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Last Post 10/24/2017 6:37 AM by  Delores Knipp
Eclipse August on 21st
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10/22/2017 7:18 PM
    Hi Scientists,

    Have any of you observed the eclipse last August? What did you think? Did you do any scientific work related to it and were there any results?

    Thanks

    Claire Raftery



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    10/23/2017 8:42 AM
    I saw the eclipse from Salem in Oregon. It was my first total eclipse and it gave me shivers up my spine! It was other worldly and the light from it was like nothing I've ever experienced.

    I helped with a project called Citizen CATE (http://citizencate.org). We had 68 telescopes manned by volunteers (non scientists) spread across the length of totality, about 100km apart. As the eclipse passed from one site onto the next, we captured images of the corona in a sort of eclipse relay race. The telescopes we used were able to capture identical, high resolution data, meaning that we can now conduct scientific studies of the innermost layer of the atmosphere, a region very difficult to observe otherwise.

    Lindsay Glesener



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    10/23/2017 10:41 AM
    I also saw the eclipse from Salem, and it was very cool to observe the sky dimming, the air temperature decrease, and the moon's shadow overtake the solar disk! Although I knew what would happen, it was an unparalleled experience to see it in real life. I did not do any scientific work myself during the eclipse, but there were several scientific telescopes observing at the time, and even a NASA airplane flying along the eclipse path in order to extend totality and look for changes in the solar corona.

    Kris Sigsbee



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    10/23/2017 2:39 PM
    Hello!

    I watched the eclipse with some friends who live in St. Louis, Missouri. I have seen partial solar eclipses before, but this was the first time I have ever seen a total solar eclipse. It was exciting! We used a lot of different things to watch the eclipse. We had eclipse glasses and a telescope with a solar filter. We also used household objects like a colander and Ritz crackers as pinhole projectors. We could even see tiny eclipse projections through the leaves of trees and shrubs and through a lattice fence. It was a very interesting experience and was different from what I was expecting. As the eclipse progressed, it did not get dark the way it does at sunset. Instead, the light started to take on a very odd silver or grayish color. My friend's dogs started to behave very strangely, which could have been due to the strange colored light during the eclipse, or it could have been because it was very hot out. It started to get noticeably cooler as the eclipse got closer to totality. During totality, the sky was a very dark shade of blue, not black the way it is late at night, and we could see it was brighter on the horizon. We could see a couple of bright stars and planets, but it was not dark enough to see a lot of stars. We watched the whole eclipse from when the Moon's shadow first appeared on the edge of the Sun to when there was just the tiniest bite left out of the Sun. It was a lot of fun, and I hope I get the chance to see another total solar eclipse someday.

    I did not do any scientific data analysis during the eclipse, because my area of research is space weather like geomagnetic storms and the radiation belts. However, just for fun I put together a collage of photos we took through my telescope eyepiece showing the different phases of the eclipse.

    Delores Knipp



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    10/24/2017 6:37 AM
    I saw the eclipse from my hometown in Tipton, Missouri. My father's farm was on the southern edge of the path of totality. It was absolutely amazing. What was very interesting to me was the appearance of the sky during the total eclipse; it looked like sunset in every direction. Prior to the eclipse there were several hunting birds soaring in the sky. As the temperature cooled these birds lost a lot of the 'thermals" or bubbles of rising air that they use for gliding. So the birds decided to roost in some tall trees. It was a couple of hours before they took to the skies again.


    My colleague, Dr. Cissi Lin, was doing eclipse photography and I was monitoring the impact of the eclipse on the upper atmosphere using a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. Here is a picture of Dr Lin working with the solar filter over her camera. She made a creative banner of the eclipse images. When the moon had fully eclipsed the Sun she was able to take the filter off. The four black and white images in the banner are during totality with solar filter removed from the camera.

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