Eclipse glasses are have
special filters on them so that it is safe to look directly at the sun.
Even during the partial phases of the eclipse.
You can also put those on top of your smartphone and take the pictures that way.
A pinhole projection is another safe way to view the eclipse.
And there you have the sun at your back and you project through the pinholes.
This is an example of a pinhole projector by the NASA punch mission.
And you make an image then of the partial eclipse on the ground
in front of you.
So during totality, when the moon totally blocks out the main body of the sun,
you get to see the sun's atmosphere, the corona peeking out around the moon
and I am so excited about that because I study the corona.
So I study why the corona has the dynamics it has and
and all of the different ways that it behaves.
And so I'm so excited to actually get to see that with my own eyes.
There are several things that are different in this eclipse
than the 2017 eclipse.
The first is that more people just live along the path of totality,
which means they can just step outside and see totality.
The second thing is that totality will last longer.
The 2017 eclipse totality lasted as long as about 2 minutes.
For this one, it can last as long as 4 minutes, depending on where you are.
And the third thing is that the sun itself is going through this magnetically
active time period.
It has these solar maximum and solar minimum cycles.
And right now we're in a maximum where we have more activity and more complexity
in the solar corona.
We're measuring a number of different things about the corona
and also how the sun impacts the earth and Earth's atmosphere.
For the sun, we're looking at the complexity of the corona
and why the corona is so much hotter than the main body of sun.
Below it, the corona is hundreds of times hotter and we're looking
at how the Earth's atmosphere responds to this reduction of sunlight
when the moon totally blocks out the sun and makes that sunlight go away.
Yeah.
Parker Solar Probe has made some amazing discoveries about how the corona
expands outwards and fills our whole solar system.
And later this year, Parker is going to have its closest approach to the sun.
It's going to touch the outer portions of that Corona and Parker has already gone
closer than any spacecraft has ever gone before
to the sun.
Yeah.
So as the sun is ramping up and its magnetic activity cycles,
that means that the portions of the corona have these more
magnetic fields tangling and they can even have explosions.
The magnetic field can tangle so much that it explodes
and bursts out into the solar system.
We're safe here on Earth, but of course we need to predict these
for astronaut safety and the safety of our missions.
To learn more, you can go to go
dot NASA.gov slash Eclipse 2024. [go.nasa.gov/eclipse2024]
There's all sorts of information
about details of the eclipse path and timing and even
science that the public can get involved in.