Simulation of July 22, 2009 Solar Eclipse with Stellarium

I should have done this last July 22 but did not have the time. Since we in the Philippines was only going to see a partial eclipse I wanted to find out how Stellarium will simulate the solar eclipse.

I tried it on a Stellarium 0.9.1 on an Ubuntu Intrepid. (Stellarium 0.10.2 has an eclipse simulation! I should try that when I can find an ubuntu package.) The location setting is 89 degrees 40 minutes and 53 seconds east longitude, and 25 degrees 45 minutes north latitude. I could not change the seconds setting so this is an estimate of Kurigram, Bangladesh. It is where this Wikipedia photo of the solar eclipse is taken.



The time setting is between 7:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. Philippine time, because it was my locale.

Here are the videos captured with gtk-recordMyDesktop. I wanted to capture it until the moon separates from the sun but it seem to have gotten cut towards the end by gtk-recordMyDesktop.

without atmosphere


with atmosphere


Although I don't teach natural science I think this would be cool to use as an illustration since you can repeat it over and over again. You can also look at it from different locations.

Links

Solar eclipse scripts for Stellarium: http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Scripts