During Monday’s total solar eclipse, a group of University at Buffalo scientists won’t just be looking as the moon’s shadow blocks out the sun.
They will be photographing it.
The UB team will use a specialized telescope to take rapid-fire images of the sun in polarized light as part of the Citizen Continental-America Telescope Eclipse project.
Funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, the CATE project positions 35 citizen science teams along the path of totality – which stretches from Texas to Maine – to photograph the eclipse. The images will help scientists learn more about the sun’s outermost atmosphere, called the solar corona.
The UB team, led by geophysicist Beata Csatho, will set up its telescope Monday at Lake Erie State Park in Brocton.
“It’s a unique opportunity,” Csatho said of participating in the project.
Csatho is the associate chair and a professor in the UB Geology Department who studies Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. She’s not an astronomer and doesn’t have any telescope experience.
Parks officials are asking the public to follow staff direction on parking and staying in properly marked designated areas and staying on trails.
But as it turns out, what she’ll be doing Monday isn’t too different from…
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