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How Astronomers Used the First Concorde Prototype To Chase a Total Eclipse (vice.com)
tedlistens writes: On Wednesday, a solar eclipse gave people across a swath of Indonesia and the South Pacific the chance to see a generous 4 minutes and 9 seconds of totality: the awe-inspiring sight of the moon completely covering the sun, turning day into night and offering a rare glimpse of the corona, the gas swirling in the Sun's outer atmosphere. But in 1972, a small group of astronomers from around the globe sought a way for seeing a longer eclipse than ever before: a prototype Concorde, capable of chasing the eclipse for a whopping 74 minutes across the Sahara Desert, at twice the speed of sound.
Is this a new Slashdot record for "old news?"
A much more modern version of this is NASA's SOFIA aircraft. It observes in infrared with a large telescope. I worked on SOFIA, but had never heard of this! Incredible... even though the results were meh, that ride must have been amazing. I hope the visual portholes were good!
How soon will Branson and Bezos start ferrying the rich and famous into LEO to view such events? Brother, could you spare a billion or two USD so I can get my name on the waiting list?
Rod Stewart would travel from London to NY on the Concorde, EVERY WEEK, just to have his hair styled.
... was just how freaking huge the Sahara Desert is, that one could fly over it in the same direction non-stop for that long at twice the speed of sound without reaching the end!!!
What a majestic lady she was with a roar of a lion to match it.
The Sahara is wider than the US
Isaac Asimov wrote about following the eclipse in an airplane in a mystery / sci-fi story, The Backward Look. This was published in Casebook of the Black Widowers in 1980, and maybe in some magazines before then.
The story itself isn't one of Asimov's best; there's a convoluted story-within-the-story that features the eclipse chasing. But that mental image has stuck with me over the years. Never knew what it was based on, until now.
Yes they had special little flaps to hide the E whenever they flew over english speaking countries...
and by the way I have a bridge to sell you ....
At precisely 10:08 am on the morning of June 30, the four twin-spool Olympus 593 engines under the Concorde’s sweeping white wings powered up to full afterburner and launched “001” down the runway of Tenerife’s Las Palmas airport. Thousands of miles to the east, the shadow of the moon was already racing across the Atlantic at over 1,200 mph, as the eclipse shadow sped westward from South America toward the African coast.
I didn't realize that Africa was westward from South America. I mean, I guess it is if you go the long way, but I don't think that's what happened here.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
As you have an E at the end of have, leave, niece, and Greece, which you do not speak in English, you just might manage with Concorde.You should get used to such things. The English language inherited half of its vocabulary from the French with lots of Es.
Pretty interesting article. A bunch of scientists flying in a prototype supersonic commercial jet modified with four portholes in the roof of the cabin conducting solar eclipse experiments. Can't image the FAA or EASA today would green light such a thing.
I walked through this Concorde at Le Bourget airport a few months ago. The thing that stunned me was mentioned in the article: they hit their tracking start point, a point in space above Africa, at Mach 2 within *1 second* of plan on manual flight controls. One of the posters at the exhibit described how the pilot would adjust the speed at different points prior to rendezvous in order to track to plan. This was done by hand in 1972. With all the tech today we could only be 1 second better. That's pretty impressive.
...I don't see why they would have to.