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    Can’t Find Eclipse Glasses? Here’s What to Do.

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    You can watch a projection of the eclipse using some common household items.Reliable paper-framed glasses are by far the most popular option for safely watching the total solar eclipse on Monday. But they’ve gotten more difficult to find in some places ahead of the event.If you’ve checked everywhere — your local planetarium, public library and even online — fear not: There is still a way to watch the eclipse safely, using items around the house. Here are a few options.Use your handsPalms up, position one hand over the other at a 90-degree angle. Open your fingers slightly in a waffle pattern, and allow sunlight to stream through the spaces onto the ground, or another surface. During the eclipse, you will see a projection of the moon obscuring the surface of the sun.This method works with anything with holes, such as a straw hat, a strainer, a cheese grater or even a perforated spoon. You will also notice this effect when light from the partially eclipsed sun streams through leaves on a tree.Set up a cardstock screenFor this option, you need a couple of white index cards or two sheets of cardstock paper. First, punch a small hole in the middle of one of the cards using a thumbtack or a pin.Then, facing away from the sun, allow light to stream through this pinhole. Position the second card underneath to function as a screen. Adjust the spacing between the two cards to make the projection of the sun larger or smaller.A pinhole box for an annular solar eclipse in Gandhinagar, India, in 2020. The larger the box, the larger the image that will be projected.Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMake a box projectorIf you’re up for a bit of crafting, you can make a more sophisticated pinhole projector. Start with a cardboard box — empty cereal boxes are often used, but you can use a larger box, too. You’ll also need scissors, white paper, tape, aluminum foil and a pin or thumbtack.Cut the piece of paper to fit the inside bottom of the cardboard box to act as a screen. Use tape to hold it in place.On the top of the box, cut two rectangular holes on either side. (The middle should be left intact — you can use tape to secure this if needed.)Tape a piece of aluminum foil over one of the rectangular cutouts. Punch a tiny hole in the middle of the foil with the tack or pin. The other cutout will serve as a view hole.With your back to the sun, position the foil side of the box over your shoulder, letting light stream through the pinhole. An image of the sun will project onto the screen at the bottom of the box, which you can see through the view hole. A bigger box will create a bigger image.Enjoy the show through any of these makeshift pinholes. And remember, during totality, you can view the sun directly with your naked eye. But you should stop looking at the sun as soon as it reappears. More

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      NASA Picks 3 Companies to Help Astronauts Drive Around the Moon

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      The agency’s future moon buggies will reach speeds of 9.3 miles per hour and will be capable of self-driving.NASA will be renting some cool wheels to drive around the moon.Space agency officials announced on Wednesday that they have hired three companies to come up with preliminary designs for vehicles to take NASA astronauts around the lunar south polar region in the coming years. After the astronauts return to Earth, these vehicles would be able to self-drive around as robotic explorers, similar to NASA’s rovers on Mars.The self-driving capability would also allow the vehicle to meet the next astronaut mission at a different location.“Where it will go, there are no roads,” Jacob Bleacher, the chief exploration scientist at NASA, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “Its mobility will fundamentally change our view of the moon.”The companies are Intuitive Machines of Houston, which in February successfully landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon; Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo.; and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif. Only one of the three will actually build a vehicle for NASA and send it to the moon.NASA had asked for proposals of what it called the lunar terrain vehicle, or L.T.V., that could drive at speeds up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel a dozen miles on a single charge and allow astronauts to drive around for eight hours.The agency will work with the three companies for a year to further develop their designs. Then NASA will choose one of them for the demonstration phase.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      They Can’t See the Total Solar Eclipse, but LightSound Will Help Them Hear It

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      A device called LightSound is being distributed to help the blind and visually impaired experience this year’s event.On Aug. 21, 2017, Kiki Smith’s teenage sons giddily prepared to watch the partial solar eclipse in Rochester, N.Y. As Ms. Smith listened to their chatter, she felt excluded.“I felt very alone,” she said. Ms. Smith was diagnosed with a degenerative condition as a child and lost the last of her vision in 2011. The local buzz around the eclipse, and the national media attention, unexpectedly touched a nerve.The eclipse “was about experiencing a historic moment in community, and I wasn’t part of that,” she said.Ms. Smith, 52, who works for a community development organization in Rochester, determined to do things differently for the April 8 total eclipse that is passing through her city. She is helping to organize a public gathering that prioritizes accessibility for people with vision loss. Her event will include specially designed devices named LightSound that translate changing light intensity into musical tones, allowing blind and visually impaired people to listen as the sky grows dark and then brightens again.During this eclipse, Ms. Smith said, “I will be with community. And I will have at my fingertips all of these fabulous resources to experience what I felt I missed last time.”People across the United States with limited vision or blindness will experience the eclipse with the aid of about 900 LightSound devices distributed by a team led by Allyson Bieryla, a Harvard University astronomer.The Path of the EclipseOn April 8, a total solar eclipse will cross North America from Mazatlán, Mexico, to the Newfoundland coast near Gander, Canada. Viewers outside the path of the total eclipse will see a partial eclipse, if the sky is clear. More

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      Final Delta IV Heavy Launch: Finale for a Rocket That Brings the Heat

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      The ignition of the Delta IV Heavy rocket is perhaps the most visually striking liftoff you’ll ever see — the rocket seemingly burns itself up on the launchpad before it heads to space. Now, the very last Delta IV Heavy ever is on the launchpad.Liftoff is scheduled for 1:40 p.m. Eastern time from Cape Canaveral, Fla., although winds and clouds could keep the rocket on the ground for another day or a bit longer. Forecasts give only a 30 percent chance of favorable weather. Conditions are expected to be better during backup launch opportunities.“A bittersweet moment for us,” Tory Bruno, the chief executive of United Launch Alliance, the maker of the Delta IV Heavy, said during a news conference on Wednesday ahead of the flight, which is carrying a secret spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. “This is such an amazing piece of technology. Twenty-three stories tall. Half a million gallons of propellant. A quarter million pounds of thrust.”When it does launch, it will look as if it is catching on fire, with flames racing up the sides. That is by design.Fiery scenes from a Sept. 24, 2022, liftoff of a Delta IV Heavy rocket. Video by United Launch AllianceThe Delta IV Heavy burns ultracold liquid hydrogen, which is a high-performance fuel. In the final part of the countdown, to cool down the engines and prevent a sudden temperature shock that could cause cracks, liquid hydrogen starts flowing through the engine into the flame trench.But when the hydrogen warms above its boiling temperature of minus 423.2 degrees Fahrenheit, it turns into a gas. Hydrogen is lighter than air and rises upward. When the engines ignite, so does that cloud of hydrogen — like a space-age Hindenburg.“A very dramatic effect,” Mr. Bruno said.The rocket designers of course took this into account and applied sufficient insulation to the boosters to keep the rocket from actually burning up. The orange shade of that exterior takes on a burned-marshmallow sheen as the rocket leaves the Earth.“And away she goes,” Mr. Bruno said.Photographs by United Launch Alliance. Mobile photo illustration by Antonio de Luca. More

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      April 8 Solar Eclipse: Path, Maps and More

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      On April 8, the moon will slip between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow across a swath of North America: a total solar eclipse. By cosmic coincidence, the moon and the sun appear roughly the same size in the sky. When the moon blocks the glare of the sun, the sun’s outer atmosphere, […] More

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      This 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed In

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      Lost & Found This 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed In By Franz Lidz and Clara VannucciFor 2,000 years, celestial observers mapped the heavens with astonishingly precise instruments called astrolabes.Resembling large, old-fashioned vest pocket watches, astrolabes allowed users to determine time, distances, heights, latitudes and even (with a horoscope) the future.Recently, an astrolabe dating to the 11th century turned up at the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi-Erizzo in Verona, Italy.Federica Gigante, a historian at the University of Cambridge, first noticed it in a corner of a photograph while searching online for an image of a 17th-century collector whose miscellany was housed in the museum.After learning that the museum staff had very little information about the piece, Dr. Gigante went to Verona for a closer look.At the museum, a curator brought her to a side room, where she stood by a window and watched the sunlight illuminate the relic’s brass features.She made out Arabic inscriptions and, seemingly everywhere, faint Hebrew markings, Western numerals and scratches that looked like they had been keyed.“In the raking light, I realized that this wasn’t just an incredibly rare, ancient object but a powerful record of scientific exchange between Muslims, Jews and Christians over nearly a millennium,” Dr. Gigante said.Astrolabes are believed to have been around at the time of Apollonius of Perga, a Greek mathematician from the third-century B.C. known as the Great Geometer.Islamic scholars improved the gadgets, and by the ninth century A.D. the Persians were using astrolabes to locate Mecca and ascertain the five periods of prayer required each day, as stated in the Quran.The tool reached Europe through the Moorish conquest of much of Spain.By analyzing the Verona astrolabe’s design, construction and calligraphy, Dr. Gigante narrowed its provenance to 11th century Andalusia, where Muslims, Jews and Christians had worked alongside one another, particularly in the pursuit of science.“As the astrolabe changed hands, it underwent numerous modifications, additions and adaptations,” Dr. Gigante said.The original Arabic names of the signs of the zodiac were translated into Hebrew, a detail that suggested that the relic had at one point circulated within a Sephardi Jewish community.One side of a plate was engraved in Arabic with the phrase “for the latitude of Cordoba, 38° 30’”; on the other side “for the latitude of Toledo, 40°.”A handful of latitude values were corrected, some multiple times. Another plate was etched with North African latitudes which indicated that, during the instrument’s travels, it might have been used in Morocco or Egypt.A series of Hebrew additions led Dr. Gigante to conclude that the astrolabe had eventually reached the Jewish diaspora in Italy, where Hebrew, rather than Arabic, was used.“Basically, carving in the revisions was like adding apps to your smartphone,” Dr. Gigante said.Lost & FoundThis 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed InFranz Lidz and March 12, 2024Updated 10:06 a.m. ETProduced by More

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      ‘Space: The Longest Goodbye’ Review

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      This documentary by Ido Mizrahy examines the psychological challenges of space exploration for astronauts and their loved ones as scientists consider whether humans could reach Mars.In “Space: The Longest Goodbye,” scientists researching the problems of long-term space exploration go where movies have gone before. Sending astronauts into hibernation to conserve scarce resources? Pairing them with an artificially intelligent entity that can act as a pal and sounding board? Screenwriters have tried these things already, with results probably best kept in fiction.But such gambits may offer real solutions for getting humans to Mars. And they are gambits that this fitfully intriguing, sometimes wide-eyed documentary, directed by Ido Mizrahy, takes seriously.“Soft, squishy humans are completely unfathomable to engineers,” says Jack Stuster, an anthropologist who asked residents of the International Space Station to keep journals. One of the principal interviewees is Al Holland, a psychologist who assembled a unit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to provide support for astronauts. He discusses his experience in 2010 consulting on the Chilean mine disaster, which had striking parallels with the isolation of space life.We also hear from Kayla Barron, a submarine warfare officer who decided to go to space, and her husband, who stayed behind; as a military couple, they were used to living separately, but this posed a different challenge. And we see clips of personal video chats that the astronaut Cady Coleman held with her husband and son back on Earth, through a system that sometimes didn’t work. “It’s hard for me to really realize how hard it was for a little kid to just have to be so very patient,” she recalls in the documentary.On Mars missions, distance will make similar real-time communication impossible, which means that astronauts won’t even have that kind of intermittent contact. “Space: The Longest Goodbye” leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.Space: The Longest GoodbyeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Odysseus Moon Lander Sends Photos Home Before Spacecraft Likely Dies

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      The privately built American spacecraft’s ability to send home images and other data has been limited by its sideways landing. On another part of the moon, a Japanese spacecraft woke up.Odysseus, the American robotic spacecraft that landed on the moon last week, is likely to die in the next day or so.Communications with the toppled lander remain limited and will end when sunlight is no longer shining on the solar panels, Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built and operates Odysseus, said on Monday morning.The company also released images that the spacecraft took as it descended, but none yet from the surface.Odysseus is the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first private one ever to successfully set down there in one piece. However, during the landing on Thursday evening, the lander, about 14 feet tall, appears to have been traveling faster than planned and ended up tipped over on its side.As a result, its antennas are not pointed back at Earth, greatly slowing the rate that data can be sent back. While some of the solar panels of Odysseus were initially bathed in sunlight, they will soon be in shadow as the sun moves across the sky. That will starve the spacecraft of energy, and its batteries will drain.“Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to light,” Intuitive Machines posted on X. “Based on Earth and Moon positioning, we believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Moon Lander Is Lying on Its Side but Still Functional, Officials Say

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      The Odysseus spacecraft was drifting horizontally as it set down, and a landing strut may have hit an obstacle on the surface.One day after its historic landing, the first private spacecraft on the moon is in good condition but has toppled over, the company that built it reported on Friday.The spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down in the moon’s south pole region on Thursday evening, the first U.S. vehicle to land softly on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines said during a NASA news conference on Friday. “We do have communications with the lander.”He added, “That’s phenomenal to begin with.”But the landing did not go perfectly. Because the spacecraft fell over, its antennas are not pointed directly at Earth, limiting the amount of information that can go back and forth.Odysseus has not sent back any photographs since landing, although Mr. Altemus did show one that was taken while the spacecraft was descending to the surface. “You see how shadowed and undulating the terrain is,” he said.Engineers at Intuitive Machines are still trying to extract more information from the spacecraft.Mr. Altemus and Tim Crain, the chief technology officer, also described unforeseen glitches that nearly doomed the mission. The landing was salvaged through serendipity and frantic work, they said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More