Great American Solar Eclipse Breaks NASA's Web-Viewing Records

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Great American Solar Eclipse Breaks NASA's Web-Viewing Records

Great American Solar Eclipse Breaks NASA's Web-Viewing Records:

The “diamond-ring effect” is seen during the total solar eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017. This photo was taken from a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flying 25,000 feet (7,620 meters) over the Oregon coast.

Credit: Carla Thomas/NASA

In case you didn't notice, people were really into the Great American Solar Eclipse. I mean, really into it. Just take it from NASA.

"With more than 90 million page views on nasa.gov and eclipse2017.nasa.gov, we topped our previous web traffic record about seven times over," agency officials wrote in a postmortem on Thursday (Aug. 24). "For much of the eclipse, we had more than a million simultaneous users on our sites. On social media, we reached more than 3.6 billion nonunique users, and Twitter reports there were more than 6 million eclipse tweets that day."

NASA also estimates that its live eclipse webcast Monday (Aug. 21) got more than 40 million views, another huge number.

"The nasa.gov numbers alone are several times larger than reported streaming numbers for recent Super Bowls, putting the eclipse in the realm of major news, sports and entertainment events," agency officials wrote.

User sessions on NASA websites from May 2015-present, as measured by Google Analytics.

Credit: NASA

The excitement isn't hard to understand. The path of totality Monday extended from Oregon to South Carolina, marking the first time that a total solar eclipse had crossed the U.S. mainland coast to coast since 1918. And no total solar eclipse had even touched the continental United States since 1979.

If you missed Monday's big event, don't fret: Another total solar eclipse will darken American skies on April 8, 2024, moving northeast from Mexico to Texas and then all the way to Maine and up into Canada. Maybe that one will break some more records.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

UFO SIGHTINGS PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Saturday, August 26, 2017