August 2008 Solar Eclipse
by HeyWhatsThat.com

Read Me
The August 1, 2008 Solar Eclipse from the point of maximum eclipse
Drag the animation slider back and forth to see the Moon pass in front of the Sun. The vantage point is in Siberia at 65.6466°N 72.2733°W, and the animation runs from 09:16 UTC to 11:26 UTC on 01Aug2008.
More information on the eclipse is available at the NASA Eclipse Web Site.
You can create these overlays -- including a simluation of the solar eclipse from your own location -- at the HeyWhatsThat Planisphere. And please visit our FAQ/Sitemap to learn all that HeyWhatsThat has to offer.
Usage notes
This overlay includes the cardinal directions (true, not magnetic), an azimuth-altitude grid (green), and, if you've requested a date in the current month, the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. By visiting our site HeyWhatsThat.com you can add your true horizon — including the names of visible mountain summits — to this visualization.
To quickly shift the view to a particular direction or object, click on an entry under Directions, Peaks, or Sun, Moon, Planets.
For more information visit our Planisphere FAQ, and please explore our home page www.heywhatsthat.com
This layer requires at least Google Earth beta 4.2. You may have to manually Switch to Sky on the View menu if Google Earth doesn't switch automatically.
Animation notes
When you load the animation we can't seem to reset the animation slider to a time of our choosing, so you may want to slide it all the way to the left your first time looking at this.
This animation starts at 01Aug2008 09:16 UTC and runs for 52 frames, with 150 seconds between frames.
A slider appears at the top right of the window when you load an animation. Hit the big arrow to the right and stuff should move. There's a cursor you can drag manually. Click on the thing that looks like a clock to the left of the slider to set options. More documentation in the Google Earth User Guide.
Each frame's start time is the moment it's actually calculated for, and its end time is the second before the next frame. Suppose you have an animation with an interval of 1 day (86400 seconds) starting July 9 at 8pm. With the animation slider all the way to the left you'll see the correct sky for July 9 at 8pm. As you slowly slide it to the right, even though the displayed time changes — July 9 10pm, July 10 4am, ... — the sky won't change until you reach July 10, 8pm. Moral: the sky we show is pulled back to the previous frame, sort of like rounding down, so don't trust the time on the slider.
The status messages appearing on the list (e.g. nighttime and visible) and the planet position data table are for the start of the animation. You may have drag the animation slider all the way to the left to make your sky match those notes. Similarly, if you double click on anything (e.g. North under Directions) the sky will spin to center your north horizon at the start time of the animation, not at the time indicated by the slider.
Planet notes
The position data for the Sun, Moon and planets is taken from the telnet service of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory HORIZONS System. We store lunar positions at one minute intervals and all other objects at ten minute intervals and interpolate linearly within those intervals. As of July 2008, we compute the topocentric position for the Moon and "Earth shadow," but use geocentric positions for all the other objects (i.e. we place the Moon in its proper place in the sky based on the observer's location on the surface of the Earth, but everything else is still shown where it would be if you were standing at the center of the Earth, because it makes so little difference).
Planets are initially surrounded with a circle to show you where they are. As you zoom in, these circles disappear and you'll first see low-resolution images of the planets and then high resolution versions. Those high-resolution images are fairly large and can take a while to load; to see them zoom in until the image looks a bit fuzzy and then wait for however long it takes you to download a megabyte.
There is no attempt to incorporate the actual axial tilt of the planets' rotations.
We came across the approach of using real size images for the planets at barnabu.co.uk's Real Sized Planets in Google Sky. We particularly recommend their beautiful Animated Planets in Google Sky KML file showing planet positions over time.
Credit for the images go to NASA JPL, NASA Marshall Flight Center, USGS, ESA/ESO Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility, Luc Viatour, and the Wikimedia Commons. See the Planisphere FAQ for more details.
Copyright 2008 Michael Kosowsky. All rights reserved.

Sun, Moon, Planets (and Pluto)

Sun
Daytime, nothing else visible

Sun

Moon
not visible, new Moon

Moon

Mercury

Venus

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus

Neptune

Pluto

Comet Holmes

Earth shadow

Planet position data

Directions

North

East

South

West

Zenith (up)

Grid

Coarse

Ecliptic

Lines

Labels

Fine