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The most accurate map for August 21’s total solar eclipse

nasaviz.gsfc.nasa.gov

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Re: The most accurate map for August 21’s total solar eclipse

#82
Hello everyone. I'm currently working with a group who plans to do some experimental sounding of the effects of the eclipse on the ionosphere. If you want to learn more about this project please check out our website http://hamsci.org/. We are pushing a number of fun ways to get involved with collecting very useful data for scientific analysis.

I'd like to ask anyone who lives on the midwest or east coast to consider helping these projects:

1. EclipseMob: http://hamsci.org/node/148

This project will ship you a set of ICs and a breadboard that will make up a VLF receiver. No soldering is required. It's a great kit to put together with children.

After you build up the kit you plug it into your phone's microphone jack and run an app that agregates radio signal information (I/Q data I think) to the EclipseMob organizers. After the eclipse is over you'll still be in possession of a fully capable VLF receiver kit. You can use it to listen to VLF signals that are interesting. This may include human generated traffic or whistlers.

2. Total Eclipse SEQP: http://hamsci.org/seqp

If you have an amateur radio license and want to help participate in a contest you can hop on the air and operate during the eclipse. The more people on the air the better dataset we have.

3. Setup a Reverse Beacon Network receiver.

The main dataset we use is the Reverse Beacon Network. It's a set of automated receivers that listen to short-wave Morse code and RTTY communications. If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket and want to set up a we have a page that talks about how to do this: http://hamsci.org/cw-reverse-beacon-network-how-guide

Using these data sources we would like to generate a very high resolution picture of the effects of a solar eclipse. As it turns out we don't exactly have the best understanding of what goes on during an eclipse.

We have a few other projects in the works that I'm not very familiar with. One idea is recording I/Q data from JT65 bands and building a data set via Zenodo so that everyone who contributes to the data set gets their name as a reference on papers that use it.

If you're interested and want to hear more about this you can reply to this post or send me an email to my "work" email. My email username is jk369 and my university's mail address is njit.edu.

Re: The most accurate map for August 21’s total solar eclipse

#85

Why would they use a tif format for the downloadable map? I haven't seen a tif format in 10 years.

lossless format (potentially) that everyone can open?

After looking at the map, I can't imagine why a lossless format is required. I just exported in as a jpg, and it would take a magnifying glass to see the difference. And the jpg was 16/7% the size (at 90%). Waste of government bandwidth.

Re: The most accurate map for August 21’s total solar eclipse

#87

Best advice I've accumulated so far: 1. Don't plan to drive anywhere on eclipse day (90% of the US lives within an 8hr drive of totality, so traffic will be horrible) 2. A 600-800mm lens is optimal for photography. Anything short of 200mm is useless. 3. Don't make any solid plans until 3-4 days before. Most places only have about 40% chance of it being clear. 4. If you're photographing the partial phases. Stop and ch…

These are really great tips. I was thinking about driving into the path of totality on the day. After thinking about it more and the hype that is surrounding this thing I am probably not going to. The highways are going to be jam packed (I-95). Reserving a place to stay or something similar in an area is also probably out of the question.

Re: The most accurate map for August 21’s total solar eclipse

#88

Best advice I've accumulated so far: 1. Don't plan to drive anywhere on eclipse day (90% of the US lives within an 8hr drive of totality, so traffic will be horrible) 2. A 600-800mm lens is optimal for photography. Anything short of 200mm is useless. 3. Don't make any solid plans until 3-4 days before. Most places only have about 40% chance of it being clear. 4. If you're photographing the partial phases. Stop and ch…

> 2. A 600-800mm lens is optimal for photography. Anything short of 200mm is useless.

Only if your goal is a closeup shot. I'd be much more interested in a shot with significant context. How easy that is to pull off I don't know, but I'd love to a nature landscape shot @28-35mm (FF) with the eclipse in the sky instead of the sun or moon.

Re: The most accurate map for August 21’s total solar eclipse

#89

Do you get the full eclipse effect anywhere inside of the green line? Is there an advantage to being at the red line?

The closer to the red line the longer you'll get totality. But anywhere in the green lines you'll have some period of totality.

The interactive map: https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/interactive...

will tell you exactly when and for how long you'll get totality anywhere along the route.

Re: The most accurate map for August 21’s total solar eclipse

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lossless format (potentially) that everyone can open?

After looking at the map, I can't imagine why a lossless format is required. I just exported in as a jpg, and it would take a magnifying glass to see the difference. And the jpg was 16/7% the size (at 90%). Waste of government bandwidth.

I'd imagine NASA's more concerned with pixel perfect reproductions than your average government agency, given the sort of imagery they're often working with.
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