LBCC’s eclipse chasers have come back home.
On Tuesday, April 9, the team of about 16 LBCC students arrived back at Eugene’s airport after a long-anticipated weekend of preparation, experimentation, and data collection in Leakey, Texas during this year’s total eclipse. For 14 weeks the students learned the history of the experiment, its significance for accessibility, and finally how to perform it.
The goal of the project was to recreate the 1919 Eddington experiment, which proved Einstein’s theory of relativity, but with materials that were more accessible than those Eddington used, such as a massive telescope and silvered plates. The experiment takes advantage of eclipses’ obscuring of the sun’s overpowering light to identify the effects of gravitational lensing on the stars behind the sun in comparison to those stars at night when the sun isn’t there.
One of the project’s beginnings was back in 2022 when Heather Hill and two students received a $15,000 grant from OSU to write some code to manipulate a telescope’s motors without the use of an expensive external program. They presented their work at the Oregon Space Grant Consortium Student Presentation Event.
Then, a $20,000 grant from NASA became available for the cost of this most recent trip to Leakey, Texas in the interest of modernizing the Eddington experiment for any individual or institution who wished to recreate it themselves. The code written by Hill and the students unfortunately ran too slowly to facilitate the experiment’s automation.
Hill explained the manual alternative:
“Originally they were going to do it manually, which means that we have a hand paddle which you can push an arrow left, right, up, and down and you would make it move by manually pushing a button. And the thing is, that’s imprecise because we wanted to get 10 degrees to the right side of the sun and the left side of the sun, so it’s not very reproducible or accurate. So it’s actually better to automate it because then we just tell the computer program to tell the telescope ‘Go to this point, go to this point, go to this point.’”
Kenneth Carrell, a professor from Angelo State University in Texas and a collaborator since 2023, suggested they change plans. He had written some Python code that two students had 24 hours to update in order to fit LBCC’s plan. Hill had actually avoided telling the students about his option herself to avoid stressing out the students.
“We didn’t know if it was going to work, I mean … it was going to work, I don’t know! You know, when you change things 24 hours ahead of time that’s not a good idea,” Hill said.
LBCC physics instructor Greg Mulder seconded these feelings:
“We had for the past many weeks to have a person manually follow the sun. We decided to create hardware and software that would allow the telescope to automatically follow the sun and you know the last 24 hours toward the eclipse the group decided to automate and that’s a pretty risky move to change what you’re going to do at the last minute, but in this case it turned out it worked out.”
Unfortunately, while the last-minute change to full automation went smoothly, the weather in Leakey, Texas was not ideal for the experiment. Weather patterns guided where they decided to have the experiment and unfortunately reality went exactly the opposite as expected with clear skies in the Northeast and clouds in the Southwest.
Before the eclipse there was a lot of anxiety about what the weather would be like in the critical moment. Hill explained, “Leading the few days before the eclipse the night skies were beautifully clear, you could see for days, it was dark because we were in the middle of nowhere,but the day the eclipse happened, it was cloudy. It was pretty bad.”
“It wasn’t a complete fail but it was definitely disappointing. We had two teams collecting data, one team was collecting data from light polarization data and their data didn’t rely on there being clear skies. So, they got good data. The other team was using the telescope and was trying to look for stars from the gravitational lensing. I honestly haven’t looked at it because I’m too afraid.”
Thankfully, Mulder said teams were collecting gravitational lensing data in Ohio and Mexico that can act as a backup for data that was unable to be collected in Texas due to bad weather.
Despite the less-than-ideal conditions, the students were not only able to practice working in the field but also had fun swimming in the river, eating barbeque, and watching “The Lord of the Rings.”
Looking to the future, plans are in the works for trips to northern Spain in 2026 and Egypt in 2027 to repeat the experiment and hopefully finish some code without the use of outside software.
At a Glance:
What: LBCC Eclipse Team’s Trip
When: April 5-9
Where: Leakey, Texas
For More Information: Heather Hill at hillh@linnbenton.edu or Greg Mulder at mulderg@linnbenton.edu
