Preparations are well underway for the Hybrid Solar Eclipse on 8 April 2005!
You can find the details of this eclipse on many websites; 
for the relevant page upon the NASA site maintained by Fred Espenak, which is probably the most authoritative source.
As of yesterday, I have arrived in Panama with two paraconical pendulums, for experiments in cooperation with the Technological University of Panama. Several of the faculty are very interested in doing various observations during the eclipse, and tomorrow we are driving to the campus at Penonome, which is on the Pan-American highway, right upon the eclipse path. Here is a map taken from Espenak's site:
We intend to find a good site for setting up the equipment, and to get started. Updates will appear here on a daily basis, so keep looking!
Furthermore, Prof. Hector Munera of the National University in Colombia is currently setting up two identical pendulums in Bogota, about 430 km off to the side from the track of the eclipse. So we anticipate performing simultaneous paraconical pendulum observations during this eclipse, both upon the track and somewhat off it. This will be a first in the field.
According to my theories upon the geometry of eclipses as related to Allais-type effects, this eclipse is classified as being quite close to the pure "equatorial tangential" type. The degree of purity is defined according to the altitude of the overlapped Sun and Moon - which is 19o (quite low) - and their azimuthal closeness to the E-W direction (they are quite close). To read about these theories, .
In fact, the geometry of this eclipse is very similar to that of the eclipse of 1997 at the remote location in China where Wang et al. performed their gravimetric experiment and detected a fascinating anomaly, as described in their article linked to be the prior art section of this website; and it's not very different from the geometry of the 1995 eclipse in India, during which Mishra and Rao detected a similar gravimetric anomaly (also linked to by the prior art section).
-o0o-
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