Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's Picture 4 April 14th of 2024 is titled How a Total Solar Eclipse Ended. So what do we see here? Well here we see a video of the end of the total solar eclipse of April 8th. And this will show the very ending. It's just a few second video. So we're going to go ahead and play that here and put it on repeat so that we can discuss it a little bit more. And what you'll see as the video starts is you'll see the very end of totality. You can see the solar prominences sticking up over the edge of the sun. Now normally those are not visible. When you notice that as soon as the sun actually starts to reappear from behind the moon, then those quickly disappear. When we see those prominences we see the red color of hydrogen gas that is being excited by the energy of the sun and cause to glow. And then just at the end you start to see when this occurs you can see the little bits of what we call Bayley's beads around the edge of the limb of the moon. That's the little bits of the sun peeking out through valleys on the moon. And you can see that at the very beginning as the sun starts to come out you see the prominences and then you will start to see some irregularities and then all of a sudden boom. It looks like it's exploding. That's really not. It's just more of the sun becoming visible and the solar surface is so bright that it overwhelms everything else. So things like the prominences are only visible when you block out the rest of the surface of the sun. Otherwise they're still there but you simply cannot see them because the rest of the solar surface is overwhelming. And you get that idea from this video clip because you can really see what happens during the eclipse at the very beginning and then all of a sudden the sun starts to emerge from beyond it and that makes everything overly bright and overexposes and washes out the rest of the image. So during totality things are quite dark and if you happen to be on the path of totality you notice that it got rather dark during that time, during the time of totally eclipse. Whereas here you can now see that because the sun being hidden allows things to be seen that otherwise could not. But as soon as that even just a little bit of sliver of the sun becomes visible it then overwhelms everything else. So the solar eclipses are a way that we used to study things like the solar atmosphere, the prominences we see here. The solar corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun. So those are things that originally we needed eclipses to be able to study because they're not visible at other times. However, once we have devices that can make an artificial eclipse it allowed astronomers to be able to study them at all times and not have to wait and travel to a total solar eclipse. So that was our picture of the day for April 14th of 2024. It was titled How a Total Solar Eclips Ended. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture. Preview to be Hubble vs. Webb for Cigar. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.