Eclipse Experiment Over in Five Minutes
— -- Thursday evening, after the sky had gone dark a second time, Jeff Kuhn had a simple verdict on how the day had gone.
“It was good,” he said.
Ten days had passed since the Michigan State University physicist and eight other researchers had landed in Panama aboard a specially modified C-130 transport aircraft containing their one-of-a-kind eclipse-watching instruments. Over the past week, they flew three rehearsal flights, each lasting five or six hours, to work out kinks. They worried about thunderstorms. They worried about getting permission to fly into Colombian air space if that’s where the clear spots turned out to be.
A Closer Look at the Sun
Kuhn’s project sought to capture never-seen-before light from the sun’s atmosphere—light that may cast insight on the web of magnetic fields that lie out there.
And, as Thursday’s solar eclipse swept over them, the quarter-million-dollar experiment worked. A quick, preliminary perusal of the data indicated their instruments had indeed captured the infrared light they sought.
“There is some tentative evidence we do see this emission,” Kuhn said, “but I’m not ready to write that down in the press. I would just say it’s very promising.”
The day had begun much earlier. They arrived at Howard Air Force Base at 8, and scoured the weather reports for an hour, looking for clear skies. The spotty weather forced them to move their rendezvous point with the eclipse a couple hundred miles to the south. But that’s the advantage of a flying eclipse laboratory. (Kuhn’s two previous ground-based eclipse experiments had been largely thwarted by cloud cover.)
At 10 a.m., they took off.
No More Rehearsals
“Eclipses are very frustrating things,” Kuhn had said a couple of days earlier. “There are also second thoughts about whether it’s worth the effort.”
Eclipses are the Olympics of scientific research, a fleeting opportunity to explore the sun’s corona—the ghostly halo of light visible only during a
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