An official website of the United States government
In this paper, we share the experience of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Solar Observatory (NSO) scientists, educators, and public outreach officers in organizing an eclipse viewing party within a stadium at a sports complex on the US/Mexico border in Eagle Pass, TX in collaboration with educators from the Eagle Pass and the Uvalde areas. We describe the reasons we chose Eagle Pass, contacts we established with the local community, preparations for and activities set up during the eclipse viewing party, the eclipse day on April 8, 2024, and lessons learned from organizing our event.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on January 7, 2027
Engaging and educating eclipse observers in the Heliophysics Big Year
The “Heliophysics Big Year” was an extended “year” when major solar events engaged the public. NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded several projects to educate the public on the science of the heliosphere and safe observing practices. In response to this initiative, we worked with other teams to create and disseminate accurate yet engaging information. We expanded our eclipse website (https://space.rice.edu/eclipse/) with activities, citizen science projects, resources, training videos, suggested equipment, and links to other compendia. We directed the Citizen CATE 2024 project, and trained state coordinators and their teams to use the specialized equipment and procedures. We trained teachers at local, regional, national, and international workshops, providing eclipse viewing cards, lenses for making “solar cup projectors,” a pattern for a safe viewing screen, and additional materials. With other teams, we gave presentations to the media at SciLine in San Antonio and hosted public events to demonstrate safe eclipse viewing techniques. The most lasting and impactful product was our planetarium show “Totality,” which was distributed free of license fees. More than 180,000 views of the show and its animations have been documented. We improved our space weather forecasting site (https://mms.rice.edu) and used our email lists (14,000+) to send out real-time warnings about the major solar storm of 10–11 May 2024. In total, we provided nearly two million people with heliophysics information. In summary, the federal/private/business partnerships meant that the events of this “year” were a fun, safe, learning experience for tens of millions of Americans.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10658034
- Publisher / Repository:
- Frontiers Media S.A.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences
- Volume:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 2296-987X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1701565
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Benoit Lavraud (Ed.)The amateur radio community is a global, highly engaged, and technical community with an intense interest in space weather, its underlying physics, and how it impacts radio communications. The large-scale observational capabilities of distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and radio science enthusiasts offers a tremendous opportunity to advance the fields of heliophysics, radio science, and space weather. Well-established amateur radio networks like the RBN, WSPRNet, and PSKReporter already provide rich, ever-growing, long-term data of bottomside ionospheric observations. Up-and-coming purpose-built citizen science networks, and their associated novel instruments, offer opportunities for citizen scientists, professional researchers, and industry to field networks for specific science questions and operational needs. Here, we discuss the scientific and technical capabilities of the global amateur radio community, review methods of collaboration between the amateur radio and professional scientific community, and review recent peer-reviewed studies that have made use of amateur radio data and methods. Finally, we present recommendations submitted to the U.S. National Academy of Science Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024–2033 for using amateur radio to further advance heliophysics and for fostering deeper collaborations between the professional science and amateur radio communities. Technical recommendations include increasing support for distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and citizen scientists, developing novel transmissions of RF signals that can be used in citizen science experiments, developing new amateur radio modes that simultaneously allow for communications and ionospheric sounding, and formally incorporating the amateur radio community and its observational assets into the Space Weather R2O2R framework. Collaborative recommendations include allocating resources for amateur radio citizen science research projects and activities, developing amateur radio research and educational activities in collaboration with leading organizations within the amateur radio community, facilitating communication and collegiality between professional researchers and amateurs, ensuring that proposed projects are of a mutual benefit to both the professional research and amateur radio communities, and working towards diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities.more » « less
-
The Total Eclipse en la Frontera program provided informal and formal science education outreach using Sul Ross State University’s La Frontera Research Initiative (LFRI) mobile program, which serves communities located along the southwest Texas-Mexico border. With assistance from existing community partnerships, the Jay M. Pasachoff Solar Eclipse Mini-Grants Program, and the National Science Foundation Noyce program, our program reached over 20,000 people within a 6-month period. LFRI provided educational experiences to Uvalde CISD (4,041 students), Eagle Pass ISD (14,028 students), San Felipe Del Rio CISD (9,874 students), Southwest Texas Junior College (2,300 students), Sul Ross State University (2,071 students), and surrounding private schools, public libraries, and the general public. Established partnerships included the above institutions, as well as Presidio ISD, Marfa ISD, Alpine ISD, the Science Mill Museum, McDonald’s Observatory, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and the National Solar Observatory. Leveraging a mobile STEM Lab, LFRI provided eclipse-themed makerspace programing along with eclipse-focused educator training to include cultural total eclipse lectures with national experts to the communities along the southwest Texas-Mexico border. Specifically, border communities of Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Uvalde, and the Big Bend Region experienced STEM education outreach throughout the summer of 2023 leading up to the Total Eclipse in April 2024. Program outcomes provide a glimpse on the use of mobile makerspace program might increase STEM identity, self-efficacy, and engagement of isolated communities through a 2-year mentoring program connecting faculty, graduate students, preservice teachers, K12 educators, and community college students.more » « less
-
Abstract We present analysis using a citizen science campaign to improve the cosmological measures from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The goal of HETDEX is to measure the Hubble expansion rate,H(z), and angular diameter distance,DA(z), atz= 2.4, each to percent-level accuracy. This accuracy is determined primarily from the total number of detected Lyαemitters (LAEs), the false positive rate due to noise, and the contamination due to [Oii] emitting galaxies. This paper presents the citizen science project, Dark Energy Explorers (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/erinmc/dark-energy-explorers), with the goal of increasing the number of LAEs and decreasing the number of false positives due to noise and the [Oii] galaxies. Initial analysis shows that citizen science is an efficient and effective tool for classification most accurately done by the human eye, especially in combination with unsupervised machine learning. Three aspects from the citizen science campaign that have the most impact are (1) identifying individual problems with detections, (2) providing a clean sample with 100% visual identification above a signal-to-noise cut, and (3) providing labels for machine-learning efforts. Since the end of 2022, Dark Energy Explorers has collected over three and a half million classifications by 11,000 volunteers in over 85 different countries around the world. By incorporating the results of the Dark Energy Explorers, we expect to improve the accuracy on theDA(z) andH(z) parameters atz= 2.″4 by 10%–30%. While the primary goal is to improve on HETDEX, Dark Energy Explorers has already proven to be a uniquely powerful tool for science advancement and increasing accessibility to science worldwide.more » « less
-
We present results of a dual eclipse expedition to observe the solar corona from two sites during the annular solar eclipse of 14 October 2023 using a novel coronagraph designed to be accessible for amateurs and students to build and deploy. The coronagraph (CATEcor) builds on the standardized eclipse observing equipment developed for the Citizen CATE 2024 experiment. The observing sites were selected for likelihood of clear observations, for historic relevance (near the Climax site in the Colorado Rocky Mountains), and for centrality to the annular eclipse path (atop Sandia Peak above Albuquerque, New Mexico). The novel portion of CATEcor is an external occulter assembly that slips over the front of a conventional dioptric telescope, forming ashaded-trussexternally occulted coronagraph. CATEcor is specifically designed to be easily constructed in a garage or “makerspace” environment. We successfully observed some bright features in the solar corona to an altitude of approximately 2.25 R⊙during the annular phases of the eclipse. Future improvements to the design, in progress now, will reduce both stray light and image artifacts; our objective is to develop a design that can be operated successfully by amateur astronomers at sufficient altitude even without the darkened skies of a partial or annular eclipse.more » « less
