Williams College Faculty/Student Team Travel to Study Solar Eclipse(Forwarded)

Office of Public Affairs
Williams College

Media contact:
Jim Kolesar, jkolesar @ williams.edu

March 20, 2006

Williams College Faculty/Student Team Travel to Study Solar Eclipse

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- A 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.williams.edu/Astronomy/IA...ses/education/ 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.

For the current expedition, Williams College received a grant from the
National Science Foundation. Pasachoff also received an earlier grant from
the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic
Society. The new electronic cameras were supplied by an equipment grant to
Williams and MIT from the Planetary Sciences Division of NASA. Additional
support is being provided by the scientific honor society Sigma Xi, a
Massachusetts Space Grant, the Rob Spring Fund, and the Ryan Patrick
Gaishin Fund. Some of the photographic equipment has been lent by National
Geographic and by Nikon.