LASCO uses a disk to blot out the bright sun and the inner corona so that the faint outer corona can be monitored and studied.

Further, the dark silhouette of the moon was covered with an image of the Sun taken in extreme ultraviolet light at about the same time by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

The composite brings out the correlation of structures in the inner and outer corona.

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Huntsville AL (SPX) Jul 12, 2010 - It's every vacationer's dream: You stretch out on a white sandy beach for a luxurious nap under the South Pacific sun. The caw of distant gulls wafts across the warm sea breeze while palm fronds rustle gently overhead. You take it all in through half-closed eyes.

Could Paradise get any better? This weekend it will.

On Sunday, July 11th, the new Moon will pass directly in front of the sun, producing a total eclipse over the South Pacific. The path of totality stretches across more than a thousand miles of ocean, making landfall in the Cook Islands, Easter Island, a number of French Polynesian atolls, and the southern tip of South America.

"It's going to be a beautiful sight," says Lika Guhathakurta of NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington DC. She herself has witnessed more than eight solar eclipses in a variety of environments from busy cities to lonely deserts to remote mountain peaks. "The South Pacific eclipse could top them all."

She imagines how the event will unfold: First, the Moon's cool shadow will sweep across the landscape, bringing a breeze of its own to compete with the sea's. Attentive observers might notice shadow bands (a well-known but mysterious corrugation of the Moon's outermost shadow) rippling across the beach as the temperature and direction of the wind shift.

The ensuing darkness will have an alien quality, not as black as genuine night, but dark enough to convince seabirds to fly to their island roosts. As their cries subside, the sounds of night creatures come to the fore, a noontime symphony of crickets and frogs.

Next comes the moment that obsesses eclipse chasers: The corona pops into view. When the Moon is dead-center in front of the sun, mesmerizing tendrils of gas spread across the sky. It is the sun's outer atmosphere on full display to the human eye.

"You can only see this while you are standing inside the shadow of the Moon," says Guhathakurta. "It is a rare and special experience."

Because the sun's atmosphere is constantly shape-shifting, every total eclipse is unique. Predicting what any given one will look like can be tricky.

Nevertheless, Guhathakurta is making a prediction. It's based on a new development in solar physics. For the first time, NASA has two spacecraft stationed on opposite sides of the sun.

"STEREO-A and STEREO-B are giving us a realtime 3D view of the solar corona, something we've never had before," she explains. "This helps forecast the appearance of the corona during an eclipse."

Inspecting images from STEREO and also from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), she predicts observers could see four ghostly-white streamers, two on either side of the sun. They will stretch out two to three degrees, forming a gossamer "X" in the sky with a black hole at the crossing point.

"I'm prepared to be wrong," she confesses. "This is the first time anyone has tried to make such a forecast using STEREO data. It will be interesting to see if it works."

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Hanga Roa, Chile (AFP) July 11, 2010 - Tourists and scientists poured onto remote and mysterious Easter Island Sunday to watch a rare total eclipse of the sun, a mixed blessing for the Pacific community.

An estimated 4,000 tourists, scientists, photographers, filmmakers and journalists flocked to the remote Chilean outpost of only 160 square kilometers (60 square miles), doubling the population of the barren island that already suffers from water pollution and deforestation.

Conditions are anything but normal on Easter Island, deemed by astronomers the best place to witness Sunday's alignment of Sun, Moon and Earth for a fleeting four minutes and 41 seconds.

The Sun is 400 times wider than the Moon, but it is also 400 times farther away. Because of the symmetry, the lunar umbra, or shadow, that falls on the face of the Earth is exactly wide enough to cover the face of the Sun.

Some weather forecasts, however, warn of cloudy skies -- potentially dashing hopes of a clear view here.

The total solar eclipse will begin at 1815 GMT, when the umbra or shadow falls on the South Pacific about 700 kilometers (440 miles) southeast of Tonga, according to veteran NASA eclipse specialist, Fred Espanak.

It will then zip in an easterly arc across the Pacific, eventually cloaking Easter Island and its mysterious giant statues at around 2011 GMT.

Parts of the globe will be plunged into daytime darkness along a narrow corridor some 11,000 kilometers long across the South Pacific.

And the eclipse, in Tahiti for example, has a chance of upstaging even the start of the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands in South Africa at 1830 GMT.

Superstition has forever been part of the cult of the eclipse.

Throughout history, awe and dread -- the birth or death of kings, victories or defeats, bumper harvests or gnawing hunger -- have always attended that moment when the Moon slides in front of the Sun and darkness briefly cloaks the Earth at daytime.

Easter Island Governor Pedro Edmunds Paoa told AFP the island "has the capacity to absorb this number of tourists," similar to the influx in the southern hemisphere summer in January.

But authorities have increased security, especially around key heritage sites, including the 3,000-year-old large stone statues, or moai, that put Easter Island, a far-flung ethnic Polynesian point of reference, on the world culture map.

In the original islanders' ancient lore, such an eclipse "would have been seen as a very powerful signal of upcoming upheaval," as their world view was rooted in nature, in "the earth, the sea and especially the sky," said Patricia Vargas of the University of Chile.

But the island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site inhabited mainly by ethnic Polynesians, was strained even before the eclipse by a growing number of visitors who choose to stay indefinitely and a sharp increase in the non-aboriginal population.

Chile's government last year proposed a law to establish immigration controls on Easter Island and limit the number of tourists to try to protect the local population and fragile ecosystem.

The huge earthquake and tsunami that struck mainland Chile on February 27 forced the navy to partially evacuate the island over fears of damage from tides and currents.

In the months since, local authorities have scrambled to inform the global tourism industry that the territory was largely unscathed.

"We want to show the world that despite the earthquake, we are still in the tourist circuit," said Mayor Luz del Carmen Zasso.

On the streets of the capital Hanga Roa, craft fairs abound and merchants were selling native craft items and eclipse souvenirs.

Zasso explained that local officials have taken "all measures to protect the heritage and the environment."

She said visitors will be told to treat the island with respect. "Easter Island is an open-air museum, and the eclipse is part of this museum," she added.

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Williamstown MA (SPX) Jul 09, 2010 - Professor Jay Pasachoff of Williams College's astronomy department is on Easter Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean preparing to observe the July 11 total solar eclipse. The eclipse will be one of the least observed ever, since so much of the path is over ocean.

Easter Island, 2,500 miles west of the Chilean South American mainland, is the only substantial land in the path, until the extreme end of the eclipse reaches Patagonia at sunset. Some eclipse scientists and eco-tourists will observe totality from smaller islands or atolls in French Polynesia or the Cook Islands, from two chartered airplanes, and from a chartered ship.

Pasachoff has travelled to Easter Island with students Muzhou Lu, Williams College '12, and Craig Malamut, a Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium Summer Fellow and Wesleyan '11. They are joined on site by Prof. Marek Demianski.

They will be carrying out high-resolution imaging to look for motions in the corona and to continue following the varying magnetic-field configuration in the solar corona as a function of the solar-activity cycle. Though the sunspot cycle remains in an extreme low, some other indications of solar activity have been increasing and the researchers are eager to see the condition of the low and middle corona.

Pasachoff is the coauthor of papers with Miloslav Druckmuller of the Czech Republic and Vojtech Rusin of Slovakia on the former's extensive image processing to bring out fine details and high contrast in the corona at the eclipses of 2005, 2006, and 2008.

They plan to compare the images they capture at this month's eclipse with similar images planned to be taken from Polynesia and the Cook Islands as well as those taken with one of the expedition's Nikon telephoto lenses from an airplane that will take off from Tahiti.

The airplane observations are in collaboration with Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona and Joel Moskowitz of New York. They expect to see motions at least in polar plumes.

The researchers also will use the images to fill gaps between the observations of the corona on the solar disk taken with NASA's new Solar Dynamics Observatory and the observations of the outer corona taken with the Naval Research Laboratory's coronagraph on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory; they have contributed to similar images for the past several eclipses but now will have the improved SDO images as part of the expedition's montage. Several of the cameras will be computer controlled using software called Solar Eclipse Maestro, written by Xavier Jubier of France.

The event will be Pasachoff's 51st solar eclipse. He is Chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses.

The Williams College team is accompanied by a documentary crew filming for the National Geographic Channel, and their activities will be covered in a special program, titled Easter Island Eclipse, partly pre- recorded and partly expected to have new eclipse footage that will air July 11th at 11 pm. In Williamstown, the National Geographic Channel is on cable channel 201.

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Santiago, Chile (AFP) July 8, 2010 - Easter Island will be overcast and drizzly Sunday, weather experts said -- a disappointing forecast for thousands hoping to view what would be, if the weather cooperates, a spectacular solar eclipse.

About 4,000 tourists have traveled to tiny Pacific ocean outpost to view Sunday's rare total eclipse of the sun, but Chile's meteorological office on Easter Island said dreary weather may ruin the plans of sky-watchers.

The weather is likely to be "cloudy or partly cloudy with rain showers."

Still, the governor of Easter Island, Pedro Edmunds Paoa, told AFP that it is not unusual for the skies there to start out overcast and clear up by midday.

"The eclipse is going to happen around noon, so we still hold out hope that we'll be able to see it," he said.

Astronomers say Easter Island is the very best place to witness Sunday's alignment of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, which will occur for a fleeting four minutes, 41 seconds.

The 4,000 visitors expected to flock to the island for the eclipse are roughly twice the population of the tiny Pacific Ocean island, located some 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) from mainland Chile.

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Washington DC (SPX) Apr 08, 2010 - For the first time, a team of astronomers has imaged the eclipse of the star Epsilon Aurigae by its mysterious, less luminous companion star. Very high-resolution images, never before possible, have been published online today in the journal Nature Letters.

Epsilon Aurigae has been known since 1821 as an eclipsing double star system, but astronomers have struggled for many decades trying to decipher the clues to what was causing these eclipses, which happen every 27 years.

The new image largely settles the matter: the eclipse is caused by a disk of material, probably similar to the state of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago as the planets began to form around our own infant sun.

The research team includes astronomers from the University of Denver, the University of Michigan, and Georgia State University with Denver graduate student Brian Kloppenborg serving as the first author on the Nature Letters paper.

Seeing this eclipse in detail has only now become possible. Kloppenberg's research advisor, University of Denver Professor Robert Stencel, describes this long-awaited discovery, "Having studied this star on and off since my postdoctoral days in the 1980s during its last eclipse, it is very satisfying to finally resolve some of the long-standing questions associated with this famous star."

The image was obtained using the interferometric technique, an old idea that incorporates computer control and laser connections among multiple telescopes to achieve signal equivalent to one giant telescope.

"To capture the detail on Epsilon Aurigae, we've made use of the biggest optical telescope on earth, the 330-meter (1,083 feet) diameter CHARA Array atop Mount Wilson, California," said Kloppenborg. To comprehend its size, note that 100 meters (328 feet) is roughly the length of a football field.

The CHARA Array is a collection of six telescopes, spread out over the grounds of Mount Wilson Observatory, in which individual beams of light are brought together using extraordinarily precise beam combiners to synthesize a giant telescope hundreds of meters across. The array is owned by Georgia State University (GSU) and operated by GSU's Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy.

In routine operations since 2005, the CHARA Array has already produced a number of astronomical "firsts" though its ability to produce images of unprecedented resolution.

CHARA Director and GSU Regents' Professor Harold McAlister noted, "The size of Epsilon Aurigae in these amazing new images is equivalent to the angular size of an 11-point font letter 'o' seen from a distance of more than 150 kilometers (93 miles)."

Key to the imaging success of the CHARA Array is the Michigan Infrared Combiner (MIRC), created by University of Michigan Professor John Monnier. MIRC enables the type of multi-telescope linkage that is required to produce such images and enables more of the potential of CHARA to be used in parallel for image reconstruction.

The combination of MIRC at CHARA has already produced the first image ever made of a normal star other than the sun, as well as the first images of a double star system in which one component is shedding matter to its companion star.

The images of Epsilon Aurigae show the intrusion of an apparently wedge-shaped structure across the face of a huge star, nearly 150 times the size of our sun.

The images of the star and wedge-shaped structure show the direct motion over a month, yielding a measurement of the relative masses of the components. The primary star itself is thought to be in a very interesting phase of its own evolution, turning out to be less massive than the eclipsing disk and the star hidden at the center of that disk.

Independently, Stencel and collaborators from the California Institute of Technology and Kitt Peak National Observatory had assembled data to show the disk contains a large, hot star known as a B5V object, describing its mass and temperature. This prior work set the stage to then evaluate the mass of the disk itself, based on the CHARA images.

It turns out the disk is as wide as the orbit of Jupiter, nearly as tall as the orbit of Earth, but contains a little less than the mass of Earth altogether.

"This is a fairly direct measurement of characteristics of a disk, in contrast to the usual disk studies where indirect evidence and lots of assumptions are the only means of characterization available. With some luck, we can obtain more CHARA images this year and develop the equivalent of an MRI scan of the entire disk through eclipse," noted Stencel.

Because astronomers hadn't observed much light from the faint companion, the prevailing opinion labeled it a smaller star orbited edge-on by a thick disk of dust.

The theory held that the disk's orbit must be in precisely the same plane as the dark object's orbit around the brighter star, and all of this had to be occurring in the same plane as Earth's vantage point. This would be an unlikely alignment, but it explained observations. The new images show that this is indeed the case. A geometrically-thin, dark, dense, but partially-translucent cloud can be seen passing in front of Epsilon Aurigae.

"This really shows that the basic paradigm was right, despite the slim probability," Monnier said. "It kind of blows my mind that we could capture this. There's no other system like this known. On top of that, it seems to be in a rare phase of stellar life. And it happens to be so close to us! It's extremely fortuitous."

The star began its current eclipse during late summer 2009, seemingly affecting us on Earth as well. Stencel and Kloppenborg had applied for CHARA observing time earlier that year.

While waiting for the star to become well-placed in the nighttime sky, Mother Nature had other plans: the Station Fire broke out in the San Gabriel Mountains around Mount Wilson in late August 2009, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres of National Forest over several weeks and shutting down operations at the observatory.

For weeks thereafter, access to Mount Wilson was closed to all, and only with great fortune were the November and December 2009 observations accomplished. Not long after that, in early 2010, with the arrival of the rainy season, extensive mudslides destroyed sections of the access road to Mount Wilson. Despite the challenges, with road repairs underway, there is hope for more observations during this rare but long eclipse, which will last for the rest of 2010.

"We have witnessed the initial phases of this eclipse, and we certainly don't want to miss the rest of the show," said Kloppenborg.

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Thiruvananthapuram, India (AFP) Jan 15, 2010 - A solar eclipse that reduced the sun to a blazing ring surrounding a sombre disk plunged millions of people in Africa and Asia into an eerie semi-darkness on Friday.

The spectacle, visible in a roughly 300-kilometre (185-mile) band running 12,900 kilometres (8,062 miles) across the globe, set a record for the longest annular eclipse that will remain unbeaten for more than a thousand years.

An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun but does not completely obscure it, thus leaving a ring -- an annulus -- of sunlight flaring around the lunar disk.

The Moon's shadow first struck the southwestern tip of Chad and western Central African Republic at 0514 GMT and then reached Uganda, Kenya, and Somalia before racing across India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and China.

Local media in the affected areas issued warnings about the dangers of looking directly at the sun, but fascinated onlookers thronged streets to witness the celestial phenomenon.

"It's getting interesting. Birds are singing. It's actually getting cold here," said John Saitega, a 34-year-old father of six in Olte Tefi, 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of Nairobi.

In India, where the eclipse was visible from the southern-most tip, astronomers and curious spectators watched in awe, using sunglasses and even ultra-dark welding masks as day turned into darkness.

There were cheers and applause in the city of Bangalore when clouds cleared just in time to show the Moon glide into position to cover about 85 percent of the Sun.

Veteran eclipse chaser Daniel Fischer from German astronomy magazine Interstellarum picked a vantage spot on a cliff in Varkala, 62 kilometres (38 miles) north of the city of Thiruvananthapuram in the Indian state of Kerala.

"I'm thrilled. My first eclipse was Indonesia in 1983," said Fischer, who has witnessed 23 eclipses in total.

The Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched three small rockets on Thursday and another five on Friday to study the effects of the event on the atmosphere.

"We will compare the data obtained on normal days with data during and immediately after the eclipse to study the difference," project director P. Ratnakar Rao told AFP from Thiruvananthapuram.

The eclipse, which was followed live on cable television in India and China, temporarily put a halt to the world's biggest religious gathering in northern India.

Temples in Haridwar, site of the Kumbh Mela which sees millions of Hindus bathe in the holy river Ganges, were closed for the duration of the eclipse because the phenomenon is considered inauspicious, an organiser told AFP.

Residents in the Ugandan capital Kampala got a good view, although some were afraid of the intensity of the light, with many sharing dark glasses to gaze up at the sky.

"Can't it burn someone? You can't even look direct because I'm fearing for my eyes. I'm fearing it can burn me," said Angela Namukwaya, a shopkeeper in a Kampala suburb.

The maximum duration of "annularity" -- the time the moon is in front of the sun --- was 11 minutes, eight seconds at 0706 GMT, making it "the longest annular eclipse of the 3rd Millennium," according to NASA.

Only on December 23, 3043 will this record be beaten.

In China's capital, Beijing, a partial eclipse made a crescent of the setting orange sun before the lunar shadow expired over the Shandong peninsula at 0859 GMT.

burs-adp/gh/bsk

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST New Delhi, India (PTI) Jan 18, 2010 - The millennium's longest solar eclipse gave a unique chance to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists and astronomy lovers to study the event on Friday, with the space agency launching rockets and celestial gazers aiming telescopes at the sky to watch the moon's shadow covering the sun.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, launched a series of Rohini Sounding Rockets from TERLS, Thumba, to investigate the effects of the solar eclipse on the atmosphere. The spectacle began at 11:17 am at Dhanushkodi island, off Tamil Nadu coast, the best location to watch the eclipse.

Four sounding rockets of series RH 200 and RH300MK II with peak altitudes of about 70 km and 116 km respectively were launched on Thursday to collect data. This was followed by another five launches on Friday, the eclipse day, an ISRO release said.

Two larger Rohini rockets of the series RH 560 MK II were also launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota, on Thursday and Friday, which will have a peak altitude of 548 km.

The occurrence of eclipse will result in a sudden cut-off of solar radiation. This affects the atmospheric structure and dynamics. There will be a large reduction in ionisation and temperature, ISRO said.

It is also a unique opportunity to investigate the effects of the fast varying solar flux on the photochemistry and electrodynamics of different atmospheric regions, especially the equatorial mesopause and ionosphere-thermosphere regions, the space agency added in the release.

New insight
These experiments will coordinate modern ground-based eclipse observations with in-situ space measurements. Interpretation of eclipse data together with space data will give new insights to the earlier eclipse observations, ISRO said in the release.As the eclipse began, astronomers - amateur and professional - aimed their telescopes to capture every moment of the event.

"We recorded the event in special filters and obtained pictures to study the various aspects of the celestial event," said R C Kapoor, a scientist with the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics.

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Bangalore, India (PTI) Jan 14, 2010 - The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) here, an unit of ISRO, has made elaborate arrangements including launch of sounding rockets to gather data for a comprehensive analysis of the annular solar eclipse, which will occur on January 15.

The atmospheric-ionospheric parameters to be conducted in India would be one of the most comprehensive scientific campaigns ever attempted during a solar eclipse anywhere in the world, a VSSC release said here on Wednesday.

As part of the campaign, nine sounding rockets would be launched before and during the eclipse from Thumba attached to the VSCC and Satish Dhawan Space Centre, also known as the Sriharikota Range (SHAR) to collect data on the event.

At 11.14 a.m. on January 15, the eclipse will pass close to Thumba with 91 per cent obscuration of the Sun and its edges would touch Sriharikota with 85 per cent obscuration.

The eclipse would be a unique one since it will take place during noontime, when the incoming solar radiation would be at its maximum, the VSSC release said.

It is also significant since the obscuration of the Sun during the eclipse would be exceptionally long, about 11 minutes and eight seconds, providing an opportunity to study, perhaps for the first time, the eclipse induced effects in the noontime equatorial region.

The interpretation of the space data would give new insights of the celestial phenomenon, it said.

]]> Fri, 03 SEP 2010 15:38:02 AEST Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jul 30, 2009 - The Hinode satellite observing our sun captured images of the moon traversing the face of the sun during a solar eclipse this week.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2009, a total eclipse of the Sun was visible from within a narrow corridor that traverses half of Earth. The path of the Moon's umbral shadow began in India and crossed through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China.

After leaving mainland Asia, the path crossed Japan's Ryukyu Islands and curved southeast through the Pacific Ocean where the maximum duration of totality reached 6 minutes and 39 seconds. A partial eclipse is seen within the much broader path of the Moon's penumbral shadow, which includes most of eastern Asia, Indonesia, and the Pacific Ocean. (NASA/JAXA)

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