The Washington Post has created an interactive data visualization illustrating historical and upcoming paths of total solar eclipses across the world. The visualization uses data from NASA’s Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses, a database of information on 11,898 solar eclipses, to create maps that track the path of totality—where the moon’s umbra, or full shadow, passes during a solar eclipse—for each eclipse since 2000 BCE and path projections for the next 100 years. Users can enter their birth year to see a map of every solar eclipse that will occur in their lifetime, as well as view a map of the path of totality of a solar eclipse that will occur on August 21, 2017—the first time that a total eclipse will have ever occurred just over the contiguous United States since the country declared independence in 1776.
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Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg is a Google policy fellow at the Center for Data Innovation, where he researches open data issues in government. He was previously an editorial fellow at GovLoop where he wrote content on modernizing government technologies. Prior to joining GovLoop, Michael was a research fellow at the Partnership for Public Service, a paralegal for an intellectual property law firm, and he held internships on Capitol Hill, at the National Archives, and in local government. Michael is a graduate of the University of Maryland in College Park, where he double majored in Government and Sociology. He is currently a second year Master’s of Public Policy student at George Washington University specializing in technology policy.
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