Rudi Keller @CDTCivilWar

Stardust has a magical appeal for poets.

Hoagy Carmichaels 1927 song of that name has been recorded more than 1,500 times. Hello Poetry has a seemingly endless page of entries online devoted to it.

And in 1969, Joni Mitchell wrote we are stardust, we are golden, we are million year old carbon in her ode to the music festival at Woodstock.

Angela Speck, the University of Missouris director of astronomy, is StardustSpeck on Twitter and when shes not cheering for the public to look up at 1:12 p.m. Monday to see the total solar eclipse, she studies the stuff that poets prize.

My work is on determining what dust forms, trying to understand why that sort of dust forms and then what is the knock-on effect once youve got that sort of dust, Speck said.

Unfortunately, she said, shes neglected that research.

I really havent done any of my own research for quite some time, Speck said. It will be a relief to get back to it.

For more than three years, Specks time has been consumed by the eclipse. She is a co-chair of the American Astronomical Societys Solar Eclipse Task Force. In November 2015, she predicted Columbia should prepare for 400,000 visitors. The estimates have fallen but she still expects the city to double in population or more on Monday.

That number of visitors would be almost double the largest crowdto see a football game at Memorial Stadium.

Im exhausted. I am so exhausted, Speck said. I am excited. I am waiting for it to come but I would like it to be tomorrow. I want to see it. It is going to be awesome.

Just for the record, the total solar eclipse on Monday will be the first visible in the continental United States since 1979 and the first to cross the continent since 1918. At Broadway and Providence Road in Columbia, the eclipse will begin at 11:45 a.m. as the moon and sun begin to come into alignment. It will reach totality at 21 seconds past 1:12 p.m. The sun will be covered by the moon for 2 minutes and 36 seconds, covering the land in darkness. The eclipse will conclude at 2:40 p.m.

Speck grew up in Yorkshire, England, and attended Queen Mary University in London for undergraduate studies and received her doctorate from University College London.

Specks interest in space began in her childhood, her parents said. Alan Speck, visiting for the eclipse, said he recalls a ride with a friend to Queensbury one day.

It was one of those days when the moon was in the sky at daylight and she explained to us the physical properties as to why the moon was shining in the daylight sky, he said. She was 5 years old.

Her mother, Wendy Speck, attributed the interest to watching a lot of science fiction movies.

Angela Speck said her ambition at that age was to be an astronaut.

It was post Apollo but before the Voyagers were launched, she said. The space mission stuff was still kind of big. I have no recollection of why but I said this is what I am going to do.

Specks career trajectory veered off course for space travel into research and teaching. And it is almost a random occurrence that shes on the MU faculty. She and her husband Alan Whittington applied at several universities.

She was hired as a spousal accommodation when Whittington, now chair of the geology department, was hired.

We both got offered jobs, but Mizzou was the place where we both got to be faculty, Speck said.

Much of Specks time is spent alternately warning that huge crowds would flock to see total eclipse and debunking ridiculous claims and predictions.

Actually an eclipse day is no different from any other day, in terms of what the sun and the moon are doing, Speck said. Theyve got it in their head that this is doing something weird to the earth. No, not really.

There is an eclipse of the sun almost every year, somewhere on earth, Speck said. But the occurrence of a total solar eclipse at any particular location is rare.

The area today called Boone County has not experienced a total solar eclipse since July 7, 1442, and will not see another until June 3, 2505. The next total solar eclipse visible in Missouri will cross the Bootheel on April 8, 2024.

During a news conference for NASA, Speck was asked if animals needed special protection from the eclipse. She replied that animals dont look at the sun when it is not in eclipse and she didnt expect that to change.

Youre sure we dont need to protect animals? she recalled being asked. Im like yeah, I am pretty sure. If you have got a beastie that is particularly sensitive, they dont like it when you switch the light off in the house, then they probably wont like it when the sun gets in the way.

An internet search on Specks name reveals 430 entries in Googles news category. Shes a colorful speaker and journalists love a good quote.

Eclipses are usually in places that are hard to get to, Speck told Wired, just because most of the planet is places that are hard to get to.

She told Space.com that the crowded conditions could resemble a zombie apocalypse. There will hopefully be less bloodshed, but zombies don't need regular food, or sleep, or toilets," Speck said.

Her sons, 10 and 13, havent taken much notice of their mothers celebrity, she said.

They have had a couple of my mom is talking to my class, moments, she said.

On Monday, Speck will do color commentary for KMIZ-TVs eclipse broadcast. She may just be silent when the big moment finally arrives, she said.

But I am loud, so theres a good chance I will want to go, Ooh, look at that, look at that, look at that.

rkeller@columbiatribune.com

573-815-1709

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MU director of astronomy Angela Speck consumed by eclipse for three years - Columbia Daily Tribune

Due to launch together in 2020, the two satellites making up Proba-3 will fly in precise formation to form an external coronagraph in space, one satellite eclipsing the sun to allow the second to study the otherwise invisible solar corona. Credit: ESA

As skywatchers and scientists converge on a transcontinental band of totality for Mondays solar eclipse in the United States, engineers in Europe are building a unique pair of satellites to create artificial eclipses lasting for hours a feat that that could be a boon for solar physicists but will escape the view of Earth-bound spectators.

The European Space Agencys Proba-3 mission, scheduled for launch in late 2020, is made possible by two satellites, one about the size of a refrigerator, and another slightly smaller spacecraft with the rough dimensions of a coffee table.

The basic idea is to fly the smaller satellite directly between the sun and the field-of-view of cameras and instruments mounted on the bigger spacecraft, blocking the sunlight and revealing the glow of the Suns corona, or super-hot atmosphere, and filament-like eruptions called solar flares.

The light coming from the surface of the Sun is a million times brighter than the corona, requiring special measures to see the solar atmosphere.

The concept of obstructing the brightest light emanating from the sun to study activity around it is not new. Scientists have made observations of the corona for centuries during solar eclipses, and there are other space missions that carry coronagraphs, light-blocking discs buried inside telescopes used to make the relatively dim solar atmosphere visible.

But coronagraphs mounted inside telescopes are prone to stray light, a common problem in optics. Light escaping around the coronagraph disc can distort or mask views of the corona.

One simple way to think of the stray light problem is to compare an image of a total solar eclipse, a spectacular phenomenon where the faint corona suddenly springs into view. Holding your thumb over the sun at arms length does not produce the same result because sunlight has already been scattered by particles in Earths atmosphere.

One of the science goals of Proba-3 is to reproduce the conditions of a total solar eclipse as much as possible, said Andrei Zhukov, principal investigator for Proba-3s coronagraph at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, in response to questions from Astronomy Now.

In general, the longer the distance between an observer or a camera and the object obscuring the sun, the better the result. Scientists also do not have to worry about atmospheric distortions in space.

This problem can be minimised by extending the coronagraph length, the distance between the camera and the disc, as far as possible but there are practical limits to coronagraph size, Zhukov said in an ESA press release.

Instead, Proba-3s coronagraph uses two craft: a camera satellite and a disc satellite, Zhukov said. They fly together so precisely that they operate like a single coronagraph, 150 metres (492 feet) long.

The duo will launch together into an highly elliptical, oval-shaped orbit around Earth taking the satellites as high as 37,611 miles (60,530 kilometres) and as low as 372 miles (600 kilometres).

In that orbit, the satellites will complete one lap around the planet every 19.6 hours. For six of those hours, cameras on Proba-3s larger satellite will have an artificial eclipse.

Proba-3 will see the features down to 34,500 miles (55,600 kilometers) from the sun about 8 percent of the solar radius resolving activity closer to the solar limb than any current space mission. Zhukov said ground-based observers looking at a total solar eclipse can still see more of the corona than Proba-3, but the advantage of a space mission is the eclipses longevity.

During two years of its nominal mission, Proba-3 will provide around 1,000 hours of coronal observations, Zhukov wrote in an email to Astronomy Now. This has to be compared with several minutes of duration of natural eclipses during the same time.

Proba-3 will also be free from disturbances produced by the Earths atmosphere in all astronomical observations, Zhukov wrote.

ESA is developing the Proba-3 mission as an experimental demonstration, with scientific observations of the sun a secondary goal.

Engineers want to test out technologies for autonomous formation flying on Proba-3, which will use ranging measurements with the help of GPS navigation signals and optical sensors.

The two spacecraft will be connected with an inter-satellite radio link, and the so-called occulter satellite the smaller of the pair will carry low-power micro-thrusters for fine maneuvers, keeping the two vehicles positioned with millimetre precision.

Proba-3 will create an eclipse when the satellites are farthest from Earth. The satellites will passively drift apart during the rest of each orbit, a fuel-saving measure to minimise consumption of the missions limited supply of propellant.

The capabilities to be proved out on Proba-3 could be used on future missions to repair satellites in orbit or return samples from Mars, according to ESA.

Already approved for development as a tech demo mission, Proba-3 won the backing of ESAs science programme committee earlier this year. The agencys scientific division will pay for Proba-3s science operations center to ensure astronomers get the most out of the project.

Proba-3 was scheduled for launch in 2019, but officials recently pushed back the missions liftoff to the fourth quarter of 2020.

The complexity in the development of the formation flying technology does not allow the launch in late 2019 as was planned earlier, Zhukov said. The project schedule is now consolidated, and the launch in the fourth quarter of 2020 is the new baseline. That does look feasible.

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Pioneering ESA mission aims to create artificial solar eclipses - Astronomy Now Online

Adam Poulisse Staff writer @adampoulisse

ROCKFORD Duane Ingram has seen, and been a part of, some pretty impressive science in his lifetime.

TheLoves Park resident taught astronomy and physics at Rock Valley College, owns Ingram Scientific Consultants and has studied the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, through the University of Iowa.

But at 79 years old,he's still not seen atotal solar eclipse. On Monday, that will change.

Ingram and his wife are traveling to Columbia, Missouri, to get an unobstructed view of "The Great American Eclipse" when the moon will pass between the Sun and Earth, casting a 70 mile-wide shadow that will move from coast to coast.

The rare celestial event marks the first total solar eclipse that can be viewed from the contiguous U.S. since Feb. 26, 1979. Along the path of totality that covers a swath ofthe country from South Carolina to Oregon, the sun will be completely blocked by the moon for about 2 1/2 minutes. It mirrors the path the solar eclipse of June 1918 took from Florida to Washington.

"There were a couple that I thought Id see but didnt," Ingram said. "This time, Im retired; its my time. Im going to see it.

Ingram is traveling to Missouri to be in the path of totality. TheRockfordregion is just outside the path, so wewon't get a full eclipse. But with 88 percent of the sun covered,residents can expect aneat show providing the weather is clear, according to Jim Dole, director of the Doug Firebaugh Observatory in Freeport, 2892 W. Stephenson St., andastronomy teacher at Highland Community College. The National Weather Service is calling for partly sunny skies with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms.

The eclipse will begin around 11:45 a.m. and last until about 2:40 p.m. Maximum coverage, when the area will be the darkest,will happen around 1:15 p.m.

"You should be able to step outside and there should be an eerie, silvery gray look in the sky," Dole said. "The birds and animals will be changing a bit, thinking it's nighttime."

Don'tplan to view the space event at any of the area observatories though, nobody will be there to operate them.

Dole and the eight-person volunteerstaff are traveling across the countryto experience the full solar eclipse. Dole is traveling to Beatrice, Nebraska, a prime viewing spot about an hour south of Lincoln that is expecting thousands of people, including NASA officials and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

But many people plan to view the eclipse right here, partaking in family-friendlyviewing parties and other activities.

"There are solar eclipses around the year, but with three-fourths of the planet being covered in water, a majority of them fall over the oceans," Dole said. "This path of totality is fantastic."

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Events galore

Boone County Conservation District and Ida Public Library will host a Solar Eclipse Viewing Partybeginning at 11:30 a.m. Monday inSpencer Park, 899 N. Appleton Road in Belvidere. Food trucks, crafts, a NASA livestream from other parts of the country and other activities are planned. Solar eclipse viewing glasses will be given to the first 500 guests. Solar eclipse handouts and free commemorative buttons will be distributed.

Nature at the Confluence Learning Center, 306 Dickop St. in South Beloit, in partnership with the South Beloit and Beloit libraries, is hosting a celebrationat 11:30 a.m. There will be arts and crafts, treats, a fire-starting competition using the sun's rays and more.

The eclipse also marks the first day of the new school year for Rockford Public Schools, and some classes will be participating in eclipse-related learning activities.

Communities in southern Illinois havebeen deemed a prime viewing spot and will have plenty of events planned to celebrate the phenomenon. About 200,000 visitors are expected to travel to the region over the weekend. The eclipse's greatest duration will happen in Carbondale and the village of Makanda, at 2 minutes, 42 seconds. Several events are planned including:

The four-day Moonstock Music Festival in Carterville headlined by the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne.

A canoe trip down the cypress swamp on the Cache Riverduring totality.

Bald Knob Cross in Alto Pass will provide an unobstructed view of the eclipse.

The Adler Planetarium of Chicago, the Louisiana Space Consortium and NASA will host a viewing event at Saluki Stadium at Southern Illinois University.

Jeff Carpenter of Roscoe has a campsite reserved in Carbondale, but declined to say exactlywhere so he doesn't give away his prime viewing spot.

"Itll be nice to see and add to the list of things Ive seen in the universe," he said. "Ive seen so many pictures (of total solar eclipses), I need to see one for myself.

Dole said he chose to travel west because there's a higher chance of visibility in Nebraska than in southern Illinois.

While some are traveling, others are looking forward to seeing the 88 percent solar eclipsein Rockford.

Terri Carpenter of Machesney Park is getting off work at noon just in time to watch theeclipse at its highest point.

"Hopefully it'll bring good energy with everything happening in the world," she said.

Safe specs

Scientists and astronomers are warning spectators to be safe when viewing the eclipse because, while it's neat to behold, staring at the sun can cause permanent eye damage.

"Without special filters, even if it's 99 percent of the sun is covered, you need eye protection; we're going to be at about 90 percent coverage," Dole said. "You're not going to feel (damage) until the next few days when your vision is fuzzy and distorted."

Eclipse glasses have been handed out at local libraries and observatories to allow viewers to safely look at the event. Glasses and hand-held viewers should meet the ISO 12312-2 international standard. No. 14 arc welder's glass can also be used to safely view the eclipse directly.

UTC Aerospace Systems Rockford's Space Business and Community Leadership Club is donating about 1,000 pair of safety glasses to Maud E. Johnson and A.C. Thompson elementary schools as part of its effort to support STEM education in local communities, spokesman Tim Schmeling said.

"The Rockford employees are currently working on life support systems and thermal control systems for NASAs Orion vehicle, intended for deep space missions like Mars, and thought the glasses donation would be a good way to share their passion for space exploration with the students," he said. "The glasses themselves are not manufactured by the business."

And don't forget about the family pets.

Though they won't be as inclined to look directly at theeclipse as we will be, revelries such as fireworks and other commotion to celebrate the event could stress them out, said Kari Kobus, a veterinarian at Hillcrest Animal Hospital on Alpine Road.

"The biggest issue with pets, in any event, is how we react," Kobus said. "If we're stressed and overly excited, they're going to get stressed and overly excited."

Domesticated animals won't react like wildlife will during the eclipse since they operate on a similar schedule as us. Since it'll get pretty dark during maximum coverage, Kobus said, "It'll look like a horrible thunderstorm is passing over the area." It's important to keep pets close and make sure they don't have away to escape if any sudden noises spook them.

If you miss this eclipse, you can catch the next one on April 8, 2024.

"For not seeing one in my life, then seeing two in seven years, that's fantastic," Dole said. "Millions of people going to see first at least onefor the first time in their lives. It's really been a boost for astronomy."

Adam Poulisse: 815-987-1344; apoulisse@rrstar.com; @adampoulisse

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Astronomy buffs traveling for eclipse, viewing events to take place across region - Rockford Register Star

Astronomers across the ages have looked up to the skies and marveled at eclipses.

Using different numerical systems, the Aztecs and the Mayans observed eclipses and could predict with precision when the next one would occur. In fact, they could have predicted Mondays solar eclipse with small margins of error, experts say.

DONT MISS THE ECLIPSE: Where to watch it in Central Texas

Anthony Aveni is a retired professor from Colgate University and author of many books on archaeoastronomy, including In the Shadow of the Moon: The Science, Magic, and Mystery of Solar Eclipses. According to Aveni, the Aztecs used to say they designed the founding of the city of Tenochtitln where modern-day Mexico City now sits to coincide with an eclipse in 1325.

Its a way of saying, Thats when our empire began, connect that with the beginning. (Its) probably not true, he said, but saying the citys foundation coincided with an eclipse helped give it more importance.

The Aztecs registered many eclipses, and its possible their calendar stone depicts the death of the sun god Tonatiuh at the hands of an eclipse monster, said Susan Milbrath, curator emeritus of the Museum of Natural history in Florida, in a recent New York Times special section about eclipses.

The Mayans also left a record of their astronomical knowledge in books known as codices, especially in the Dresden Codex. The book now resides in Germany and is one of only four codices to survive Spanish colonial officials burning of the books, Aveni said.

This codex has a famous chart of eclipses that suggests the Mayans were watching the sky every bit as carefully as the Babylonians, who might have been the first to keep a record of a total solar eclipse, Aveni said.

DONT STARE: Some tips when watching the eclipse over Austin

Religion, everyday life and science were deeply connected for the Mayans, who used a vigesimal or 20-based numerical system for their calculations. Instead of seven days, for instance, the Mayan week had 20, which corresponded to the number of fingers and toes a person has. They used this system to calculate everything from child gestation to the movement of celestial bodies.

This is an example of scientific cultural diversity, Aveni said. The Mayans had this religious, ritual dictate that any cycle in heaven had to fit perfectly with the cycles of the human body, and other cycles that we dont pay attention to.

The Mayans were way ahead of their time, Aveni said, and we tend to put them down, to say its superstition, but they were doing things quite comparable to what we say we know about eclipses.

Something most of us can agree on, Aveni said, is that when watching an eclipse, we all stop what were doing, we see something unusual and we remember that we all did it at the same time.

It unifies cultures, he said.

Watching the eclipse in Central Texas

Mondays solar eclipse, dubbed the Great American Eclipse, will be seen from Oregons coast near Salem to Charleston, S.C. The next one in the U.S. will not occur until April 8, 2024, when one is expected to start in Mexico, passing through Texas and Maine, and reaching Canada.

Austin will only get to view a partial eclipse Monday.

Several places in Central Texas will hold eclipse viewing parties Monday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Visit statesman.com/eclipse for a list of tips, locations and other information.

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Aztecs, Mayans marveled at eclipses and predicted them with precision - MyStatesman.com

Artist's illustration of the star system Kepler-444, whose five planets were discovered by the Kepler space telescope as they passed in front of their star, dimming its light. All five orbit the star within less than 10 days.

Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and the chief scientist at COSI science center. Sutter leads science-themed tours around the world at AstroTouring.com. Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

As we prepare for the upcoming total solar eclipse set to cross the continental United States on Aug. 21, the mechanics of the event are pretty straightforward to explain: Occasionally the sun, moon and Earth end up in straight line, and when they do, the moon casts its shadow on the Earth. Voila: eclipse!

From our perspective here on the surface of the Earth, it appears as if the disk of the moon covers the face of the sun. You have to be near or at totality when the sun is fully covered to notice the sun's dimming with your unaided eyes. However, sophisticated light-measuring instruments can easily pick up even the slightest hint of reduction in sunlight no matter the extent of the eclipse.

Now let's play a game. Let's say you attached these keen instruments to a telescope and you rocketed a few light-years away from the solar system. And instead of observing the sun-moon eclipse, you stared at the sun as the Earth meandered in its orbit. If you lined everything up just right and stared long enough, eventually you would get to see the tiny planet cross the face of its massive sun. [Total Solar Eclipse 2017: Here Are the Best Live-Video Streams to Watch]

With enough dedication to your astronomical duties, you could conceivably measure a dip in brightness as the Earth entered the edge of the sun, and a return to normalcy as the planet moved on.

Let's take it to the extreme: You're so far away that you can't even see a tiny dot representing the Earth. Could you still measure the telltale dip in brightness? Well, measuring the light output of a star is much easier than hunting for an insignificant speck of a rocky world, so I suppose with enough technological progress one could achieve it.

And imagine this: What if we did this all the time? Well, we do. This hunting for subtle eclipses is our primary method for detecting exoplanets planets outside the solar system, orbiting their own host stars. Of course, astronomers don't call it "subtle eclipse method," but rather the "transit method."

This method allows us to find exoplanets big and small orbiting stars of all sizes and ages. Over 4,000 planets and counting! We haven't found an exact match for Earth yet but we're getting closer to finding a match with every new planet detected.

The transit method isn't perfect, of course; it relies on a chance alignment among the star, the exoplanet and us. If that planet just happens to orbit perpendicular to our line of sight, we're out of luck. Thankfully, there are, to put it mildly, many stars out there, even within our nearby galactic neighborhood, so enough coincidences occur to give us a solid census of our celestial cousins.

So, as you're feasting your eyes on the upcoming solar eclipse, you might wonder if some distant observer is also enjoying the event.

Follow Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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How Astronomers Use Eclipses to Discover Alien Worlds - Space.com