excerpt from
For Eclipse 2017, Scientists Prepare For 'The Most Beautiful Thing You Can See In The Sky' : The Two-Way : NPR
The inner corona is particularly interesting to researchers because there's a lot of activity there related to so-called
space weather, which can affect Earth's electric grids and communications systems.
But the moon moves more quickly than researchers would like. From any given spot on the ground, Penn says, the view of the inner corona lasts for just a couple of minutes while the moon is totally blocking the sun. "And the corona is big. It changes, but slowly, and in two minutes you can't really see changes that we want to study in the solar wind," he adds.
That's why Penn has been organizing
Citizen CATE: the Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse experiment. Trained volunteers will be positioned at 68 sites across the entire 2,500-mile path of the total eclipse. As the moon's shadow crosses the country, the volunteers will use identical telescopes to take photos of the corona.
"With that many telescopes, you can get continuous coverage of the eclipse from coast-to-coast during totality," says
Bob Baer of Southern Illinois University, another member of the CATE team.
When the images get stitched together into a continuous movie, Penn says, "we can observe the corona for 93 minutes and therefore see changes that we wouldn't normally otherwise detect."
In addition to ground-based telescopes, researchers working on other projects will watch the eclipse with the help of satellites,
airplanes and high-altitude balloons.