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[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

I haven't seen this posted here yet, but Sky and Telescope promotes Curt's determination that we experienced a partial and not a total eclipse on the 4th of April 2015....and so do other timing organizations....somewhat/maybe...

See the story here:
Curt in Sky and Telescope....


Cool....

[Centaur]

Apr 6, 2015 12:09:34 GMT -6 Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe said:

I haven't seen this posted here yet, but Sky and Telescope promotes Curt's determination that we experienced a partial and not a total eclipse on the 4th of April 2015....and so do other timing organizations....somewhat/maybe...

See the story here:
Curt in Sky and Telescope....


Cool....

Thanks, Joe. It was a modern version of telling the emperor he has no clothes. The media consider NASA the go-to source for anything astronomical, even though its primary mission is to launch items into space and not pretend to be the most authoritative source for astronomy. In the cases of eclipses the media consult the eclipse predictions published on the NASA website made years ago by NASA's ex-agent Fred Espenak before he retired in 2009. I knew that Fred and his eclipse book collaborator Jean Meeus assumed a perfectly spherical Earth for eclipse predictions. That may seem somewhat reasonable except for a borderline case like the recent one.

I applaud the Starry Night programmers who did just as I did and accounted for the oblate shape of the Earth resulting in the prediction of a partial lunar eclipse for 2015 APR 04 (that's the official astronomical date format). I also must credit Sky & Telescope for eventually considering the possibility that the recent eclipse might not be best described as total after I provided a contrary comment to one of their eclipse articles. Fred Espenak indicated it may prompt him to rework some of the eclipse predictions he made for NASA.