Shooting For the Moon

By a celestial stroke of luck, the total eclipse will swoop over the colossal dish telescopes of the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute near Brevard, North Carolina.

Once a secret NASA satellite and tracking station critical to the space race and the Cold War, PARI is now a powerhouse of astronomical research and science outreach. Its giant equipment is too big to bring to an eclipse, but the stars have aligned to bring an eclipse to it.

“There is no history of anything like that happening,” says Don Cline, a philanthropist and science advocate who rescued PARI from demolition and turned it into a non-profit research and education center.

Legions of researchers and astronomers will converge at PARI to study the eclipse and broadcast live footage. PARI’s radio technology captures the electromagnetic spectrum and will work even if there’s cloud cover during the eclipse—unlike normal optical telescopes.

It’s a great cosmic coincidence that we have a total eclipse at all. If the moon was any smaller, or further away from earth, part of the sun would always hang out.

But the geometry is just right. The sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, but the moon is 400 times closer to earth—so it’s a perfect fit.

Science on the horizon

Most of America will have their eyes on the sky when the solar eclipse sweeps the nation, but not Justin Hess.

He will have his head down, buried in the monitor of a base tracking station capturing data from 15 miles above the earth’s surface.

Hess is part of research team with Southwestern Community College in Sylva, North Carolina, that will broadcast live feeds of the eclipse from a weather balloon high in the atmosphere, along with the robust data collection. 

The research is funded by a $1.4 million science education and outreach grant from NASA. The eclipse was the clincher in landing the grant.

“The eclipse was a way to put yourself all the way through the door all at once,” said Matt Cass, the science chair of SCC and head of the Smoky Mountain STEM Collaborative. “The eclipse is one ‘big small part’ of what we are doing. This is really about building a more scientifically literate public.”

The eclipse has rocketed science to the forefront. Astronomy programs, eclipse stations and portable planetarium shows are regulars on the calendar of the Fontana Regional Library system, which also has a fleet of loaner telescopes to check out.

 “We don’t see the solar eclipse as the finish line—this is the starting point,” Cass said. “We are hoping this event will be so impressive that the effects will last.”