For the last week, it’s been almost impossible to turn on the news and not hear about the great solar eclipse that passed over much of North America yesterday. Eclipse totality cut a swath right through the middle of the United States ranging from Texas through Maine. Unfortunately, I was scheduled to operate the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona the night before the eclipse, which meant there was no way I could make it to the zone of totality in time to actually witness the event. At Kitt Peak, we were only able to see about 75% of the sun eclipsed. This was a little sad for me, since the closest I’ve been to a total eclipse of the sun was last year’s annular eclipse. One might think it’s not fair that a professional astronomer doesn’t get to witness a total eclipse of the sun, but solar astronomy is not my specialty. Imagine if you were scheduled for cancer surgery and all the techs rushed away to watch a rare heart transplant. That’s what it would be like for me to leave my post. Below is a sequence of photos I grabbed during the eclipse. They are sequential from just before to just after the eclipse maximum. The third from the left is basically the maximum coverage of the sun we saw from Kitt Peak.
Even though I didn’t get to see the total eclipse, I still had the experience of seeing the eclipse with friends. Several of us who work at Kitt Peak gathered at the WIYN telescope to watch the event. At least two other folks on hand were as sleep-deprived as I was!
The two primary projects I’m involved in at Kitt Peak are the DESI survey, which is making the largest three-dimensional map of the known universe with the goal of understanding dark energy and NEID, which is a high-resolution spectrograph that observes the effects of exoplanets on their host stars. If you look at the photo above, the telescope is housed in the dome at the left. However, if you look at the right, there is a structure on the top of the blue roof. That’s WIYN’s solar telescope. It feeds light from the sun into NEID each and every day because one of the best ways to understand light from distant stars is to compare it to light from our own star. The day of the solar eclipse was no different and here are my colleagues, Dr. Sarah Logsdon and Eli Golub observing the sun during the eclipse.
Sarah tells me, “Observing an eclipse with NEID is a great opportunity to mimic some of the measurement techniques we use when observing planets around other stars, but at very high signal to noise. We will be able to measure the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect—which can tell us if a planet is rotating prograde or retrograde or even if it ‘s on a polar orbit and completely misaligned to the spin axis of the star. We may also be able to see a [star]spot-crossing event.” In effect, a solar eclipse is a rare opportunity to use NEID on objects we understand in our own solar system as a way to calibrate what we’re seeing on objects outside our solar system. You can learn more about planets crossing star spots at: https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/~fdai/spot_crossings.html. I find this very cool because several of my published papers involve investigations of spots on distant stars.
I may have missed totality, but I feel like I may have witnessed some real groundbreaking science in its place.
As it turns out, I have edited two books that imagine what real exoplanets might be like along with exoplanet scientist Dr. Steve Howell, who once was also WIYN’s telescope scientist. You can learn about each of them at the links below.
David Lee Summers' Web Journal 