NASA will be studying the total solar eclipse. Here's how you can help

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Total Solar Eclipse News

NASA,Observations,Citizen Science

Cheyenne is Engadget’s weekend editor and covers a little bit of everything. She’s particularly interested in emerging technology and niche gadgets, climate change, space, privacy, and internet culture. She’ll talk your ear off about Tamagotchis if you get her started.

On Monday, April 8, a total solar eclipse will be visible across a swath of North America, from Mexico’s Pacific coast to the easternmost reaches of Canada. And in those few minutes of daytime darkness, all sorts of interesting phenomena are known to occur — phenomena NASA would like our help measuring.

All you’ll need to join in is equipment you already own, like a smartphone, and a few minutes set aside before the eclipse to go through the training materials., a concerted effort to measure the true shape of the sun. While the sun is closer to being a perfect sphere than other celestial bodies that have been observed, it’s still technically an oblate spheroid, being a smidge wider along its equator.

Temperatures at the surface can, in some cases, drop as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit during a total solar eclipse, according to NASA. And certain types of clouds have been observed to dissipate during these brief cooldowns, resulting in unexpectedly clear skies in the moments before totality. Data collected with the help of citizen scientists during the 2017 total solar eclipse showed that, and then open the Globe Eclipse tool from the in-app menu.

 

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