Eggplant.place

29d

“What an incredible coincidence it is that our moon fits exactly over our sun…”

—In his 2009 parallel-universes novel TRANSITION, Iain (M) Banks suggested that one of our planet’s near-miraculous total eclipses would be a perfect place to look for alien tourists

@bookstodon

https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/iain-banks/transition/9780349139272/

#Scottish #literature #IainMBanks #IainBanks #sciencefiction #scifi #eclipse #eclipse2026 #aliens

"Now, most jet travel on Earth is for tourism. Not business; tourism. Would our smart, curious aliens really be that different from us? I don't think so. Most of them would be tourists. Like us, they'd go on cruise ships. And would they want to actually come to a place like Earth, set foot – or tentacle, or whatever – here? Rather than visit via some sort of virtual reality set-up? Well, some would settle for second-best, yes. Maybe the majority of people would. But the high rollers, the super-wealthy, the elite, they'd want the real thing. They'd want the bragging rights, they'd want to be able to say they'd really been to whatever exotic destinations would be on a Galactic Grand Tour. And who knows what splendours they'd want to fit in; their equivalent of the Grand Canyon, or Venice, Italy, or the Great Wall of China or Yosemite or the Pyramids?

"But what I want to propose to you is that, as well as all those other wonders, they would definitely want to see that one precious thing that we have and probably nobody else does. They'd want to see our eclipse. They'd want to look through the Earth's atmosphere with their own eyes and see the moon fit over the sun, watch the light fade down to almost nothing, listen to the animals nearby fall silent and feel with their own skins the sudden chill in the air that comes with totality. Even if they can't survive in our atmosphere, even if they need a spacesuit to keep them alive, they'd still want to get as close as they possibly could to seeing it in the raw, in as close to natural conditions as it's possible to arrange. They'd want to be here, amongst us, when the shadow passes.

"So that's where you look for aliens. In the course of an eclipse totality track. When everybody else is looking awestruck at the sky, you need to be looking round for anybody who looks weird or overdressed, or who isn't coming out of their RV or their moored yacht with the heavily smoked glass.

""If they're anywhere, they're there, and as distracted – and so as vulnerable – as anybody else staring up in wonder at this astonishing, breathtaking sight.”

ALT

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28d

Here's my crappy blurry photo of the solar #eclipse2026

blurry photo of the solar eclipse. The sun is a crescent.

ALT

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28d

Partial eclipse from Germany. Really happy with how this shot turned out. Taken with an Acuter Elite Phoenix 40 and a ToupTek G3M678M.

#solareclipse #eclipse #eclipse2026 #photography #astrophotography #Astrodon #astronomy #sonnenfinsternis

Solar eclipse from Germany through an Acuter Elite Phoenix 40

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25d

A chance discovery in the solar eclipse videos: This is flight “BOX192,” an AeroLogic/DHL Boeing 777-F flying from Leipzig to Nottingham at an altitude of 36,000 ft, between Wesel and Xanten (Germany), in 49 km distance.

#solareclipse2026 #eclipse2026 #eclipse #astronomy #aviation #boeing777 #dhl #aerologic #space #mywork

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26d

What an amazing #SolarEclipse we witnessed this week! I photographed it from Peñafiel in the north of #Spain, home to a beautiful castle that provided the perfect foreground for the spectacular #eclipse. No picture can do it justice though: there's no substitute to actually seeing a total eclipse in person.

#astronomy #astrophotography #photography #eclipse2026 #SolarEclipse2026

$A photograph of a dimly lit castle silhouetted against the dusk sky. It's a combination of multiple exposures, with the Sun appearing as a sequence of discs crossing the sky diagonally above the castle. A progressively smaller fraction of the Sun is visible as the eclipse progresses. Right above the castle the eclipse reaches the total phase, with the Sun completely blocked by the Moon, revealing a fiery corona around it. The sequence continues towards the horizon, with the Sun progressively reappearing.$

ALT

Edited 26d ago

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