![]() "They are relying on all of us to pull our weight," he said. A lifelong amateur astronomer who courted his wife on an eclipse-watching trip to Turkey, Anderson will be stationed at a state park near John Day in Eastern Oregon, where he will set up his gear long before dawn. Volunteer David Anderson, of Bellevue, has been practicing in his backyard in preparation for the big day. "No one has really looked at the corona in this way before, so there are bound to be new things that we discover," Penn said. The eclipse video will provide an unprecedented, time-lapse look at the way the inner corona morphs and moves. In order to better predict solar storms, scientists need to better understand the solar wind, Penn said. Telescope attachments called coronagraphs canblock the glare of the sun and reveal the corona, but they obscure the innermost layer - where a lot of mysteries remain.Īmong them is the process thataccelerates the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that roars off the corona at a million miles an hour. Then the images will be stitched together to create a 93-minute video.Įven though modern astronomers don't have to wait for an eclipse to study the corona, the natural sky show provides unique opportunities, Penn explained. The scopes will be programmed to track and snap rapid-fire images of the eclipsethroughout the roughly two minutes of totality at each spot. All of the groups will set up the same type of telescope equipped with the same type of camera. He's assembled more than 200 volunteers and a few professionals who will be stationed at68 locations from Oregon to South Carolina. "The thing that excites me most is that people can walk out on their porch in their slippers and collect world-class data using modest instruments," said Matt Penn, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., and Citizen CATE's maestro. Researchers are tapping into that enthusiasm to recruit legions of citizen scientists like the Alders to gather images and data along the eclipse's 2,500-mile-long path. With more than 200 million people living within a day's drive of the swath of totality and millions more tuning in online, it could also be the most watched. Researchers on a mountain in Wyoming will map magnetic fields in the corona, while others test new tools for probing the sun.Įclipses have been the subject of scientific fascination for centuries, but the so-called "Great American Eclipse" is likely to be the most studied in history, says Thomas Zurbuchen, of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Teams of scientists will chase the eclipse in high-altitude jets equipped with instruments to measure the fluxof light and energy. NASA will track the eclipse with satellites thatscan portions of the corona that won't be visible from the ground and measure jets of X-rays erupting from the sun. The clouds trigger Earth's colorful auroras, but can also disrupt power grids and communication networks. More than a hundred times hotter than the surface of the sun, the roiling halo is of keen interest to astronomers because it spits out immense clouds of supercharged plasma called coronal mass ejections. The main focus is on the corona - the faint, diaphanous atmosphere that surrounds the sun but is only visible during a total eclipse. from coast to coast - the first such event in 99 years. "And we're nervous."Ĭalled Citizen CATE (Continental-America Telescope Eclipse), the project is one of more than a dozen scientific studies that will be crammed into the brief window of time when the total solar eclipse sweeps across the U.S. It's the "if" part that has Bruce, the elder Alder, on edge. If all goes well, the result will be the longest video ever compiled of the planet's premier sky show, and a trove of data for scientists. #Solar eclipse maestro professionalFrom atop a peak in the Coast Range, the father and son from Corvallis will be the first in a transcontinental chain of amateur and professional astronomers to film the total solar eclipse on identical telescopes, from identical angles. ![]()
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