Hey gang... don't forget to step outside and enjoy the view this Thursday Wednesday night. There's going to be a total lunar eclipse visible through most of the lower 48 (you PSTers might miss the very beginning).

Of course, to look at the cloud cover map for the US on Thursday, most of the eastern US is probably not going to see most of it. The DC area is forecast to be under about 85% cloud cover. The Big Apple should fare a little better, having only about a 35% cloud cover around 7:00pm, when the eclipse starts. Not to fret, however... total lunar eclipses are not terribly rare, occurring at least twice a year - although they're not always viewable from the US. The next total lunar eclipse viewable from the US will be in the early morning of December 21, 2010 EST.

For those of you more interested in the Big Show - a total solar eclipse... well, you've either got to do some traveling or some waiting. There will be one this August 1, but you're going to have to be in some of the northernmost places on the planet to see it - northern Canada, northern Greenland, northern Russia. The mainland US doesn't get a total solar eclipse until August 21, 2017. (The western US gets the tail end of a partial eclipse during the evening of May 19, 2012... but why settle for second best?)

The 2017 event will paint a total eclipse stripe from the northern coast of Oregon to the central coast of South Carolina during the afternoon of August 21. And this will be the last time you can see a total solar eclipse in the lower 48 until 2106. (The 2017 eclipse also the best chance anyone here has had to see a total solar eclipse since the last one that was centered here, in November 1834.)

If you want to get a sense of what the eclipse will look like, go get Stellarium. It's the ultimate sky-watchers' program, and is GPL'ed (which is to say, free). Set your observatory to Hopkinsville, KY (a town near the center of the 2017 event), go forward in time to about 1:25pm (as the clock reads, which I don't think is accounting for daylight savings), then watch the magic.

Or watch this crappy quality YouTube version. I tried a video capture from my desktop, but SnagIt (or, more likely, the MS codec) wasn't able to capture 7 frames per second of full-screen vid for a minute-plus. You're going to have to get Stellarium yourself, or do as Jambro and I are doing and planning a trip to Kentucky in nine-point-five years.

I wrestled yesterday with the idea of posting about the 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I ultimately decided against it because I figured that no one really shares stories about Challenger anymore. Challenger was the Flashbulb Moment for folks of our age group, but has since been overshadowed by another moment. But I read a fairly moving retrospective online today that led me to change my mind. Not about telling the Flashbulb story... most of us have the similar stories: I was at home, it was a snow day, I was watching The Price is Right, CBS broke in, and that was that.

I was just moved by this story at MSNBC, one of the reporters who was on the scene and covered the story extensively back in the day. It dispels a few myths that we'd (or at least I had) come to believe over the past two decades. But more than that, it's just an effective remembrance.