Thursday Overnight Open Thread - August 27, 2026

Howdy Hordelings! Welcome to the Thursday ONT! Mixed bag of content for those who care. Open thread, as always. What's on YOUR mind tonight?

[Top photo: Pilbara, Western Australia]

Get out there and take a look at the moon!

On the night of 27 August 2026 the Earth's shadow will slide across a full Moon and turn it copper for more than an hour, a partial lunar eclipse visible from the Americas without any equipment except a clear sky

...weather permitting, the full Moon over the Americas is going to do something it will not do again for more than two years. Beginning in the late evening of Thursday, August 27, Earth’s shadow will creep across the lunar surface until, a little after midnight on the East Coast, 96 percent of the Moon sits inside it, glowing a dim, rusty copper with only a bright sliver left along one edge.

Technically it is a partial lunar eclipse. Practically, it is about as close to a total one as a partial can get, and astronomers are calling it the best lunar eclipse anywhere on Earth until New Year’s Eve 2028.

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For viewers in the eastern half of North America, the timeline runs like this. The subtle penumbral shading begins around 9:24 pm Eastern time on the 27th. The real event, the partial phase, starts at 10:34 pm, when the curved edge of Earth’s dark inner shadow, the umbra, takes its first visible bite out of the Moon. The shadow advances for the next hour and a half until maximum eclipse at 12:12 am Eastern, when 96.3 percent of the disk is immersed and the Moon hangs copper-red in the sky. The shadow then slides off, with the partial phase ending at 1:52 am and the whole affair over by 3 am.

Subtract the hours for other zones: maximum comes at 11:12 pm Central, 10:12 pm Mountain, 9:12 pm Pacific. West Coast viewers see the Moon rise with the eclipse already underway, low in the southeastern sky, which is a gift for photographers who want a shadowed Moon hanging over a skyline.

Please share your respective moon-gazing experiences tonight. If you get any good photos, please send them my way - you may see them on a future ONT!

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Black spray paint has many uses

These facts may or may not be related.

1. You can buy cans of black spray paint at Walmart for under 3 bucks.

2. Paint on a solar panel is a bad idea, it will block all the light and make the panel useless.

3. From a distance a panel sprayed with black paint would look just fine.

4. Flock Cameras are solar powered and the area of their panel surface is 595 square inches

5. A single can of spray paint can fully cover 2880 square inches.

6. 2880 divided by 595 is 4.84

See kids math is a valuable skill you really will need it in the real world.

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Pushback against Flock in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

A police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin caught Flock lying to his city council, and killed the $8 billion surveillance company's contract less than a day after the council had approved it.

Here's how it happened.

The night before, Oshkosh's council was set to renew its deal with Flock Safety, the license plate camera company backed by a16z and Tiger Global.

One council member asked the Flock rep a plain yes-or-no question. Does this system build a heat map of everywhere a specific car travels over time?

Flock's rep said no.

The council believed him and voted 5 to 2 to renew. By the next morning, Chief Dean Smith's own officers had told him that answer was false.

So he pulled up the system himself. He watched it generate the exact heat map Flock had just sworn it couldn't make.

Then he walked into an emergency meeting and said it out loud: "Because of this misrepresentation, I can no longer recommend Flock."

Understand what a heat map is, because it's the whole trick.

Hit the link to read the whole thing

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Flock being used as a revenue generation tool.

e.g. Ticketing overweight trucks on restricted roads.

Photos at the link

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Dolly Parton will be remembered accurately!

��BREAKING: Netflix has announced DOLLY, a new biographical film chronicling the life and career of country music legend Dolly Parton. pic.twitter.com/VlA6OfAIyK

— Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) August 26, 2026

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Asshoes

Felony charges dropped against Golden Gate Bridge protesters

A two-year legal battle over a dramatic protest against the war on Gaza came to an end on Friday as seven protesters who’d blocked traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge received 30-day sentences and $1,000 fines.

Over two dozen activists halted several lanes of traffic on the bridge on April 15, 2024, six months into Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory that has been widely recognized as a genocide. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged 26 of them with crimes. Most were offered diversion, in the form of fines and community service, but Jenkins hit seven protesters with a raft of serious charges, including felony conspiracy.

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After a two-and-a-half-week trial, jurors deadlocked in June over the most serious charges but convicted the protesters on several misdemeanors, including obstructing a thoroughfare, unlawful assembly, and four counts of false imprisonment related to trapped commuters.

Jenkins’ office had considered a new trial on the conspiracy charges, but assistant district attorney Angela Roze announced on Friday that the remaining charges would all be dropped.

Emphasis mine.

Screw you, AP. "Widely recognized"?? Again - screw you. Oh there are links in that article. Go ahead and check them out - if you dare.

The protesters are asshoe, and the AP is asshoe.

DJ Doof - Random Stuff Edition

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