Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Be There! The Great American Eclipse

Episode Date: May 3, 2017

Our ongoing coverage of preparation for the Great American Eclipse takes us to Southern Illinois University Carbondale where a huge celebration is planned.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

That Great American Eclipse, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. More of our special coverage of the cosmic event that will happen on Monday, August 21st, rain or shine. We'll go to Southern Illinois University Carbondale to hear about that school's very public plans, and then we'll hear from two of the people behind the Eclipse mega movie. Everyone you'll hear hopes you'll join the celebration. How many worlds have we discovered around the Milky Way? Bruce Betts will share the mind-blowing total on What's Up. And now, something we've all been looking forward to for weeks. Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla has returned.

Emily, it has been far too long. Welcome back! Thank you, Matt. And you are back with a bang. A big bang. I mean, first, a very comprehensive update about the Curiosity rover. But what we're going to talk about for the next two or three minutes is this little event related to the planet Saturn. Tell us about, I don't know, was it a celebration? It was a celebration, I guess. It was an event to mark a very important and significant event in the lifetime of the Cassini project, which was the very first time that Cassini dived between Saturn's rings and the planet. It had all the trappings of a usual kind of JPL event where

people were waiting for the signal from the spacecraft. In actuality, there really wasn't any doubt that the spacecraft was going to survive this passage. These people understand their spacecraft very well. They've learned a lot about Saturn. They knew how the spacecraft was going to perform. But it still seemed really important for everybody to watch because this is, it was the first step on the rest of Cassini's mission, a mission that's inevitably going to end in September. And there was a very personal side to all of this. Even some songs composed for the occasion. That's right. There's a group called the Cassini Virtual Singers that has been singing at these kinds of events. Honest to God Choral Group, Soprano Alto Tenor Baritone, they were singing in four-part harmony all kinds of songs about silly in-jokes among the engineers and operations managers who run a spacecraft mission. It was very nerdy and very fun.

How about the science, at least at this early stage? Well, when you first get into a new orbit, the first science that comes back is in the form of images. And some of the first images that they got back from this dive, they were all focused at the planet this time, not at the rings. The spacecraft had its cameras pointed at the planet. But over time, these next few months of data are going to build up a really rich understanding of this innermost zone of Saturn's rings. And also, for the first time, we'll finally be able to separate the mass of Saturn's rings from the mass of the planet. We actually don't know how much Saturn's rings weigh. And that's really important information to try to understand how old the rings are. And guess what?

After all this Cassini mission, we still don't know how old the rings are. And not only that, what about how long a day is on Saturn? Are we going to learn about that? That's funny. That's one of those things that we thought we knew after the Voyager mission. And then Cassini showed up and found out that the day length was different. A planet like Saturn cannot change its day length that fast. So it turns out we were wrong for Voyager

and hopefully maybe being this close to Saturn, this deep inside its magnetosphere, will help scientists finally get a read on exactly how fast the interior of the planet is spinning. Emily, it is wonderful to have you back from sabbatical, both here on the radio show and at planetary.org, where everybody can read that curiosity piece and this terrific piece about your experience with Cassini and that terrific team that is now counting down the last days of the mission. It's a pleasure to be back, Matt. That's Emily Lakdawalla back with us from sabbatical.

She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, and we'll be hearing much more from her in the weeks to come. On now to a special show, a couple of conversations about the coming great American eclipse. I'd only been in southern Illinois once before. It was many years ago, and I didn't have nearly as good a reason for being there as I did a couple of weeks ago, or that I will again in August. Southern Illinois University Carbondale is where I'll be for the Great American Eclipse on August 21st. Actually, I'll be there several days before to join the grand celebration of this astronomical wonder that will pass diagonally across the United States from its northwest to its southeast.

SIU Carbondale is right in the middle of that path. It's also in the middle of preparing to share it with everyone who comes to the beautiful campus. You can learn about the big plans at eclipse.siu.edu. That's also where you can get your tickets for the climactic gathering in Saluki Stadium, and you will need tickets. But there will be so much more happening on campus, as I learned at a reception not far from the university. I'm Bob Baer. I work at SIU Carbondale. I am the Eclipse Committee co-chair for Eclipse 2017 coming up. Of course, Carbondale is going to be seeing two, so we talk about in terms of Eclipse 2017 and 2024.

Other than being incredibly fortunate at the location of the campus, why has the university embraced this to the degree it has. It's really pretty amazing. It is. So at SIU, we look at it as a large community outreach opportunity. But this is the biggest opportunity that we have, this eclipse coming up to reach out to such a large group of people. It occurs on the first day of school for us. So all the students returning back to campus are going to see an eclipse. We often joke, who else gives their students a total solar eclipse on the first day of class? There's a few other universities in the path, but we're very proud of that. Not only they can see this, but they can get engaged with us and actually volunteer and help us out with activities the day of.

Give me just a thumbnail description of some of the major events that are going to be going on over really like four days. Right, we start Friday night actually. We're doing a big carnival for the students. We have an eclipse preview event starting on Saturday. We're doing an eclipse comic con. So that goes Saturday and Sunday. That's, you know, a pop culture event for the students. And this is a real Comic Con? Oh yeah, yeah. We're working with a group out of Cape Toronto, Missouri. They're helping us to plan it out. This is the first Comic Con event we've ever done on the campus, and it's being done through SPC, the Student Programming Council. So they're working out the details of that right now. I'm really looking forward to it. I've heard already

that it does sound like we have some stormtroopers who will be involved with this Comic-Con. Star Wars stormtroopers, yeah. Just to be clear. Exactly. Some cosplay. And then on Sunday, we're doing an Eclipse Expo. Everyone identifies with the eclipse. A lot of people, as you know, identify with astronomy in general. There's often no language barriers when you're looking at objects through a telescope. And this one, the eclipse, you don't even need a telescope to see this. So this is a pretty spectacular opportunity. The big viewing event on campus on Monday is at the stadium. And I always tell people, you know, you can see the eclipse from anywhere. Here in Southern Illinois, you can step outside your back door and see the eclipse. In the stadium, we're doing this event for first-time viewers who have never seen an eclipse. So they can come in,

they can get the eclipse explained to them. There's programming going on called edutainment. So it's educational and entertaining. But it's really for the first-time eclipse viewer or someone like me. I've seen one total so far, but I'm like you. I really want to see this with the crowd. I am really excited to see the crowd's reaction for this Eclipse. And it's not like you're going to turn somebody away if they've happened to have seen one before. Oh no, not at all. We'd love for those people to be here because they're kind of going to be part of the show. If you're coming in and you've seen an eclipse before and maybe you're bringing equipment into the stadium and you want to set it up, we're going to be talking to you that day. We're going to be asking you, what's your experience?

Let us know and it will be part of the show that day, actually. Along those lines, one of the major events with this eclipse are the broadcasts going out. So your event that's going to be done on campus. That's our Planetary Radio Live on Sunday. Right. The eclipse panel discussion on Sunday, that's a major event for our campus. And then the day of the eclipse, NASA EDGE is broadcasting from campus. WSIU is going to be rebroadcasting that. We're really excited for the whole world to see what the campus is like and see the eclipse from our perspective on campus. You're an astronomer. Where was that prior total solar eclipse that you saw? So I saw one in Tanjung Pandan, Indonesia, and I saw it as part of the CIS and CATE experiment.

I got involved in that experiment a few years back, but I went to Indonesia with a student, Sarah Kovac. She's a physics undergraduate, and we actually observed the eclipse there and recorded it and brought back images, about 1,200 frames, actually, of the eclipse. images, about 1,200 frames actually, of the eclipse. Sarah's actually been doing research, along with other groups, research on that data that we brought back from Indonesia. There is going to be a lot of science going on around this. Oh yeah, there will be. And one of the parts that I did not mention yet on campus is on Saturday afternoon, we're planning on doing a, I'm calling it the Crossroads Eclipse Research Workshop. That's going to be about two to three hours of talks in the afternoon.

And that will be people who are doing eclipse research or coronal research, I should say, on campus at our dark side or in the main areas on campus where we do the large public outreach events. We're doing a little bit of that on campus. That's going on across the country though. The Citizen Cade Experiment has actually, I think we're right around 60 sites across the nation. So these are eclipse observation sites that are operated by citizen volunteers about every 40 miles or so across the country to get complete coverage of the eclipse. And there's other projects such as the Eclipse Mega Movie Project. There's another large citizen science project. Which we'll be talking about on this show as well. Yeah, lots of research

being done across the country. Multiple teams sometimes doing research from different locations. You were working pretty hard during that first one that you saw in Indonesia. What was your personal reaction, your emotional reaction to it? Yeah, that's a really good question. So it started for us at about 4.30 a.m. We can hear the call to prayer is kind of our wake-up call right outside the hotel. And it's still dark, and we hike back to our observation site about a half a mile from the hotel. Before the sun's coming up, we're setting up the telescope, and we can see Venus. As soon as the sun came up, the clouds started parting for us. The focus of what we were doing was focusing the telescope at that time. That was the most challenging part of our task,

was focusing and getting the tracking right. I'm sure you know when you set up an equatorial mount, which is what we used, generally we used the North Star to do the alignment. We're setting up in the daytime in the southern hemisphere. So we winged the alignment, I'll say, and did what's called a drift alignment procedure over time. Now, there was just so much anticipation as we got towards totality and you can see these beautiful partial eclipse images on the ground. You can actually just hold out your hand and see the images being projected. Moments before totality we had a more experienced amateur astronomer with us

who called out totality and I pulled the telescope filter and I bump the telescope. The telescope moves. Luckily, we got it back on track. We didn't get the image centered perfectly. So if people look online at some of the images, our images of totality are just shifted slightly off center, but we're very happy to keep it in frame. You know, you're zoomed in on this corona. We're only looking at about out to 2.5 times the solar diameter for taking these images. We got it back on target right away and made sure the data was being collected, verified that. And then I look up at it, and I think it's a good thing I got this telescope running before I looked at totality because I didn't want to look away at that point. It's just amazing.

We saw prominence. The corona was big. In Indonesia, people told me it was larger than other eclipses, but naked eye, it looked about twice the diameter of the moon. Then there was this little prominence. For us, it was about at 8 o'clock, and it's bright red. So the corona is just this beautiful pure white. And you're seeing a prominent naked eye, which I have never seen before.

You have to use like a hydrogen alpha telescope or something to see those normally. The other part of it is seeing Venus and Mercury close to the sun. You know, we never see anything like that. I'm just still astounded by it as I talk about it now, just how spectacular it was to see that. So it was just this huge relief that we got the data. It was wonderful. Back to the campus. What's your advice to people who are intrigued and are within reach of Southern Illinois University? If they live just outside of the path of totality, they need to make sure they get inside the path of totality.

That's something we talk about a lot. The people who say, well, I'm at 95%, that's good enough. No, you need to travel. You need to make that trip. If you're in Illinois, traveling to Southern Illinois is a wonderful option for you, or if you're close to that. What we have going on on campus, the major events going on starting Friday through Monday,

I don't know of anywhere in the country that's doing the variety and the quality of scientific and cultural events that we have going on at SIU Carbondale. So I'd recommend make plans early, come down early. If you wanna make it to the Eclipse Panel discussion on Sunday night, you better be traveling early for that. Don't leave and think, I'm just going to drive down

and it's going to take me the normal two-hour trip. No, you need to leave early. And that goes even more so for Monday. We're opening our parking lots. We've tossed around a few different times, 4 a.m. I've heard 6 a.m. now, but we open the doors to the stadium at 9. Again, if you think you're just going to show up the day of an hour before totality and everything's going to be okay, no, you need to reevaluate that plan. Come down the day before. If you're within driving distance and you're coming down the day of, come down very early. Plan out your trip. Plan this out as if it's a trip that you really got to get right. Don't just wing it. And that's probably true for pretty much any place you may want to

get to, although I think SIU Carbondale celebration is going to be very special. I can't wait. Yeah, I can't wait either. Yeah, it'll be here before we know. We're around 120 days left to go now. And counting. Thanks, Bob. You're welcome. Good to talk to you, Matt. Bob Baer, co-chair of the Eclipse Celebration Committee at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. The great Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois, is one of the university's primary partners for the eclipse. Bob gave up his chair at the reception so I could hear from the woman who is leading the planetarium's participation. My name is Michelle Nichols, and I'm Master Educator at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

We are here this weekend, Michelle, you and I both, as sort of the pathfinders, I think, for what's going to happen in August, right? Why is Adler going to be coming down this way? The Adler Planetarium was contacted by SIU maybe about a year or so ago to help out with their eclipse event preparations, mainly because they said, well, we don't have an astronomy department on campus and we have astronomers on staff and could we help out with what they had in mind? And as the year has gone on, things have evolved, and so we've got quite a big presence that we're going to be having for the eclipse event. We actually start the week before the event. We have an outreach program that we call Galaxy Ride, so it's going to start Monday, August 14th.

Basically, we're going to where people are. So restaurants, bars, schools, libraries, various other places. I'm going to do free outreach events, basically get people excited about the eclipse, get them looking up at the sky. And then on the Monday of the eclipse, we'll have a tent at the stadium with activities going on all throughout the day. And then you and I will be hosting the Eclipse Stadium Show inside Saluki Stadium at Southern Illinois campus. And there are a number of activities that are going to be taking place. It's like a five-hour show in the stadium. What are some of the things that you're

hoping to demonstrate? Our preparation has been trying to figure out how to get somewhere between 10,000 to 15,000 people engaged with a stadium show that's going on on the field. My goal is to try to figure out ways that people can participate with me. So things like making a pinhole projector by putting your hands together, looking around for experiences that are going on around you, like listening to the sounds of what people are saying, what they're doing, what they're feeling, what they're experiencing at that moment. Figuring out ways we can all be a part of this together so that it's not just you, me, and various other people just on the

field. We want to draw all those people into the show itself. How does something like this fit into the mission of Adler Planetarium? We have a theme that we've been working with the last few years. We call it here, there, everywhere. So we have really great things that happen at the Adler Planetarium. That's here, or well, it's not here, here. Five and a half hours north, right? Yeah, five and a half hours north of where we are right now. There means we have ways of getting out into the community. That could be the local Chicago community. That could be the suburbs.

That could be down here in southern Illinois. And then everywhere. How do we get people, how do we get them to engage with whatever it is that we're talking about or the program that we have so that they can bring it into their own communities. So leveraging their resources, getting people excited and increasing their own capacity to maybe take what we might give them and use it in whatever way they need to. This is not your first. No, this is going to be my second total solar eclipse.

I was lucky enough to see one in 1999. Solar eclipses come in approximately 18-year cycles. They happen more often than that. They happen about twice a year. But they come in about 18-year cycles, and the last one in the cycle of the one that's coming up in August was the one in 1999. So we were on a cruise ship in the Black Sea with several hundred other folks on a relatively small cruise ship. Cruised around and we were in

the middle of the Black Sea for Eclipse Day and it was absolutely magical and I'm hoping we have a similar experience in August. How did you react personally? I sobbed. There is no right reaction. There's no wrong reaction. There's no right place to be. There's no wrong place to be. The only right place to be is in the path of totality and it's clear. That's the right place to be. And you would agree, therefore, with the other people who've been on this show that it's a profound experience, obviously. It's a life-changing experience. It really is. It's something that once you see one, number one, you completely, 100% viscerally understand why people were terrified of these things hundreds of years ago when we couldn't predict them. All of a sudden, the sky goes dark, and it looks like a hole in the sky. And I know what it is. I know it's the

moon covering the sun, and you see the corona. I know the science, but the emotion and the understanding of it, you feel connected to that alignment that only a certain number of people are going to see. And so it's such a unique, amazing astronomy experience unlike any other in astronomy. We can see planetary conjunctions. We can see lunar eclipses. We can see all sorts of stuff. We can say the last time Mars was this close to Earth was 50,000 years ago or whatever it was, like in 2003. But this is something completely different.

And so that's why I encourage anyone, if you have the means to go to this path of totality, please go. Thank you, Michelle. I'll see you in August. I'm looking forward to it. Adler Planetarium Master Educator Michelle Nichols. Got a smartphone? Will you be in the path of totality? Then you need to hear from our next guest how you can serve as a citizen scientist and help create the Eclipse mega-movie.

That's after the break here on Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. In the last five years, our members have helped to achieve pretty much every single advocacy priority we've had. It's been amazing. NASA's planetary science budget is above one and a half billion again, and it's growing. We have new missions to Mars in 2020 and Europa. We've sent over 400,000 letters to Congress and the White House in order to achieve this. And your generosity has enabled us to grow this program up to three full-time staff dedicated to space policy. But we have a new Congress, a new president, and soon a new NASA administrator. Decisions are being made right now that are going to impact the future of NASA for a generation, if not more. So we need your support now more than ever to build on the momentum we've created here. So please, join us. Invest in our advocacy program. Go to planetary.org slash advocacy. Thank you. in North America will be tracking, observing, and gathering data, and you can join their efforts.

One way is through the Eclipse Mega Movie, an international effort that has already recruited many citizen scientists, but has room for tens of thousands more. The project's website, eclipse-mega.movie, has many other great resources for everyone who hopes to enjoy the eclipse. A loose but dedicated team of scientists and others leads the project that is managed by Laura Petacolis of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab. Hugh Hudson is a research physicist at Berkeley and an honorary research fellow at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, which is where I found him on Skype the other day. Joining us was filmmaker and accomplished eclipse chaser Mark Bender in Texas. Gentlemen,

thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio to talk about this continent-spanning project to follow what a lot of people are beginning to call the Great American Eclipse. Hugh, you told me that you are one of the, I guess, a couple of people who helped to come up with this? That's right. It was in Boulder, Colorado, at a meeting, Scott McIntosh,

who's the head of HIO up there, and I were hearing a presentation on the eclipse. I spy Shadia Habal, who's a colleague, esteemed colleague, and a great eclipse chaser. Scott and I looked at each other and said, movie, outreach. So we had basically the idea that, my goodness,

we could string all of these individual observations together right across the whole 90 minutes and make a movie, which would be really interesting scientifically, but it would also be a way of involving people. Many kinds of people could participate. Mark Bender, you know a lot about making movies. Is that one of the things you're contributing to this? Yeah, I think I was actually brought into the group as the movie maker because it was going to be a movie. They thought they should probably have somebody

who made movies. Jay Pasikoff, who's literally the world's greatest eclipse chaser, I had made a film with him for National Geographic about the eclipse that occurred over Easter Island in 2010, which was a remarkable moment in time, something that only happened there in 2,000 years. Jay and I got very friendly on that project, and he recommended to Hugh that I be put on the list of original people to come in and start actually putting this project together. I'm so glad that you mentioned Jay Pasikoff. Now, would you guys, who are both, I would assume, eclipse chasers, would classify yourselves as such? He was shaking his head no. No, I've never really seen a good corona, believe it or not. No kidding. I'm like this famous guy,

David Todd, who went to 12 eclipses and never saw a single one. So I've been to two, and I've never actually seen the corona in its glory. So I'm coming at this from a very abstract and non-eclipse-oriented perspective, I think. Well, I hope the third time is a charm and my first time to see a total solar eclipse. But you know what Jay Pascoff told us on this show is that he's not an eclipse chaser, that the eclipse chases him. He seems to have a flawless record, and he's never going to be beaten. He will probably die with a permanent record, the number of eclipses seen by a human being. I wouldn't be surprised. Tell us a little bit more about what this project really hopes to accomplish and how it's going to accomplish that.

Well, the main thing is to get people's data assembled. And our initial idea was actually to make the movie, and that's going to happen kind of in ex post facto within a couple of hours. Google will string people's contributions together and make a very nice video, I hope, of the whole development of the corona. But as we thought about it, we thought, well, there's science in this as well. And of course, I'm a scientist and I'm never not thinking about science. And so the science, what could you do with this? Well, it's people go to eclipses to take beautiful pictures, but now we can take a stack of them and make a data cube, make something that's very highly

time resolved and it goes on forever. We've evolved to become an archive. So what we would like to do is get people's contributions and put them in this archive. And the archive will include not just good images that one can get with DSLRs or real kit, but actually also smartphones. Mark has been particularly helpful with our development of an app that will enable ordinary people to use their smartphones for this kind of recording. Somewhere between one terabyte and a thousand terabytes of data, we have no idea right now what's going to happen. But that's going to be kept for people to play with,

and we hope that citizen scientists will play with it for different purposes once we've got it. A data cube. Help me if I've got this incorrect. once we've got a data cube. Help me if I've got this incorrect. Basically, you're talking about a lot of, in this case, videos, but strung out over time so that it's basically a three-dimensional, with one of those dimensions being time, development of this movie. Precisely.

We see the time, what we call the time domain, we see this stringing together of all these images, videos, yes, but also still images. Because if you have 100,000 still images, you've got enough frames to compose a pretty good movie, a very detailed movie, just like that. So we're thinking about both kinds of formatting. The data cube is our technical, sort of semi-technical term for just a stack of pictures. You'll perceive that it's a hard problem to put them together and that's why we think of this as a as a an archive that people will toil and enjoy the corona is going to be popping and fizzing and and chirping and things like that will be happening we've already called

this a tremendous example of citizen science but mark it seems to present some pretty huge challenges. I mean, how do you get all these to homogenize? Well, that's the $24,000 question. Maybe $100,000, maybe $200,000. What we're after, there's different strands in the mega movie. We've got levels. It starts at, like Hugh mentioned, right down. It's just people with their mobile phone, their smartphone. And the smartphone is great because it's got a camera, but it's also a device that has a lot of metadata.

So it knows what time it is and it knows where it is on the planet, which is pretty much the two things you need to know when you're an eclipse chaser. Because eclipses happen at a particular time in a particular spot. So the phones, they can know that data, and the app we're developing knows where it needs to be to actually film an eclipse. So the concept is the phone will just turn itself on and start filming the eclipse if you're in the right spot at the right time. I would like to give some thanks to Braxton Collier and the company IDM in Albuquerque, who is doing the app development. They're extremely good. So we're looking forward to getting that app out free to many, many people with countdown timer and geolocation and, of course, the capability of taking the pictures automatically

and uploading them to Google and putting them in the archive. That sounds kind of simple, but that is such a brilliant modern moment in that 10 years ago we didn't have 300 million smartphones scattered all across America. So we suddenly in the last few years have developed this data capturing matrix of people with these devices, which we just think of as normal everyday little things we carry around, but they're incredibly sophisticated devices. So we're trying to leverage that into capturing this in a way that's unparalleled in the past. And all science begins with observation.

The problem in the past is that, and I like to call us the lone warriors, the eclipse chaser. We go out to foreign lands and we travel through deserts or up snow-covered mountains. So we're in this path of totality. And we take whatever equipment we can take on our backpack or on a mule or whatever. I'm now making it sound a little more exploratory than it is. Generally, you fly to a place and stay in a hotel and take a taxi out to the place. But still, you've got to carry all your equipment.

And then when you're there and you're placed and you're all set up, this thing happens and it just comes and goes in a heartbeat. It's just a few moments. And then you scratch your head and you say, well, if I want another couple of minutes of observing that particular phenomenon, I've got to go to the other side of the planet in 18 months and trail off into a desert. So you take off your parka and start thinking about your Bermuda shorts. So this is what makes this whole experiment remarkable is that we have for the first time in 100 years, this eclipse that goes across this one nation continent. Just that from an eclipse chasing point of view is remarkable because they go, they happen on a regular basis,

but they happen in relatively obscure places around the country in the short term. In the long term, the planet, everything happens all the time in the long term on the planet. But in the short term, we haven't had eclipses in America. The last one was 37 years ago when this one comes up. Like I said, the one like this happened 100 years ago. And it wasn't like this because 100 years ago, we didn't have the American nation that we've got now. We didn't have the road infrastructure, we didn't have the population, and we didn't have these smartphones. So we've got this remarkably sophisticated first world

country about to experience the glory, God's greatest gift astronomical to the human species. He's good. He's really good. We've got these levels, though, because we also want very professional people like myself to photograph and film the eclipse. And that's what the high-end level of our project sponsored by Google is, is to have at least 1,000 participants at a very high level of participation with very professional camera equipment, tracking the whole sun-moon movement that day and capturing at a very high resolution. And Hugh mentioned that the difference is that what we can capture in a high resolution may be better quality images, but it doesn't have the, I keep forgetting what this word is, Hugh. Oversampling, that's our technical. Oversampling, yes. Lower quality, but oversampled. So where we might have a thousand people capturing

it with the high-end equipment, we we might have a thousand people capturing it with the high end equipment, we might have a hundred thousand people capturing it with their smartphones. And between those two data sets, we will have this data cube of information unheard, unparalleled in solar observation in this way, in white light. And I think as an eclipse chaser myself who's done all those treks out there and gotten these few little scant moments of imaging, that this really is the future for observing the eclipse in this way. It's just going to give us a dimension, this time dimension that we have never had before.

Something else that's new, which we haven't had 10 years previously, is the moon. The moon has now been measured very precisely. Its location, its shape, the word is that every... Its distance. At a five-meter resolution, people have absolute structural information about the moon. So now for the first time,

we have an astrometric reference, right? This is something that we know in the sky. It's going across the sun, and it's doing a very precise job on what is called Bailey's beads, the diamond ring. This is one of the more spectacular aspects of an eclipse, but now we can interpret it quantitatively to take advantage of it properly on the science side. The innovation here is having the moon as an astrometric reference. This is, it's quite a

first. Mark, how do people get involved? Well, we, uh, we've partnered with Google, which just in itself is pretty awesome. Google has set up a website for us, which is at eclipse mega dot movie. Now, so that kind of freaked me out because I'm like, what? What's the name of this website? And I realize now that it's not a dot com or a dot org or a dot info, which is things we're familiar with. It's a dot movie. We explain what we're trying to do and how we're trying to do it.

And like I said, there's multiple levels of engagement that you can do as a member of the public. And you can have your high-end equipment. This is a nation of photographers. They're out there. So we're asking them to come out and participate with their high-end equipment. And they register on the website. And they become members of our team. And this happens at all the different levels,

down to the participation of people with their smartphones, which is just literally their smartphone sitting kind of tilted up, pointed at the sun. Just handheld. But the higher end, you're talking about people with what? A digital single-lens reflex camera and a tripod? That's not that much. No, no, exactly, exactly. I mean, we have a lot of people out there with the equipment that we need, which is a DSLR camera, a tripod, and you do need a relatively long length telephoto lens.

We want a nice, big, chunky picture of the corona. So we're recommending a 300-millimeter lens. You don't want to get too crazy. I mean, there's people out there with 1,200-millimeter lenses, and you can get this really giant black spot in your frame, in your picture. The black spot, by the way, is the moon. You'd be leaving out the corona, though, I guess, if you got in too tight. Exactly.

A lot of pictures you see of the eclipse are black spots with a little bit of white stuff coming out of it, the coronal flow, as it were. But what really happens when you're there watching it is that the corona is a very massive structure around the disk of the sun. And up to like five lunar radius, it's out, spreading out from the sun, this eminence of this milky white

substance uh remarkably beautiful and only seen during a total solar eclipse and so we're trying to image that because as you mentioned with a certain time factor involved uh the corona is active and what we're hoping to do is capture coronal activity over this period of 90 minutes that's kind of pretty much impossible to see at any one location for the kind of duration that you get to observe the corona. Once again, it's Eclipse Mega Dot Movie. That threw me as well. It's one of those newfangled domains you can find on what our boss calls the electric interweb. You mentioned Google. What actually does that major partner in this project bring to it? Google is doing two or three really important things.

One thing, of course, is to host this website. The second important thing is to acquire the data. Their servers will ingest all of this information that's flooding in from along the trajectory. If it's being captured by the app, the app will do that automatically. It will feed its images directly on the web once the user has gotten into wireless range. Google will accept all of this stuff. And meanwhile, Google has a big program of their own for outreach, and they're going to be exercising that. And as a part of that, they'll be actually making the real-time mega movie.

So this will come from the high-end DSLR frames. And they are developing software to patch them together and rotate and stretch and accommodate the different formats as best they can. And the result will be probably not as good as we will eventually get from the whole archive. And certainly it won't be as good as the better products that we'll be able to make later, but it will be quite nice, I think. I haven't told them about this yet, but I'm going to ask if they do a diamond ring movie as well. A diamond ring movie, sparkling, flashing, popping, that'll be lovely, I think. And you better remind folks what the diamond ring is.

We speak of the contacts. The first contact of the eclipse is where the moon first touches the sun in projection. The second contact is where totality begins. Third contact is where totality ends. And fourth contact is where it's gone forever. So second and third contacts, just at those moments, the sun is going from being very, very bright to the corona. And so in that last moment or the first moment on the third contact, a single point of actual sunlight that's getting through. And it's very, very bright.

It's like the brightness of Venus, for example, in a dark sky. And so that flash is what people can capture and often capture in very heavily saturated overexposed images. And it's quite beautiful because you see rays and spikes and chromatic aberration and all kinds of ugly things to a professional photographer, but beautiful things to an amateur, to an uninformed amateur. That also is part of the beauty of it. And so I think Mark might comment on this, but the idea is that if we get just the right exposure from all of these cameras, each of these cameras, and then string that all together, we will see this diamond ring point of light moving along the surface of the moon as the eclipse develops, going up and down mountains into

valleys, at the same time telling us where the sun is. One of the prizes in the archive searches for citizen scientists will be to find new parts of the moon, parts of the moon that have evolved since the mapping took place, landslides, craters forming, whatever. There may be things there, obelisks, you just don't know. Well, I hope they find one or two of those. Yeah, that would be great. You only need one. You only need one obelisks. You just don't know. Well, I hope they find one or two of those. Yeah, that would be great. You only need one. You only need one obelisk. That's right.

That changes everything. We'll call it TMA1. How's that? Yep, that's the one. Gentlemen, we better warn people one last time, or one more time, it won't be the last time, to take the proper precautions if they're going to watch this eclipse. The precautions seem so obvious and simple because we don't generally look at the sun to begin with because, you know, you kind of glance up,

you catch it in the corner of your eye, and it's super bright. And so then because you glance at it and it's bright, you don't then turn and stare at it because it hurts your eyes and it doesn't feel right. The sun is going to be very, very bright right up until the moment of totality. And at the moment of totality, you want to look at the sun directly because you're not really looking at the sun anymore. You're looking at the moon and the moon is blocking the bright chromosphere or rather the bright photosphere, which is so bright that it blots out the corona. But now that the moon's in front of it, it's a big occulting disk that's blocking that out.

You can look straight up there and see something that the sun is doing all the time, but we are never witness to, and that's the glory of the corona. It's a factor of 10 billion, 10 billion times fainter. Wow. We've talked about Google, pretty nice partner to have in any kind of project. Wonderful. We've talked about Google, pretty nice partner to have in any kind of project. But there is a tremendous team behind this. The major players are listed on the website. We'll call us an international band of fellow travelers with this project. And we're scattered out all over the country.

I'm actually in Texas. Hugh's in Glasgow, Scotland, although he was born in Texas, weirdly. Hugh is in Glasgow, Scotland, although he was born in Texas, weirdly. And I actually lived and taught at university in Edinburgh, Scotland, for a long time. So there's this weird international mix. And I don't even know where, like most of the people, I work a lot with Hugh, and I don't really know where half of the people in the project are. So when people talk about getting together, it's like, what part of the world are you in? And where, you know, how are we getting together? Is this a Skype thing or somebody next door?

I wouldn't be surprised if one of my neighbors was part of this group and I just didn't know it. Laura, she's done this amazing job of taking this situation where we're herding cats of these people that come and go. And there's a huge network, as Hugh mentioned, of people working in science outreach through schools and universities, most of which I can't, I don't even know. I mean, I went to the AAS meeting, which is the American Astronomical Society meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, a couple of weeks ago to give a talk about my field testing of the app in Patagonia. And so I'm giving my presentation to a group of eminent scientists and educators. Other people would come up and they'd start talking about their involvement with the mega movie. I've never even seen these people.

And I'm like, afterwards, it's like, oh, you're part of the group. And they're like, oh, yes. You know, Laura brought me in like six months ago. I've been doing outreach all over the country. And I'm like, excellent. So, yeah, it's a big, diverse group of people. And as Hugh mentioned earlier, we don't really have a lot of titles. No one's really the boss. We're all working together, but independently from positions all over the planet to get this done. Because

I think if you aren't really familiar with total eclipses and you're kind of familiar with science and you're kind of familiar with experiments and you like that kind of thing, if you've never actually seen the total eclipse, you cannot physically and mentally appreciate the scale and the magnitude of the total eclipse experience. But until you actually see it, I just sound like a crazy person. And then you see it and you go, oh, he wasn't so crazy after all. That was spectacular. And in our normal everyday lives, we're not really used to something that you could actually genuinely call awesome or epic. And they might be brilliant.

You might have a great day. But you didn't actually have an epic day. But on August 21, 2017, if you were in the path of totality, you will have an epic day. I'm ready for an epic experience, Mark. This is going to be super. I'll be in Corvallis, Oregon at the very beginning of it. And I will tell you guys downstream that it's coming, that it's going to be good. You won't be far from a friend of the show, Tyler Nordgren, who's going to be somewhere in eastern Oregon where he's most likely to have clear skies.

So clear skies to all of us, gentlemen. I am so appreciative of your joining us on the show, but also everybody who's involved with this project, the Eclipse Mega Movie, and some of the partners listed on the website at, once again, eclipsemega.movie. We'll put that link up on the show page, this week's show page, of course.

I first heard about it from people with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, that great organization, ASP. But you name it, Oregon State University, Foothill College, Lick Observatory, Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley, which I assume is where your project manager is, right? University of Colorado Boulder. I know there were people at Southern Illinois University, where I will be on Monday, August 21st, hoping for those clear skies. Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. Time to visit once again with Bruce Betts,

the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. And he's going to tell us about the night sky. And we've got some other cool stuff to talk about. Thank you, Matt. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. It's going to be a busy week. I've got to get two shows done this week before I leave for the Humans to Mars conference, which is next week in Washington, D.C.

Are they sending you? Not yet. My application is in, but I don't know where I am on the list. Yeah, I don't think it really matters, but okay. Is that red thing up there? It is, but it's going away. It's getting tough and up for a long time, but it's going away. It's getting tough. It's been up for a long time, but it's starting to get really low in the west. Shortly after sunset, you might still be able to

pick it up. But you can pick up giant Jupiter looking super bright in the evening sky in the east and the south, traveling across the sky during the night looking bright, brighter than any of the stars in the sky. Speaking night looking bright, brighter than any of the stars in the sky. Speaking of bright, even brighter Venus is up in the pre-dawn east. In between those two is Saturn rising in the mid to late evening now in the east, dimmer and yellowish. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1961 that Alan Shepard became the first American in space with a suborbital flight. Big deal.

And now more people beginning to look at doing suborbital flights like that, but paying a lot of money out of their own pocket to do it. Yeah. Similar concept, though. We move on to Random Space Matt. I don't know what to make of that. Go ahead. I don't know what to make of that. Go ahead. I don't either. So you know this, Matt, but some of our listeners who've come on later may not realize there are two sets of Lego bricks on Mars, courtesy of the Planetary Society, NASA, and the Lego Group.

On the landing bases of Spirit and Opportunity, we sent a silica glass DVD, and the holder has three Lego bricks each. They are aluminum, but here's the neat part to me, and I made sure before we sent them off, they will fit a Lego brick. So, an astronaut's visit that somewhere in the distant future, they will be able to build on top of those Lego bricks that are already on Mars. I love it. I didn't know you'd actually tested them. I did. It works.

I've got the engineering mock-up and build all sorts of things all day long. Well, when I go, I'll be sure to do that. Okay. See, we've resolved so much in this episode. On to the trivia contest. I asked you, as of late April 2017, approximately, how many confirmed exoplanets have been discovered? How'd we do? Very nice response. And a couple of numbers.

It was really most people went for the number apparently that comes from NASA, which is the one that you were looking for. Am I right? Is it from NASA? I am, but I was also, as why I said approximately, is I recognize different groups, different sites use different criteria to decide what's a confirmed exoplanet and what's a candidate. So I'm not surprised we've got variation, and that's okay as long as it's kind of in the ballpark. Well, this one is in the ballpark. Well, this one is

in the ballpark. The hit was made by Perry Metzger, a first-time winner, I think, out of New York, New York. The town's so nice they named it twice, as our boss likes to say. He says 3,475 confirmed exoplanets. He says, of course, I'm posting this on April 21st. There may be a lot more by now. It's quite possible. Is that what you were looking for? Yeah, that's what I was looking for. So in the 3500 ballpark, amazing to me that there are that many planets we know in other star systems. By the way, a little extra info. There are 581 multi-planet systems that have more than one planet. Wow. This has all happened in like the last 20 years. Yeah, amazing. I love this response

from Vicky Knorr, or Knorr. She says, if we add all the estimated masses of all those exoplanets discovered so far, we've discovered, get this, 9 times 10 to the 29th kilograms of

exoplanets. That's 150,000 Earths worth of stuff. You know, it's cheaper by the kilogram. It is. You get those bundled discounts. I didn't mention that the prizes going to our winner, Perry Metzger, include Dante Loretta's new game. This is the second board game to come from Dante, the PI for the Osiris-Rex mission. It's Constellations. His Kickstarter campaign is over. They raised like almost three times what their goal was in that campaign.

People can still pre-order the game, though. They can pre-order Constellations at squareup.com, and we'll put a link to that out as well. It looks like a very cool way to learn your way around the sky. people at pincause.com. This is the official March for Science pin from about, oh, I don't know, a week and a half ago as we speak. So we thank Kate and Nate at pincause.com for that. Of course, a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. This from Perry, sadly, rather than silcaceiceous carbonaceous and metallic are the rubber asteroids which have not been observed by science in quite a while

will they ever be seen again only the planetary society knows for sure similar messages from Steve Donaldson in Hagerstown Maryland it's a sad day when even the keeper of the rubber asteroids can't throw one at a co-worker. And finally, from Jonathan Beaton in Atsugi, Japan.

Any chance I could get a Planetary Society certificate that states, in lieu of a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, all I got was this certificate? And can it be autographed by someone named Matt? We're ready for next time. Speaking of things on Mars, what are the names of the two astrobots on the surface of Mars? These are Lego minifigure representations

put there by the Planetary Society. The two astrobots, what are their names? If you listen to the show back in the archives way back, they even were interviewed by Matt. They sure were. If you can figure it out, if you find the names of the astrobots that are accompanied by those Lego blocks Bruce was talking about, you can get us an answer by Wednesday, May 10th at 8 a.m. Pacific time,

and you'll be in the contest to win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt, an itelescope.net account from the good folks at iTelescope, that worldwide network of nonprofit telescopes. I just want to mention, I think I forgot to say, go to planetary.org slash radio contest to enter the contest. Thank you. All right, everybody, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Thank you. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about plants that are not green.

Thank you, and good night. You mean like the rust-colored ones that are on all the planes of Mars we just haven't seen yet. They blend in. They're so clever with their camouflage. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society

and he joins us every week here for What's Up. I'll once again be at the Explore Mars Humans to Mars Summit at the George Washington University, Washington, D.C. May 9 through 11. It is going to be an

amazing gathering. I hope to see some of you there. You can learn more about the conference at h2m.exploremars.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Never Eclipsed members. Daniel Gunners, our associate producer, Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies, please.