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About Eclipse Witness
Technical
Technical Information and Acknowledgments
The Maps:
The paths have been mapped over the course of a few centuries by great scientific minds. I am not one of those minds, and am grateful for their work. This book presents artistic presentations of eclipse paths. They are very close to the true paths, but I have widened the areas of totality or annularity for visibility. I do this for very simple reasons.
The area of pure totality in an eclipse can easily be less than seventy miles. That is 1/340th of a 24,000-mile globe. Try drawing that on a map just a few inches wide. It is a very thin line, to say the least. Presenting it that way is both difficult and feels slightly absurd. It's not a line. It's a shadow. To best represent this shadow, I include areas of “almost” totality or annularity. The shaded paths in this book are experiencing profound eclipse, but only the very center of the shaded area would be in direct totality or annularity.
The mapping I present is not perfect, but all flat maps have difficulties presenting global phenomenon. I insist on creating hand drawn maps because I am convinced that I was supposed to present them in this primitive analog fashion. I think God might be sick of computers. I pray there’s none in heaven.
I base my drawings on four different scientific sources-the earliest from 1887 and the latest from NASA. I then try and convey their reality as best as I can. Since I don't use computers directly for the drawing process, there are some rough spots. I get shaky. There’s some funky curves. See if you can spot the “whiteout” correction fluid. It’s a little late in this game for fixing all the details. So please forgive me if Orlando is slightly out of line in the eclipse of 1600. I tried very hard to keep it as close as possible, and accuracy is important to me, but this medium has limitations, as do I. For closer geographical “certainty”, please refer to the sources I credit further below.
My maps show the dominant area of most eclipse. For total eclipse, shading will usually be where the eclipse is 95% or more, for annular (ring of fire) eclipses, where it is 85% or more. I believe this method helps the viewer “see” the signature of the eclipse best. I use pencils to shade in. Good old lead No.2's. After trying other formats, ink and pencil seemed the best way to convey the impression of shadow. A hand-drawn eclipse path has a 3-D quality that vanishes in computer drawn maps. I also limit or exclude some political boundaries. The eclipse paths themselves are obtained from several modern and classic sources and then artistically adapted for comparative effect.
Here are the main sources.
• 20th Century eclipse resources owe their primary debt to Theodore Oppolzer's Canon of Solar Eclipses (1887), one of the greatest computational works of all time.
• In our day and age, Fred Espenak (NASA’s eclipse scientist) and Jean Meeus's book “Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses” Volume One and Two are indispensable and should be bought. Their maps are available online at NASA, but it's not the same as the physical book which allows for quick comparisons of large time frames and patterns.
• The tremendous website “Time and Date.com” is the most comprehensive source for detailed eclipse maps online. Their site allows the viewer to locate individual towns and cities on maps from 1900 to 2100. You can learn all sorts of information there, including the percentage of coverage at any given location, and the exact time the eclipse occurred. Their website also has a very easy to use date calculator.
• “Solar-Eclipse.info”, the site of Andreas Moller, provides easy to read and clear guides for historical eclipses going far back in time. His site allows you to search national maps.
• Christopher Grant of the Mathematics Department of BYU did the vital calculation that determined the Great 391 Year Cosmic Clock (first hinted at by H. Grattan Guiness but missing the draconic calculation). He also did an extended Saros calculation.
• There are several resources for the upcoming American Eclipses. My favorite is Dan McGlaun's “eclipse2024.org”.
• Dean Coombs at 1260d.com has one of the deepest considerations of Biblical calendar reality.
• George Van Den Bergh named many of the cycles mentioned here, including the Octon and Hepton. He also numbered the Saros Characters. His ideas remain in spotty places on the internet. Much of his greatest work has almost completely “disappeared” from modern scholarship and the web. Part of his unusual story is presented in the personalities section. His great work Universe in Space and Time is occasionally available at used bookstores.
• I find the best books on the general topic of God in human history are the non-fiction works of CS Lewis, especially Mere Christianity. The late Chuck Missler is another good resource.
• Lewis Mumford’s Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power provides the essential big picture study of the progressive trajectory of Empire and scientific priesthood.
• The Approaching End of the Age and Creation Centered in Christ by 19thCentury Irish evangelist and astronomer H. Grattan Guiness are deep dives into the cosmic calendars of God.
• The Holographic Universe by the late Michael Talbot is a great overview of cutting-edge physics confronting the many unusual characteristics of the implicate and explicate order.
• Of course, The Bible is the great book and clearly Living Word.
I couldn't do any of this without publicly available maps. I don't expect any of my sources to necessarily sympathize with the direction of this work, but I am still grateful for their efforts. Clearly there's a lot of ways to love eclipses. Some people love them with a heart for a “purer science” than me. God Bless them! It's all good.
Historical and astronomical information in this work is “common knowledge”. I don't own it and neither does anyone else. It is available in the Columbia History of the World, Britannica Encyclopedia and other sources. I credit all specific quotes and details. Mostly just basic history and geography. There are some general web phots on the site, which are used for strictly educational purposes.
All illustrations besides my own are from NASA, Timeand date, or other public domain sources. Publicly available NASA maps are the work of Fred Espenak and Jean Meuss, and constitute a true public asset.
Who I am
Who I am
People want to know who's telling them a story.
I understand that. So I’ll say where I come from.
I am currently the author of a huge book which I am very much looking forward to finishing. I’m also a husband, father and manager of a small hay farm. I do outdoor work and play guitar and write songs. I have a small town bluegrass band. I have three books I wrote.
My name is Sand, and that is my birth name. My parents were Norman and Norma.
For a while growing up, we lived on a place called Normal Street. I kid you not.
Norman was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn USA. His father William was from Ukraine ( arrived in USA 1911). He fought in the Battle of the Marnes in WWI for the USA and was injured for life by mustard gas. His father before him had been born a serf.
His wife, my grandmother Lily, was from Austria.
My mother Norma was from working-poor Protestant American stock. She was born in Oklahoma and raised in the Dust Bowl, mostly in Northern Arizona. Her bloodline goes back to the American revolution on both sides,. All our people fought for the Union in the civil war.
They were westward moving people. Mom’s grandpa was a free-will Baptist minister who built 5 churches. He had been saved following a tornado experience working as a roughneck in Ripley Oklahoma. My mother Norma was a teacher and a poet and much more.
I was conceived in New Zealand while my parents had briefly emigrated there. I was in Mom’s belly when we took the ship back to the USA. I was born in the town of Flagstaff, Arizona Sunday evening June 4th 1967, in the opening hours of the Six Day War in Israel. The Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s was released that week.
At two months old, my family moved to Tahlequah, Oklahoma-the capital of the Cherokees, at the end of the Trail of Tears. I learned guitar there at 11 and was there until I was 14.
My youngest memory: I was five. My brother and sister were taking horse riding lessons at a place out in the country near Tahlequah. Someone decided to stick me on the back of an unsaddled and untied horse so I could see what it felt like. The horse startled and ran across a field with me at a dead run. I see horse ears and my little hands gripping the mane in my mind’s eye to this day. I held on for dear life and leaned forward. I had never been on a horse before. They chased me down in a pick-up truck across the field. I rode the horse to a standstill and they got me off. My sister remembers this. It actually happened.
I left Tahlequah at 14 with my Mom and attended a private high school on scholarship in Tulsa. I attended Colorado College on scholarship until graduating in 1989. After college, I worked for 7 years off and on as a dude ranch cowboy and ranch hand in Utah. I also lived and worked in several small towns in Colorado. At 28, I moved to Nashville to make it in Country Music and had some bands.
I found out that the sun is the same size as the moon in the sky when I was 32, watching a late-night public access channel. I left Nashville at 33. I had a born-again experience
( believing the truth of the savior Jesus) while homeless camping out of my truck 3 days after I left Nashville in the Flat Top Mountains of Colorado on July 14 2000. I watched the mountain Mesa Verde burn about ten days later and was told in my heart that the internet is the beast. A few weeks after that I Joined a wildland firefighting crew in Oregon and at the end of the season wrote a book called “What the Fire Said” about story and fire and technology.
Since then, I’ve lived in the Four Corners mostly, aside from a three-year stint in Texas. I have done mostly outdoor labor and music most of my adult life. I have made lots of original music albums and do lots of gigs where I play lots of classic country and rock requests.
In 2017 I completed a children’s book called Eclipse Miracle: The Sun is the Same Size as the Moon in the Sky and I traveled along the 2017 eclipse path with my book that summer. I began work on Eclipse Witness in early 2020.
But enough about me! Back to the God Songs, the hieroglyphs, the Cosmic Timekeeping of the Real Author, the Author of the Real. .
My Music
I have 17 albums of original music created over the last 30 years It is available at all major online music [platforms like apple and spotify.by punching in my name Sand Sheff...you can listen to a lot of it free at sandsheff.com ( click)
Video Channel
I have many eclipse and music videos available on you tube...click here
My Book About the Network and the Future
I wrote a book about the computer network in 2011 called Real is Good. It is available online or you can read it free here
Beliefs
I am a believer in and follower of the Lord Jesus Christ , but am respectful of others, no matter their beliefs and traditions. I read the Bible. I believe the solar eclipse phenomenon points to Jesus in many ways, and provides harbingers of His return. I do not claim to know the date of His return.
May God bless you all.