Solar Eclipse from Indonesia
A group of astronomers will travel to Palu (Sulawesi island, Indonesia) to observe and broadcast the next Total Solar Eclipse (web: sky-live.tv). The crew is made up of STARS4ALL team members. STARS4ALL is a Collective Awareness Platform for Promoting Dark Skies in Europe through Light Pollution Initiatives (LPIs). LPI are local or global working groups who fight against light pollution. Every citizen will be able to contribute and participate in one or several LPIs, through Citizen Actions (CAs).
Figure 1.- Solar taken from the Australian Outback (Bob’s Lookup, Queensland, Australia) November 14th, 2012. The beautiful corona is very symmetrical because the Sun is in a period of large activity. The corona during the upcoming eclipse will have a similar morphology.
Why have astronomers chosen such a remote location for the live broadcast?
Miquel Serra-Ricart, the leader of Shelios 2016 -Francisco Sánchez expedition- said “Observing this eclipse will be very difficult, since the shadow will only touch land in the large Indonesian archipelago, where there is a high probability of clouds due to its equatorial location”. To choose the correct location, Serra-Ricart had to consider not only the visibility of the eclipse, but also the best chance of good weather, the quality of the roads and the safety of the expedition.
Miquel, an astronomer at the Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, IAC), is a highly experienced eclipse observer – this will be his 13th expedition as leader. The first was in 1998, in the middle of the Atlantic: “No two eclipses are the same and there are always unexpected new phenomena”. The data obtained will also be made available to schools for educational activities.
STARS4ALL is a project funded by the European Union H2020 Programme under agreement number 688135. STARS4ALL is composed of 8 institutions (UPM, CEFRIEL, SOTON, ECN, ESCP Europe, IAC, IGB, UCM) from 6 countries.
The Tadulako University (Palu, Indonesia) will participate in the broadcast. Three Spanish supercomputing centers CETA-CIEMAT (Centro Extremeño de Tecnologías Avanzadas), CSUC (Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya) and IAC (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias) will collaborate in redistributing the online broadcast (sky-live.tv).
The STARS4ALL project website: http://www.stars4all.eu/
The educational activities for schools will be available at:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CFfSR6KQkX6wmIeuSMM59p83F4RrUpQkb3JM_JhVYH8/edit?usp=sharing
Broadcast information
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dw34dt7fiCW9zCyx-9lbk0L9kXuap7ljQbXTkrWTAC4/edit?usp=sharing
Expedition Blog: http://journal.shelios.com/
Contact IAC: Miquel Serra-Ricart, researcher of the IAC, mserra@iac.es
ANNEX 1.- Eclipse Circumstances in Palu-Indonesia (March 9th, 2016).
Figure 2. Totality path (blue lines) of the Eclipse of March 9, 2016, according to data from NASA. The green dot (GE) indicates where the duration of the eclipse is maximum (4m09s). The observation point of the expedition Shelios 2016 will be Palu (Indonesia, see map expedition, red dot). Image courtesy NASA and Google (eclipse interactive map).