Bucknell Students in Texas for Eclipse Experiments

Apr. 6—On a bright, clear Texas morning, professor Ned Ladd, physics and astronomy, and a class of 13 Bucknell University students, were busy unpacking their telescope and other field-site equipment they would use to see the solar eclipse Monday afternoon.

The Greenhill School, from nearby Addison, Texas, is hosting the Bucknell group.

"They are providing us with space to set up our equipment. Power, cables that we didn't want to ship down from Pennsylvania," Ladd said on Friday.

The Bucknell students have been preparing for the trip this semester during Ladd's half-credit class that taught them both the proper use and positioning of refracting telescopes that will be used to collect data on solar oscillations from the corona of the eclipse.

The moments of totality, Ladd said, "we have about three minutes of totality and that is when the moon and the sun are perfectly aligned so that the central part of the sun is completely blocked out."

This will be 1:40-1:44 p.m. Central Time, he said.

"From a scientific perspective, what we are hoping to learn about is the sun," Ladd said. "The eclipse is a geometric phenomenon. The moon, the earth and the sun all line up in such a way that the moon blocks out part of the sun. When that happens we can see the outer part of the sun — the part you just can't see if you just look up at the sun today. It's called the corona. It's kind of a whispy, very hot layer of the sun.

"The science we are doing here is to try and understand better the corona.

During the last solar eclipse in 2017, Ladd led a similar study trip to Tennessee, where students also gathered corona oscillation data. The 2017 group discovered a solar heating problem in the corona, and this year's student team will replicate that study to validate its findings and ensure their accuracy.

"As you move farther away from the corona, it gets hotter, which doesn't line up with physics as we know it," said Virginia Hostetter, Class of 25, physics, in a news release from Bucknell. "We think it has something to do with the magnetic fields, and so studying the oscillations gives a way to measure the effects of those fields."

Accurate alignment of telescopes is critical for the group since the totality window is only minutes long. They have been meticulously practicing by focusing on the stars at night.

"This is hard to do, and if we pull it off, it'll be because we worked hard and because we succeeded together," Ladd said.

What does this all mean to non-scientists?

"We will learn about how the sun is constructed," Ladd said. "If you understand the sun better you are understanding the entire universe a little bit better. From a pure science perspective, that is valuable."

The corona is also the source of the solar wind, which blows out from the sun, "and occasionally, but not always, interacts with the Earth's magnetic field and creates the aurora borealis, the northern lights," Ladd said. "So the direct physical connection between the sun and the Earth goes through the corona."

"One of the problems with doing eclipse science is that totality is three-and-a-half minutes long. So if you have a problem and you fix it four minutes after you discover the problem, you've missed the eclipse and you have to come back 20 years later," he said.

There won't be another U.S. eclipse spanning coast to coast until 2045.

The students are confident they're ready when the moment arrives, and they're quite excited about the experience, too.

"There are two reasons I'm excited," said Cole Kratz, Class of 2026, mathematics, in the Bucknell report. "This is a nationwide event where our professor said there will be 200 million people there to see it, and we're making measurements on an event that's rare and won't happen again for 20 years, so that's very exciting."

"For me, this is my first field site observation and experiment, and I'm excited to take part in a project that is from the ground up — with my own hands and not something that the professors are setting up for me," says Hostetter.

Before commencing their research, the Bucknell students will engage with approximately 1,200 students from all grade levels at the Greenhill School, where they will present and conduct eclipse-related activities about physics and astronomy.

"First we're going to have a presentation for the students, and then we're preparing to have a fair, so we'll be outside and have a bunch of different stations which we'll name after different planets," said Eliza Ray, Class of 2024, education. "We're going to have the students look through solar telescopes — like a sun-spotter to teach them about sunspots — and teach them about the difference between solar and lunar eclipses and the positioning. They're all ages, so that's part of our challenge, figuring out how to cater the educational message to different age groups."

The educational component should enhance the overall experience for the Bucknell students according to their professor.

"An eclipse is an awesome event, but what we're trying to do here is very much science in action and consequential," Ladd said. "So if we pull it off and the experiments go well and hundreds of the Greenhill students get something out of this, it will be remarkably rewarding."