[X] My Assistant

[PDP8E]

As all of you know, by now, there will be an amazing Total Solar Eclipse this summer in North America stretching from coast to coast, and basically from 10 AM to 2 PM local time, from west to east.
An estimated 75 million people will be less than a half day's drive away from totality.
My family and I will be in Missouri that day, prepared to zip east or west in case of inclement weather.
Do you plan on observing this event?

[fredk]

From extreme western Idaho a plane was visible flying into the umbra. I caught this with a time lapse sequence - here are two frames, about 6 seconds apart, showing the contrail just before and just after second contact:

The earlier frame has the shorter exposure, yet the trail appears brighter in it, so it's clear that the contrail darkened substantially (my goal is to end up with a radiometrically calibrated time lapse).

With the sun in the SE at the time, the plane must've been flying roughly south to north. With an estimate of it's altitude there may be some hope in identifying the flight. But from the plane the sun would've been 45 degrees high and roughly 35 degrees to the right as viewed through the starboard windows. Probably a difficult observation with typical airline windows. But of course the darkening of the sky and landscape would've been obvious.

I'm sure there were more examples of this given how packed the US airspace is.