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News > Science and Tech

Scientists, Non-Scientists Join Forces To Study Solar Eclipse

  • People across the United States will watch and also document the eclipse.

    People across the United States will watch and also document the eclipse.

Published 17 August 2017
Opinion

The total solar eclipse will be the first to travel coast-to-coast in the United States in nearly a century.

The total solar eclipse across the United States next Monday will be “the most documented, the most appreciated, eclipse ever,” with the participation of thousands of people in the age of the internet.

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"This... is a unique opportunity in modern times, enabling the entire country to be engaged through modern technology and social media," Carrie Black, a program director at the National Science Foundation's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, said in a statement.

"Images and data from as many as millions of people will be collected and analyzed by scientists for years to come," he added.

"This is a generational event," agreed Madhulika Guhathakurta, NASA lead scientist for the 2017 eclipse. "This is going to be the most documented, the most appreciated, eclipse ever."

When the moon passes directly in front of the sun on Aug. 21, it will cast a 70-mile wide shadow, called the “path of totality,” across the United States over 93 minutes, temporarily bringing darkness to daytime skies.

“Millions of people ... can walk out on their porch in their slippers and collect world-class data,” said Matthew Penn, an astronomer with the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Penn is coordinating a citizen science effort to photograph the sun’s volatile outer atmosphere, known as the corona. The pictures will later be spliced together into a 93-minute movie.

The corona’s pearly light is typically obscured by the bright glare of the sun, but during a total eclipse, scientists can get a clear view of the sun's outer crown, which triggers solar flares and other storms that can disrupt satellites, power grids and other systems on Earth.

Penn’s project requires special equipment and training of the participants, but dozens of other projects are open to anyone in the path of totality with a camera or cell phone. In the digital age, the tools in everyone’s pockets can serve as data-gathering machines.

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The California Academy of Sciences’ project, Life Responds, invites people to report about how animals and plant life react during the eclipse. Using an app called iNaturalist, amateur scientists will log their observations and get help identifying flora and fauna.

“We want to collect exactly what all these animals are doing as it gets dark … what do we see, what do we hear,” University of Missouri astronomer Angela Speck said.

Google and the University of California Berkeley are teaming up for Eclipse Megamovie 2017, a crowd-sourced compilation of eclipse imagery. Another app-driven science projects will record temperature changes, monitor clouds and collect information about radio waves passing through Earth’s ionosphere.

“This is an opportunity to draw people from across the country into being fans of science,” said Speck, who is also the co-chair of American Astronomical Society’s National Total Solar Eclipse Task Force.

“The change in light is so fast and what you get to see is so amazing that even people who chase eclipses and have seen dozens of them will still be wowed by this," Speck said. "It’s not just visual, it’s an all-over experience."

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