On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will be visible over a wide swath of the U.S. from Oregon to North Carolina. Here in the Northeast, we”™ll experience a partial eclipse. Faculty and students on a Connecticut Space Grant Team at the University of Bridgeport (UB) have been working for two years on a national project to study the eclipse involving the U.S. space agency NASA along with scientists and academicians from around the country. The UB team will be traveling to the western part of Kentucky where the total eclipse will be visible for the longest time.
During the eclipse, the UB team will be launching four weather balloons equipped with radiosondes, devices which take high-altitude atmospheric measurements and radio the data back to earth. In addition, they”™ll launch two balloons equipped with cameras to send back live video of the eclipse from high in the atmosphere, where clouds and pollution won”™t get in the way. The video will be live-streamed on the internet, so anyone can watch. The link to watch the live video will be here.
At the Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport on July 31, the university”™s eclipse team conducted a test launch of a radiosonde-equipped balloon. UB professor Jani Macari Pallis said that students from the University of Hartford, high school students from Fairchild Wheeler Interdistrict Magnus Campus in Bridgeport and colleagues from Kentucky assisted in the testing. The balloon soared to 51,000 feet before radio contact was lost.
UB mechanical engineering graduate student Shiva Sundaram explained that the radiosondes will be launched “”¦in succession: five minutes before the eclipse begins”¦40 minutes before eclipse totality, five minutes before totality, and 30 minutes after totality.”
