How Astronomers Used the First Concorde Prototype To Chase a Total Eclipse (vice.com)

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 9, 2016 @03:01PM from the chance-of-a-lifetime dept.

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.

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The most impressive thing by rayan · 2016-03-10 02:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.