Solar Eclipse Live From China

At starting at 8:55PM on July 21, 2009 in the planetarium of Montgomery College at Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus we will use the Internet to watch the eclipse live that is happening when the sun is shining in India, China, and the Pacific Ocean, but it is night here an no solar eclipse is visible from our location directly via a line of sight.  On March 3, 2007 we watched a live web cast of a Lunar Eclipse from our fiends in Ahvaz, Iran which was mostly clouded out here in Montgomery County.  It is now possible to see celestial spectacles anywhere on the earth from some place where it is clear. 

Because of time zone differences 0:55UT on July 22, 2009 in China is 8:55PM Daylight Eastern Standard Time on July 21, 2009 here in the Washington Metro area. 

http://eclipse.astronomy2009.org.cn/english/, "With the maximum duration of 6 min 39 s, it is the longest solar eclipse in the 21st century. Chinese mainland, along Yangtze River, is the most convenient region for observation for the eclipse. Since the weather condition in this region on July 22 is very hard to forecast, Chinese Astronomical Society, the host of IYA 2009 in China, organizes a large scale live broadcast program for the eclipse event, to try our best to let everyone have chance to enjoy the great event.

The project, "Multi-site Federated Live Broadcast of Solar Eclipse on July 22, International Year of Astronomy 2009", will take full advantages of the latest technologies in network, multimedia and the emerging Web 2.0 technologies. Multiple observation sites will be organized inside the wide eclipse region, especially large cities inside the total solar eclipse belt. Signals from different sites will be collected to a central broadcast studio through high-speed network backbones. After synthesization, public signal will be released to various portals, including website, TV, mobile phone, etc, and then accessible for the public through these portals. "

http://www.shadowandsubstance.com/
http://xjubier.free.fr/en/site_pages/solar_eclipses/TSE_2009_GoogleMapFull.html
NASA Eclipse page, "Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak, NASA/GSFC" http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html

Montgomery College's Planetarium home page

Web page by Dr. Harold Alden Williams.
Last changed  5:43PM July 11, 2009.