Q. A total solar eclipse---when the moon totally blocks the sun for a few moments and day turns into night---is a magical event.
A long time ago, a solar eclipse would terrorize people, including many who worshipped the sun as a god. Today, eclipses are well known, if no better understood, by most people---it's unlikely that they scare anyone, but they remain, largely, a mystery.
On Wednesday, March 29, the shadow of the Moon will sweep across a band starting in eastern South America, across the Atlantic Ocean, the Gold Coast of Africa, the Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean Sea, Turkey, across central Asia, ending in Mongolia. Totality---when the sun is totally blacked out by the moon---will last as long as 4 minutes 7 seconds in North Africa, with a shadow stretching about 190 kilometers (about 120 miles) across at that moment.
You and Ron Marsh aim to demystify these regular celestial events and to share, through the magic of the Internet, their transient beauty and excitement. You also want to use these magical astronomical happenings to sharpen the scientific thinking of school-age children. Tell us about this upcoming solar eclipse and your Webcast project.
A. A total eclipse of the Sun is inspiring; everyone should see one at least once in their lifetime. We will be in Antalya, a 2,200-year-old resort city on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, for the total solar eclipse March 29. It'll get completely dark there during the eclipse at about 2 p.m. Antalya time (6 a.m. U.S. Central Standard Time). We plan to take students with us each time we go---this time we are taking UND physics graduate student Tricia Johnson. She will take digital photographs and post them on our Web site.
About the eclipse: at certain times, the moon can blot out the sun. It's simple geometry, really; the sun is 400 times the size of the moon, but it also is about 400 times farther away from us than the moon is. Every five or six lunar months, the moon comes into perfect alignment with the sun, producing---from our point of view on Earth---an eclipse; so we get a solar eclipse twice a year. Not every eclipse produces total darkness. But every year to year and a half, on average, total solar eclipses can be seen, though in different parts of the world. Solar eclipses occur only at new moons and lunar eclipses only at full moons.
We will be Webcasting the whole show from a hotel in Antalya; we'll be in contact with San Francisco’s Exploratorium and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and plan to provide a backup Webcast for them. Our multicast technology is possible with our collaborators Tim Lawlor at Pennsylvania State University-Wilkes Barre and George "Chip" Smith at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At least one class in the Grand Forks public school system will be watching, too.
This is our third solar eclipse Webcast; we were in Madrid last October and Panama last April.
Q. You mentioned that your primary goal with this Webcasting project is to show young school kids what the moon is all about. Please tell us how you aim to accomplish this.
A. First, we want to bring these events to people who couldn't otherwise see them. We aim to educate people---especially younger children---about how many eclipses there are per year and why. That's because we know that so many people remain confused about why there are phases to the moon and why there are eclipses. Studies have shown that 60 percent of people think that phases of the moon are caused by shadow of the earth. This is astounding and we want to change that.
Q. You're going after a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. What do you aim to accomplish with that grant?
A. The NSF grant that we're trying to get is about educating children about the whole Sun-Earth-Moon system. In doing that, we want to get funding to go to these eclipses, about two a year. The point of the grant is to create higher-order thinking in preadolescent children and changing misconceptions about astronomy. We want to start them thinking early about what's going on in this system. If you've learned incorrectly about the moon phases and eclipses at an early age, you tend to hold onto those beliefs, so it's important to start getting the correct information early.
On this eclipse---the one we're traveling to Turkey for later this month---we're starting a pilot study in a fifth-grade class in Grand Forks. We'll measure how their perceptions change in viewing the Webcast; we're doing this collaboratively with Prof. Mark Guy of Teaching and Learning in the UND College of Education and Human Development.
We believe that if we can get elementary school children to grasp the basic concepts involved in the Sun-Earth-Moon system, then we'd be preparing them for higher-order thinking in many areas, especially mathematics and science.
This is all about getting children interested in accurate science.
Q. We're talking specifically about a solar eclipse in this case; but it seems what you're driving at is a core principle of education.
A. Yes, that's what we're driving at. The larger issue is science education. It's about preparing the next generation of adult leaders. It's hard to develop correct thinking about what you're seeing and about the concepts behind what you're seeing. For example, in terms of the moon, current teaching of the phases of the moon usually includes two-dimensional images of the moon. This is really not descriptive enough to understand what is going on. Moreover, we're only spending a fraction of a (science) class time on these principles, so kids rely on stories in books about the moon, and on hearsay.
Q. Can you tell us how you'd improve this system of teaching?
A. With my undergraduate classes here at UND, I do a semesterlong project that I call "Moon Project." Students observe the moon over a month and then report on the observations. I encourage them to interpret their data, specifically to correlate the Moon’s phases to its position in the sky. We're reinforcing that in the classroom, but this about teaching young people to do their own real science.
Q. How does the Webcast work?
A. We need the Internet to make our Webcast work. That is difficult in some places. We usually collaborate with a local university or hotel that has Internet access; we use the infrastructure of our host country to get on the net. Once we are on the Internet, we link our servers at UND Computer Science. Then we have a point-to-point feed to collaborators that do multicasts. We don't want everyone trying to use our server. We give the signal to other universities, which then spread that signal. We had over 50,000 people participate in our last eclipse Webcast (in Madrid last fall). And that's counted people; a lot of folks aren't counted because they bring up the Webcast in a stand-alone viewer, and that isn't counted by the Webcast counter.
We will have two Webcams and also a chat room; people feel like they're part of the whole event and that's one of the unique things about our Webcast. We also have audio; people type in their questions, and we answer them verbally as well as in text. The lag time is, at most, a few seconds. The Webcast is live. We also have a separate recording computer that'll put our solar eclipse observations out on a podcast; we will produce radio clips for iTunes and also have them on our server.
What we're doing with regard to the kids is to use technology to enhance their learning, get them into higher-order thinking. This is a major push. Most science is taught as facts, that's what children believe science is, answering questions like, what is the moon’s age, what is the moon made of, and what is the size of the moon; that's called lower-order thinking, memorizing facts
With these live Webcasts and similar tools we get kids to understand concepts, to make two step logical statements that you need in order to explain complex systems, like the phases of the moon.
What we're hoping is that (this type of education) eventually gets into school systems. We're seeing that they need more time on science subjects they don't get that now. This will further science education and will give students with tools of higher-order thinking to use in other science classes.
Q. Where can we find more information about the eclipse and your Webacst?
A. You can find out more about what we're doing with this upcoming eclipse at http://sems.und.edu. We're also listed on the NASA Web site at http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse; click on "Total solar eclipse 2006" and then scroll down to the section on live Web coverage, you'll find us third down on the list. We're one of only two U.S. groups that will provide this kind of coverage.
