Volunteers from Mexico to Newfoundland used solar telescopes to get a peek at a part of the sun that’s usually hidden on April 8.
Their goal: Take photos of the sun every few seconds during totality to contribute to NASA's Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast initiative. Images taken by volunteers from across North America will eventually be compiled into a time-lapse video.
One of those volunteers was Sean MacBride, who set up behind the sports fields of Burlington High School. He graduated from there, and is now a physics PhD student at the University of Michigan.
"We’ll be able to see these large filaments of extremely hot gas. ... Gas that other solar probes have been able to get close to and pass through, but not actually see on such a long time scale as this — how they evolve. Hopefully we can get maybe an hour or more," MacBride said.
He and other volunteers are processing their photos. They’ll compile those snapshots into a video to help scientists better understand how the sun's surface and its atmosphere interact.
"The thing that we’re really interested in is the solar corona — this level of the sun’s atmosphere that we normally cannot see," MacBride said. "With the moon acting as our own personal sun shield, we can see this coronal atmospheric level and we’ll be able to see how it evolves, not only on the three minutes of totality that we get here in Vermont, but hopefully over much, much longer time period with all these other stations scattered over the U.S., Mexico and Canada."
MacBride says the NASA video could be ready soon.
“It feels sort of like a nerdy Super Bowl,” said MacBride. “It’s a lot of fun.”
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