Pitt students studying data they gathered in Texas during solar eclipse
Some University of Pittsburgh students are working through the data they gathered during April’s total solar eclipse. The students traveled to Concan, Texas to launch weather balloons and a plane to study the phenomenon.
“I had never seen an eclipse in real life before October, and so it was honestly amazing,” said Pitt Senior and student lead Peri Schindelhalm. “I just think what we do is really important. It’s a good experiment to be a part of us for kids our age, because we don’t have that much experience, and this is giving us real fieldwork.”
“Eclipses are something I learned about in class in elementary school and then in my astronomy class, and so it’s just really interesting,” said Pitt junior Mathilda Nilsson. “This is the first time that I’ve directly worked on researching a topic I’ve been told about in school.”
Professor Sandhya Rao led the students through three separate projects. One was funded by NASA. Another centered around something called shadow bands.
“It’s a really neat phenomenon that people have been observing for hundreds of years and nobody quite knows why they exist. Any unanswered question about a phenomenon is worth answering,” said Rao. “Shadow bands are basically a series of light and dark bands that race along the surface of the Earth just before totality and just after totality.”
“These bands of darkness kind of travel along the ground,” said Pitt senior Howard Malc. “They’ve been documented for about 500 years, but nobody really knows why they happen. So, we’re trying to see if we can figure it out.”
The students have worked on the project for two years. The goal was to expand on a shadow band study Pitt initially did during the 2017 solar eclipse.
“The current prevailing theory is that (shadow bands) are caused by atmospheric turbulence. In 2017, we had a team that set up a weather balloon with a diode on it, and it found some kind of pattern above the atmospheric level, which means that it’s not caused by turbulence, it’s caused by something else. But we weren’t really looking for it. and the data was kind of iffy,” added Malc.
Shadow bands happen a few minutes before eclipse totality and a few minutes after, so timing for this project was everything.
“We want the radio sound to be in the turbulent layer of the atmosphere while the eclipse is happening. So, we need to launch like eight or 10 minutes before that so the balloon reaches the altitude we want it to be when shadow bands occur,” said Rao. “The light sensor payload is going to be launched about a half hour to 45 minutes before the eclipse because we want the cameras to be above the atmosphere just before and just after the total eclipse and to take pictures of the eclipse itself.”
“We launched these radios and switched on the transmitter, and we got data from and it records parameters like humidity, temperature, pressure, altitude, those kinds of things,” said Schindelhalm. “Our goal is to see how they change in the hours leading up to the eclipse during the eclipse and right after.”
The hope is it’s a goal that leads to a bigger prize and go where no one has gone before to solve an unanswered question.
“It’s important to know how these things work and how they affect things,” said Pitt junior Emma Moran. “I just like to know how the world works. I think that should be the drive behind science as a whole.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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