Williams College Team Witnesses Todays Eclipse In Siberia
WILLIAMSTOWN - "Detail in the corona was fabulous and the sky, completely clear," said Prof. Jay Pasachoff of Williams College after viewing the August 1 total solar eclipse in Siberia.The moon took a couple of hours to cover and uncover the sun, starting over northern Canada and in the Arctic, and reached Novosibirsk, the major Siberian city, at 5:45 p.m. local time. Novosibirsk is 11 time zones later than United States Eastern Time, nearly halfway around the world.
"It was a surprise and a relief that the cooling of the atmosphere from the eclipse itself wiped the sky completely clean of clouds," said Pasachoff, who with his colleague Dr. Bryce Babcock, carried out observations to study how the solar corona is heated to millions of degrees.
"We were located on the roof of the University of Novosibirsk's physics department, collaborating with Dr. Alfia Nestorenko of the department and Dr. Igor Nestorenko of the nearby Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"The diamond rings sparkled at the beginning and the end of totality, and we had a sweeping view of the approaching eclipse shadow over the birch and pine forest that surrounds Akademgorodok, the academic city outside Novosibirsk," Pasachoff said.
Members of Pasachoff's eclipse team included undergraduates Katie Dupre and Marcus Freemans and Russian history professor William Wagner of Williams College; Matthew Baldwin, a Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium exchange student from Swarthmore College; Marek Demianski, a visiting astronomy professor from the University of Warsaw, Poland; Dr. Paul Rosenthal of Williamstown; and Michael Kentrianakis of New York City.
Additional observations involved Dr. Robert Lucas of the University of Sydney, Australia, in imaging the corona with a special filter that passed only light emitted by the hot coronal gas. The Williams College group was joined on site in Siberia by 10 Greek astronomers, headed by Prof. John Seiradakis from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with whom they had observed the previous solar eclipse, in 2006. The Williams College team will go to China next year for the total solar eclipse on July 22, 2009.
Pasachoff is chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses. This eclipse was the 47th that he has seen.
