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Sunday's Solar Eclipse To Be Rare, Dramatic 'Hybrid' Event

'Highly Commended' by the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013, this amazing space wallpaper is a composite shot showing the progress of an annular eclipse in May 2013.

This overview map of the Nov. 3, 2013 annular and total solar eclipse, a hybrid solar eclipse, shows the path of the event.
11/02/2013
A slice of eastern North America will undergo a weird and dramatic event early Sunday (Nov. 3) morning: a partial eclipse of the sun.
For most North American observers, the partial eclipse [ http://www.space.com/23414-dramatic-solar-eclipse-east-coast-sunday.html ] will coincide with sunrise. But within a very narrow corridor that extends for 8,345 miles (13,430 kilometers) across the planet, the disks of the sun and the moon will appear to exactly coincide, providing an example of the most unusual type of eclipse: a "hybrid" or "annular-total eclipse."
During annular solar eclipse, the sun looks like a "ring of fire," while the moon and sun line up perfectly during a total eclipse. Throughout a hybrid eclipse, however, the celestial sight transitions from annular to total. [Photos: Nov. 3 Hybrid Solar Eclipse Visibility Maps & Images [ http://www.space.com/23419-hybrid-solar-eclipse-visibility-images-november-3-2013.html ]]
If you don't have a chance to see the eclipse from your part of the world, you can watch the cosmic rarity live on SPACE.com [ http://www.space.com/19195-night-sky-planets-asteroids-webcasts.html ] courtesy of the online community observatory Slooh.com [ http://live.slooh.com/ ; live feed (currently running in 'Please stand by' mode with a bit over 8 hours to go) "Total Solar Eclipse - 11/3/2013", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJPhI6QcxPo (next below)].

The eclipse event begins at 6:45 a.m. EST (1515 GMT) and will run throughout the entirety of the eclipse.
A Rare Occurrence
During the 21st century approximately 4.9 percent of all central solar eclipses — those eclipses where the moon crosses directly in front of the disk of the sun — fall into the hybrid classification.
In most cases, an annular-total eclipse starts as an annular, or "ring of fire" [ http://www.space.com/21080-ring-of-fire-solar-eclipse-photos.html ] eclipse, because the tip of the moon's dark shadow cone — the umbra — falls just short of making contact with the Earth; so the moon appears slightly smaller than the sun producing the same effect as placing a penny atop a nickel leaving a ring of sunlight shining around the moon's edge.
Then the solar eclipse [ http://www.space.com/15584-solar-eclipses.html ] transitions to total, because the roundness of the Earth reaches up and intercepts the shadow tip near the middle of the path, then finally it reverts back to annular toward the end of the path.
However, as pointed out by the renowned Belgian eclipse calculator, Jean Meeus, the hybrid eclipse of Nov. 3 will be a special case: here the eclipse starts out as annular, then after only 15-seconds it will transition to a total eclipse, and then it remains total up to the very end of the eclipse path. The last time this happened was on Nov. 20, 1854 and the next such case after 2013 will occur on Oct. 17, 2172.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/02/sunday-solar-eclipse-rare-hybrid_n_4202543.html [with comments]; original at http://www.space.com/23442-rare-hybrid-solar-eclipse-explained.html [with embedded videos, and comments]


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NASA | Five Days of Flares and CMEs

Published on Oct 29, 2013 by NASA Goddard

This movie shows 23 of the 26 M- and X-class flares on the sun between 1800 UT Oct. 23 and 1500 UT Oct. 28, 2013, as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It also shows the coronal mass ejections -- great clouds of solar material bursting off the sun into space -- during that time as captured by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. Music: "Stella Nova" by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of the artist and Ultimae records. http://www.lars-leonhard.de / http://www.ultimae.com

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011300/a011387/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8XwfyNm5XQ [with comments]


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