Eclipse excitement building up

The solar eclipse craze is building up less than 2 months before the big day. This nice map resumes pretty well what you’ll be able to see from major cities in the country with and the times to adjust your schedule. (click to zoom)

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Better hope 梅雨, the rainy season, will be over by July 22nd…

eclipse-sunglasses

Amazon Japan also started selling eclipse sunglasses for the occasion: buy 4, get one for free.

Interesting language point: solar eclipse in Japanese is 日食 which basically means “eat the sun”… Sound pretty cool.

Also I’m extremely disappointed as I was invited by a now retired colleague to come to his home on 奄美大島, one of the only islands dead center on the full occultation path, but I was not able to get plane tickets to get there. There is only one plane per day from Tokyo, operated by JAL, and they sold the exclusivity of all the seats for a week to their travel agency branch JTB who sold out their insanely expensive tourist packages months and months ago… Of course, in a typical Japanese move, JAL never thought it might be a nice idea to buff up the number of flights for the once in a lifetime occasion.

If I still were a student, I would’ve taken the 48h boat trip. Alas, my salaryman life does not permit it anymore…

One thought on “Eclipse excitement building up”

  1. I was living in Stuttgart when it was in the path of totality of the solar eclipse on August 11, 1999. The local authorities had promoted the event as the “Erlebnis der Jahrtausend” (the ‘experience’ of the millenium).

    However, that morning, it was overcast – and pouring with rain – so we were unable to observe the eclipse itself. But the effect was of nightfall, total darkness and then sunrise all within two or three minutes, which in itself was something to behold shortly before lunchtime.

    This video on YouTube captures it quite well, I think:

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