Attendees enjoy food before the Exploring the Eclipse panel Feb. 19 in the Planetarium.
Ahead of the April 8 total solar eclipse, UTA received a $50,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support eclipse-related education for K-12 students and a two-and-a-half-day workshop, bringing scientists to Arlington to discuss and research the phenomenon.
For the first time since 1878, the Metroplex will be directly within the path of totality during the eclipse, meaning the moon’s shadow will completely cover the sun, according to previous Shorthorns reporting.
Levent Gurdemir, planetarium director and co-principal investigator on the grant, said that while the planetarium already has an outreach program for K-12 students, the grant will expand their work.
“Because there are some provided eclipse classes by NASA, the grant allows not only K-12 students to travel [to] the UTA planetarium, but also UTA experts are going to visit some K-12 students and deliver a presentation all at their school,” Gurdemir said.
The experts will visit elementary, middle and high schools within the Metroplex throughout March. Faculty and graduate students will lead presentations educating students on the eclipse.
“It is important to give the correct information to kids, because kids can grow up with [the] right information and carry that information through their lives and transfer it to an even younger generation,” Gurdemir said.
The program hopes to reach 4,000 students, and UTA will donate eclipse viewing glasses to each one, according to a UTA press release.
Yue Deng, professor of space physics and lead researcher on the grant, said in an email that the presentations will cover the causes and significance of the eclipse, where and how to safely view it, how scientists will learn from it and how people viewed eclipses in the past, among other topics.
From April 8 to 10, there will be a workshop covered by the grant for over 100 members of the International Astronomical Union to conduct research on the total solar eclipse.
“They will set up scientific instruments and they will take scientific data during the total solar eclipse,” Gurdemir said. “In the meantime, they will do these workshops and some seminars and some presentations.”
Deng said two topics of research during the workshop will be about collecting data on atmospheric changes during the eclipse and solar corona, the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, which is only visible to the naked eye during the eclipse.
Ground observations will help scientists understand the spatial and temporal variations of corona, he said.
While total solar eclipses are not uncommon, Gurdemir said this eclipse is special because the line of totality will go through a civilized area like the Metroplex. The line of totality is usually only observable from remote places. He said in this case, the eclipse can be called a “lifetime opportunity.”
“For example, the next one is going to be in 2026,” Gurdemir said. “We [will] need to travel to Iceland.”
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