Hey, Bill Nye here! A really fun word
you get to use when there's an eclipse
is: syzygy. Syzygy! SYZYGY! I just love saying that.
Syzygy is a word you can use when any
three objects line up in space. It could
be the Sun, Venus, and the Earth for
example. Now that's a type of syzygy that
does not produce an eclipse on Earth
because Venus is just too far away from
us for it to cover much of the Sun.
Instead we call that a transit of Venus
and it would look something like this.
Lucky for us we have this big beautiful moon. As the moon orbits the Earth, its orbit
is not quite a circle. It's an ellipse.
Sometimes it's a little closer to Earth
than other times. Now, when it's closer to
the Earth and there's syzygy, the Moon
blocks the Sun out completely and that's
a total solar eclipse.
If the Moon happens to be orbiting a
little farther from the Earth,
it doesn't quite block the Sun
completely. Instead you would see a fiery
ring in the sky. Like this!
We call this an annular eclipse and annular
means "ring-shaped." Now check this out.
Eclipses can also happen on other
planets. To hear about this let's check
in with a friend of mine.
An eclipse on Mars? That's right a few years back the
Curiosity Rover on Mars was in the right
place at the right time to catch this
awesome Martian solar eclipse.
This is Mar's moon, Phobos, passing right
in front of the Sun. Curiosity was parked
right in the shadow of Phobos for this
eclipse. Since Phobos is pretty small, it
didn't cover the entire Sun. So like Bill
said, this was an annular eclipse... on Mars!
Now that's totally awesome! Back to you, Bill
Thanks, Ashwin! So on August 21st we want everyone to go outside,
put on your special eclipse viewing
glasses, and watch the syzygy!
It's going to be a Totally Awesome Total Eclipse!
I'm CaLisa from the Planetary Society. The National Park
Service in the Planetary Society are
teaming up to make sure everyone knows
about the 2017 North American Total
Solar Eclipse. Together we created the
new Junior Ranger Eclipse Explorer
activity book. This workbook will get
kids out of the house as they learn
about the science, history, and fun of
solar eclipses. So call your nearest
National Park and ask if they have the
Eclipse Explorer book or you can
download it from nps.gov/kids or
at planetary.org/eclipse
