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Four decades hunting the Moon’s shadow

Jay Anderson.

Solar corona at the March 2015 total eclipse over Svalbard by Judy Anderson: Processing Alson Wong

Description

More than forty years ago, I stood in a snowy field to watch the Sun fade away behind the Moon. A few years later, opportunity gave me a chance to see another, and from that marvelous experience, I became an eclipse chaser. If you’ve seen one eclipse, you haven’t seen them all, but if you’ve seen thirty, they become old friends with stories to tell. In this chat, I’ll give you a taste of some of those adventures to the shadow. We’ll talk about eclipses and cycles, the physics revealed,  the spectacle itself, the lands visited, and the unexpected  escapades that accumulate along the way.

Biography

Jay Anderson is a meteorologist and an amateur astronomer who fell into eclipse chasing by accident and good fortune. He started with a degree in Physics and Astronomy at UBC, studied meteorology with Environment Canada in Toronto, and then spent most of his career as a forecaster in Winnipeg and Vancouver. Weather was not his first love but familiarity bred contentment, especially when he married his profession with his hobby. Eclipse travellers look for the best weather along the Moon’s shadow path, so Jay became adept at teasing out global weather data to serve to chasers and the travel industry, first in NASA and USNO publications, and now online. With his wife Judy, Jay has travelled the world to stand under the lunar shadow.