 2000 Solar Eclipse Pictures and Accounts
By
Senior Science Writer
posted: 08:29 am ET
26 December 2000
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People cross much of North American on Christmas Day, each from their own homes, shared a common experience, a blessing from above
People cross much of North America, each from their own homes or their holiday destinations, shared a common experience on Christmas Day -- a blessing from above.
| Eclipse Pictures | |  From SPACE.com's NY headquarters: Community Producer Robert Pearlman snapped this shot with a Nikon CoolPix 950 digital camera, through a pair of welding glasses.
|  ANIMATION: Wil Milan took this sequence of images over 116 minutes from Phoenix, Arizona. He used a Tele Vue 70mm wide-field telescope, Nikon digital camera, and Takahashi tracking mount. Dark spots are sunspots.
Click to enlarge | | See images made by SPACE.com members, or Uplink yours. Click here! | The last partial eclipse of the millennium (or the first of the next, depending on your point of view) ran a course from Eastern Canada and across all of the continental United States Monday. Amateur astronomers of varying skill levels armed themselves with special eclipse glasses, welders goggles, binoculars, sheets of white paper, and masking tape, and braved often frigid temperatures, to safely watch the a bit of Moon shadow slide across the Sun. "I almost forgot about the sub-freezing temperatures," said one SPACE.com member, echoing the awe experienced by many -- especially those who used special techniques to witness their first solar eclipse. In the Northeastern United States, where 50 to 60 percent of the Sun was covered by the Moon, most people had clear skies. In Gainesville, Florida, James C. White II made a family event out of the eclipse. "Just before 12:00 noon, I put together a couple of pinhole cameras with cardboard and pricked aluminum foil and found a nice, large piece of white poster board to use as a projection screen," said White, executive director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 
James C. White II gets the whole family involved in safely watching the eclipse. | White's mother held one "camera," and his uncle held another. They projected images of the Sun onto screens held by other family members, and yet another relative took digital pictures of the activity and the eclipse. "Day to day we live lives seemingly removed from the workings ... the mechanism ... of the Cosmos," White said. "Yet on days like today, we are permitted to see behind the celestial curtains and see that mechanism." What could be better than a partial solar eclipse? A total eclipse, of course. White and four colleagues will be leading tours to southern Africa next summer to experience the first total solar eclipse of the new millennium. There are at least two solar eclipses (partial, total or annular) per year somewhere on Earth, researchers say, and the maximum number of all eclipses that can occur in a year is five. The next Christmas Day solar eclipse won't occur until the year 2307, visible off the western coast of Africa. Related Information
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