Williams College faculty/student team travel to study solar eclipseMarch 21, 2006A team of Williams College faculty and students is preparing to scientifically observe the total eclipse of the Sun that will sweep across the far side of Earth on March 29. Six undergraduates are joining Jay Pasachoff, Bryce Babcock, and Steven Souza of the astronomy and physics departments, who have worked together on a series of expeditions, most recently to study Pluto and its moon Charon. The expedition is to Kastellorizo, a small island east of Rhodes in the Greek Dodecanese. Aside from Cyprus, it is the farthest eastern point of Europe, so many eclipse watchers are expected to travel there. The Williams group will be on site a week in advance to set up, test, and align its nearly ton of equipment. They are working closely with Professor John Seiradakis of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, continuing a collaboration begun with joint observations there of the 2004 transit of Venus. Pasachoff, chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses, will be observing his 42nd solar eclipse. He is Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy and director of the Hopkins Observatory at Williams. Babcock is coordinator of science facilities and staff physicist; Souza is instructor of astronomy and observatory supervisor. They last observed an eclipse in 2002 in Australia. The total solar eclipses since then have been visible only from Antarctica in 2003 and the mid-Pacific in 2005, preventing the use of complex equipment.
The student participants are Megan Bruck '07 of Tempe, Ariz., Paul Hess '08 of Simsbury, Conn., Shelby Kimmel '08 of Newton, Mass., Jesse Levitt '08 of Natick, Mass., Amy Steele '08 of Orlando, Fla., and Anna Tsykalova '08 of Ardmore, Pa. The group devoted time during Williams' January Winter Study Period to test the expedition's equipment. The eclipse will start at dawn on the eastern tip of Brazil and sweep across the Atlantic and over western and northern Africa, where many astronomers will observe from southern Libya. The path of totality will then cross the Mediterranean and Kastellorizo, less than two miles off the Turkish coast. After passing over the middle of Turkey, the path of totality will continue across central Asia before ending at sunset in northwestern Mongolia. A partial eclipse will be visible from all of Europe and most of Africa and Asia. The Williams team will have three minutes to capture its observations of the Sun's corona, the faint outer halo of million-degree gas that is hidden by the sky except during a total eclipse. That length of time is relatively long compared with the approximately 30 seconds afforded by the most recent eclipses. Two of the group's experiments involve searching for the mechanism that heats the solar corona to millions of degrees by taking rapid series of images with new electronic cameras through specially designed filters. One filter passes a narrowly defined color in the green portion of the light spectrum and the other passes a narrowly defined color in the red. Each is emitted by gas in the corona from iron that has been heated to such high temperatures that it has been stripped of 13 or 9 electrons, respectively, from its normal 26. A third experiment uses a filter that provides an even more narrowly defined coronal color. Known as a Fabry-Perot, it was designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for David Rust, a solar astronomer there. Rust and his colleague Matthew Noble will be in Kastellorizo. Williams alumnus Rob Wittenmyer '98, now a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Texas, also will work with the team on site. A fourth experiment involves a specially built telescope that matches one now defunct aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a satellite built and operated by the European Space Agency and NASA. Both organizations have arranged with Pasachoff to receive a digital image immediately after the eclipse, to merge with their own spacecraft images and to distribute to the public. Bernhard Fleck, SOHO project scientist, will be on site with the Williams team. The group will capture a further variety of digital and film images. They will include work by several veterans of previous Williams eclipse expeditions, including Lee Hawkins from Appalachian State University and Jonathan Kern of the Large Binocular Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. Kern will capture images with a camera modified to flatten the extensive dynamic range of the corona to enable the delicate coronal structure to show on a single piece of photographic film. In Kastellorizo, the Williams team will also be joined by Seiradakis and two of his students, along with Margarita Metaxa of Athens, who works with Pasachoff on the International Astronomical Union's Commission on Education and Development, and two of her high-school students. Pasachoff maintains the Website http://www.eclipses.info that links to various eclipse-related resources. With the assistance of Milos Mladenovic of Williams' office of information technology, he has posted details of all the scientific experiments planned for March 29 at sites in Libya, Egypt, Greece, and Turkey. Williams College | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Related Solar Eclipse News Articles Massive Transiting Planet with 31-hour Year Found Around Distant Star An international team of astronomers with the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey today announce the discovery of their third planet, TrES-3. Magnetic field uses sound waves to ignite sun's ring of fire Sound waves escaping the sun's interior create fountains of hot gas that shape and power a thin region of the sun's atmosphere which appears as a ruby red "ring of fire" around the moon during a total solar eclipse, according to research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA. Mars Express successfully powers through eclipse season The Mars Express spacecraft has emerged from an unusually demanding eclipse season introducing a special, ultra-low-power mode nicknamed 'Sumo'-an innovative configuration aimed at saving the power necessary to ensure spacecraft survival. Scientists accurately simulate appearance of sun's corona during eclipse The most true-to-life computer simulation ever made of our sun's multimillion-degree outer atmosphere, the corona, successfully predicted its actual appearance during the March 29, 2006, solar eclipse, scientists have announced. NASA Sees Solar Eclipse in a Different Light NASA is offering the public a front row seat for the total solar eclipse on Wednesday, March 29 thanks to a partnership with the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco's Exploratorium. The sap flow through trees. The transport of water through trees Trees take up water from the soil by their root hairs and transport it through the vessels of the stem towards the leaves. At leaf level this water evaporates and comes into the atmosphere through little pores in the leaf epidermis, called stomates. This process is also known as transpiration. The water transpired through the leaves must be replaced by new water molecules. This water can either be pushed from the bottom or pulled from the top. The first process, called root pressure, is however not sufficient to push the water to the top of tall trees. Moreover, root pressure occurs only during low transpiration rates, and in the beginning of the spring Leading Eclipse Scientist puts finishing touches to his next expedition Professor John Parkinson, Britain's leading eclipse expert sets off for South Africa in a few days time to observe the total eclipse of the sun on 4 December. He will be heading for a remote bush camp at Sirheni in the northern part of the Kruger National Park. A total eclipse offers a rare opportunity to learn more about astronomy, science and the natural world through observing and investigating. John's web site at www.shu.ac.uk/eclipse explains the why, when, where and how of eclipses and also offers ideas for experiments that can be carried out during an eclipse. For most people, a total solar eclipse is a 'once in a lifetime' experience but for John this will be his 10th expedition. He Double Planet Meets Triple Star High-Resolution VLT Image of Pluto Event on July 20, 2002 A rare celestial phenomenon involving the distant planet Pluto has occurred twice within the past month. Seen from the Earth, this planet moved in front of two different stars on July 20 and August 21, respectively, providing observers at various observatories in South America and in the Pacific area with a long awaited and most welcome opportunity to learn more about tenuous atmosphere of that cold planet. On the first date, a series of very sharp images of a small sky field with Pluto and the star was obtained with the NAOS-CONICA (NACO) adaptive optics (AO) camera mounted on the ESO VLT 8.2-m YEPUN telescope at the Paranal Observat Nature press release for 2 August issue [412543] LIFELINES: POPULATION SET TO PEAK IN 2070 (pp543-545; N&V) The world's population may be heading for a peak as soon as 2070, followed by a decline, suggests a study in this week's Nature. There is an 85 per cent chance that the population will stop growing before 2100. The population could climb to only 8.4 billion by 2100, an estimate about 1 billion short of a United Nations prediction. Portraying a world increasingly dominated by Southern Hemisphere nations, the model also predicts that the proportion of people over age 60 will leap from 10 to 34 per cent. This may be preceded by a "window of opportunity", in which many societies will benefit from a large workforce, says University showcases latest research for news media On Tuesday 26 June Sheffield Hallam University stages a unique research presentation for the news media at its City Campus. The University has earned an excellent reputation for applied creativity and practically-oriented research, and its work often makes national and even international news. In this Research Showcase event seven researchers will be presenting outstanding examples of current research projects. Each expert will give a five-minute informal presentation to an audience of journalists and broadcasters, each introducing his latest research and its applications in everyday life and answering questions. At the end there will be time for one-to-one interviews and photographs (and th More Solar Eclipse News Articles |
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