The principal invesitgators are members of a committee convening a planning workshop to prepare for the rare total solar eclipse that will traverse the US continent on 21 August 2017. The workshop will be held April 9-11, 2012, at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, and will bring together eclipse experts and scientists to plan for this 2017 event.
The workshop wii allow plans to be developed to capitalize on the unique scientific and public outreach potential of the 2017 eclipse. By traversing the extended US landmass, the shadow band of the 2017 eclipse will provide almost uninterrupted observations of the solar corona over 90 minutes, from its start in the northwest to its end in the southeast. Such a span will provide the opportunity to capture the temporal variations and spatial characteristics of coronal structures on times scales of fractions of seconds, to minutes, to over an hour. Since a number of identical experiments can be set up along the path of totality to maximize chances of success, the 2017 eclipse promises an optimal scientific yield.
The broader impact of this activity will be in its ability to spark the interest of the public at large and to entice them to take part in exploratory and discovery opportunities. This workshop will provide the first meeting for specialists to collectively develop ideas for public experiments and outreach that would fully exploit the 90 minute duration of this 2017 event across the USA, and involve a significant fraction of the national population, as well as a large number of visitors from abroad. In addition, the workshop will allow planning for eclipse observations that will test new technologies and concepts for later incorporation in ground-based and space-based observatories.
Solar Eclipse 2017 E/PO Planning Workshop This workshop provided the opportunity for more than 75 scientists interested in brininging the excitement and scientific importance of solar eclipses to the US public during the 2017 Solar Eclipse. The total eclipse will be visible in a narrow region starting in the northwest coast, travelling across the center of the country and terminating near Savannah, Georgia. Because of its path, it will potentially be visible by hundreds of millions of people, either in partial phase, or for those lucky enough or willing to travel a bit, along the path of totality. By gathering the individuals who are actively planning to carry out an E/PO project for the 2017 eclipse, the gathered group was able to provide constructive criticism about the planned activities, therefore improving them. Additionally, multiple people planning similar projects were able to join together their efforts, making the planned effort better. Also, new ideas were generated during the meeting, with multiple people coming together in one place, creativity is unleashed and excitement gets built up. The workshop provided just such an environment. These accomplishments speak to the intellectual benefit of the grant. The workshop served to gather together and focus numerous different people planning independent activities for 2017 along the path of totality. By ensuring they all knew about each other's projects, the hope is to broaden the impact of all such activities by providing uniform information and approaches to public education. Also, instead of many different websites or information channels providing information about the eclipse, the workshop allowed some agreements to be made limiting the number of such information channels. This will broaden the impact as well, by providing as close to 'one stop shopping' as possible for public information. Nothing is worse than doing a search online for information about something and finding hundreds of sites that seem relevant. By consolidating, we make it easier for the public to get validated information they can trust from a single, or handful of such sites. The workshop results were presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society where a larger number of scientists were in attendance than at the workshop (2000 vs. 75), with the intent of sharing with them the results and broadening the participation in the 2017 eclipse activities.
