ECLIPSE: With North America awaiting a total solar eclipse to take place Aug. 21, the United States Postal Service announced it will commemorate the relatively rare event with a new stamp.
The Total Eclipse of the Sun Forever stamp will be the first stamp that will transform when someone touches it. The eclipse photo will change “into an image of the Moon from the heat of a finger,” USPS said.
The eclipse returns to the image when the stamp cools.
Neat.
The image is a photograph of a total solar eclipse on March 29, 2006, in Jalu, Libya, taken by astrophysicist Fred Espenak. It’s the first U.S. stamp to use thermochromic ink. The stamp will be released on June 20.
Espenak also photographed the full moon that appears when the stamp is warm.
“Tens of million of people in the United States hope to view this rare event, which has not been seen on the U.S. mainland since 1979,” USPS stated. “The eclipse will travel a narrow path across the entire country for the first time since 1918. The past will run west to east from Oregon to South Carolina and will include portions of 14 states.”
It looks like Pennsylvania will be a little out of the path, but according to NASA, “Observers outside this path will still see a partial solar eclipse where the moon covers part of the sun’s disk.”
As the USPS explains, “A total eclipse of the Sun occurs when the Moon completely blocks the visible solar disk from view, casting a shadow on Earth. The 70-mile-wide shadow path of the eclipse known as the ‘path of totality,’ will traverse the country diagonally, appearing first in Oregon (mid-morning local time) and exiting some 2,500 miles east and 90 minutes later off the coast of South Carolina (mid-afternoon local time).”
