Vanessa Thomas
On Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse darkened skies over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. As the Moon covered the Sun, it briefly revealed the Sun’s wispy outer atmosphere — the corona — to those in the path of totality who were lucky enough to have clear skies. NASA researchers and photographers were along the eclipse path to study the corona, capture the phenomenon, and observe how the eclipse affected our planet.
One NASA photographer in Spain captured the total solar eclipse as well as the partial phases before and after, until the Sun set below the horizon.
In northern Maine, where only a partial eclipse was visible, another NASA photographer captured the International Space Station, with its crew of seven aboard, speeding past the partially eclipsed Sun.
Meanwhile, from about 250 miles above the ground, a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station snapped a few photos of the partial eclipse from their perspective as well.
Between the ground and the space station, NASA pilots flew NASA’s WB-57F research jet at an altitude of 50,000 feet, passing through the eclipse’s shadow to lengthen their time in the eclipse. The jet carried a suite of cameras that captured high-resolution images of the corona and prominences, plumes of electrically charged gas rising off the Sun, in several different wavelengths of light.
In both Iceland and Spain, teams of students participating in the NASA-funded Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project launched scientific balloons that carried instruments to capture images of the eclipse’s shadow and study the eclipse’s effects on our atmosphere. Even though clouds obscured the view of the eclipse from the ground in Iceland, the weather did not interfere with the balloon-borne instruments’ ability to gather information about how the brief loss of light and heat affected the lower atmosphere.
Before the eclipse, scientists at Predictive Science Inc., with support from NASA grants and supercomputers, used observations of the Sun from NASA spacecraft and ground-based telescopes to predict what the corona would look like during the eclipse. Below, their corona prediction is compared to a composite image of the corona, which combines multiple images captured by the NASA-supported DEB Initiative project during the total eclipse near León, Spain.