Astronomy

I'm sitting in a dark hotel room on the eve of my first - and possibly only - total solar eclipse, with my partner and step-son, and I am positively awash with emotions.

I have been waiting for this day for 30 years, since my first partial eclipse in May of 1994. That was an underwhelming experience for many reasons, but not the least of them was that I had nothing and no one to view the eclipse with.

Three decades, two astronomy degrees, 5 years operating a planetarium, and 5 years as a guide at the local observatory later, and I'm fully prepared. Today, I have more viewing glasses than i have fingers, two cameras with filters, I have my family, and I am smack dab in the middle of the path of totality.

And the forecast calls for clear skies.

I can't believe it. I can't believe that this is actually happening for me. That everything looks like it's going to work out.

The only disappointment is that I discovered that Potato World exists - it's the New Brunswick potato museum (and it's next door to my hotel) - but it's closed!

So I bought 2 sets because it looked like one set was briefly lost in the mail and this past week I got an email from Amazon that said one set I bought were “fakes.”

• Both sets have printing that matches legitimate manufactures.
• The “legitimate” set have all black filters (not the metalized filters I am used to like Thousand Oaks Optical) the “fakes” have the metalized filters.
• Both sets of glasses have the same transmittance as the Thousand Oaks filter material I use on my telescope and cameras.
• The build quality of the “legitimate” glasses is quite a bit worse than the “fakes” with the two layers of paper being misaligned

So, what I suspect is that I actually received a crappy set of “real” glasses and a well made set of counterfeits, this seems in line with the press release made by the American Astronomical Scociety.^[0]^

Some of these newly identified counterfeits are indistinguishable from genuine Qiwei products and appear to be safe. Others look like Qiwei’s eclipse glasses, but when you put them on, you realize they are no darker than ordinary sunglasses. So, these products are not just counterfeit, but also fake –– they’re sold as eclipse glasses, but they are not safe for solar viewing.

So, did anyone get unlucky enough to get some ‘real-fake’ glasses? An did anyone get a set of legitimate glasses with the non-metalized filter?

^[0]^ https://aas.org/press/american-astronomical-society-warns-counterfeit-fake-eclipse-glasses

In collaboration with Astro Alexandra (who I had not heard of), SciShow just released a video on upcoming telescopes. They don't go into too much detail on each one, but the video gives a nice overview.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/16513334

The European Space Agency has revealed that a few layers of ice approximately the width of a strand of DNA have begun to impact its Euclid telescope’s optics.

The problem was discovered after operators noticed a small but progressive decrease in the amount of light coming from stars that were repeatedly observed by the telescope’s VISible instrument.

According to the agency, small amounts of water absorbed from the air during assembly on Earth were gradually “teased out by the vacuum of space.” The water then stuck to the first surface it landed on and froze in place. Unfortunately for Euclid, some of this water has frozen on highly sensitive mission-critical components. The ice build-up is likely just a few tens of nanometres thick, which is equivalent to the width of a strand of DNA. The extreme sensitivity of the telescope’s optics means that even this tiny amount of ice is affecting the data collected by Euclid.

According to ESA, teams have been working on the issue for several months and are currently in the process of testing a newly designed procedure to de-ice the telescope’s optics. The solution devised will see operators utilizing onboard heaters to independently warn individual mirrors. After each mirror is warmed, operators will examine if there has been any change. The hope is to isolate the affected areas without having too great an impact on the telescope’s delicate thermo-optical stability.