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Hi Brian, I have not seen any total solar eclipses, but I have seen a partial solar eclipse and several total lunar eclipses. I was not able to take photographs of the eclipses, but I have taken photographs of the aurora borealis or northern lights. I'm more of a magnetospheric physicist than a solar...

We've been unlucky for totals across the US recently... but there will be one in 2017! The biggest temperature drop I experienced for a non-total (but very close) is 10 degrees in May 1994. (90 to 80F). In Libya we measured a 15 degree (F) temperature drop... but that was in the desert near noon...

Hi Kellie-- actually, the U.S. is not particularly under-represented eclipse-wise, it just seems that way lately. The problem is that the eclipse path is so small relative to the Earth's size, that the probable frequency for a total solar eclipse to occur at any one spot on Earth is, on average,...

No, eclipses aren't harmful to animals or plants (unless the animal gets scared and runs off a cliff!). It's only as dark as twilight - not very dark really. Just dark enough to see the brightest stars and planets with a "sunset" all around you. I have been to eight total eclipses,...

Hi Tiffany, Solar eclipses are visible only on a very narrow region on the Earth's surface called the eclipse path. NASA has a nifty tool on the Internet that will tell you when solar eclipses will be visible from a particular city. Since you are interested in the eastern United States, I entered...

Sometimes people call the red extensions at the edge of the eclipsed sun (peeking out from behind the moon) as "flares" but they are really just prominences, material flung out from the Sun. The prominences are red because they contain a lot of Hydrogen. You can see some great eclipse pictures...

I would take my fisheye camera to make a "fulldome" planetarium show about living in space. We got some fisheye images from the astronauts on STS120 - they took one of our cameras aboard. I would love to take a fisheye movie camera but there isn't one that's space qualified yet. Here...

Hi Harry, They can in theory, but total solar eclipses last only a few minutes, so the chance of a flare occuring on the limb of the Sun during that time is not so big. Maybe someone has seen one, though. It has been suggested that a 1800s drawing of a total eclipse (see below) shows a coronal Mass Ejection...