Total Solar Eclipse To Be Webcast Live

The Exploratorium said Monday it will produce a live telecast March 29 of a solar eclipse from several locations along the path of totality. The first darkening will occur on the western shore of Brazil, and then will move across the Atlantic Ocean to make landfall in Ghana. It will continue northeast through Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Libya, Egypt, across the Mediterranean and into Turkey.

Exploratorium team members Fred Espenak - also known as "Mr. Eclipse" - and physicist Kennedy Reed of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be stationed in Libya and Ghana, respectively, to provide commentary on the event. A third team will telecast from a 2nd-century outdoor Roman theater in Side, Turkey.

This marks the fourth time an Exploratorium team has traveled along the path of totality to televise the event live via satellite and the Web.

The live Webcast will begin at 2:00 a.m. Pacific Time, and the eclipse will reach totality at 2:55 a.m. Highlights include live views of the eclipse in both white light and with an H-Alpha filter, which examines the Sun in the hydrogen portion of the spectrum in order to see more surface details.

NASA also will provide eclipse images from its Solar Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, satellite, which carries 12 sun-gazing instruments.

The eclipse TV programming will be broadcast to community centers, NASA learning centers, and museums in the United States, Mexico, Egypt and Europe via satellite and Internet-2. The Webcast will be at up to 512 kbps to an anticipated live Internet audience of 100,000, and then archived on the Exploratorium Web site.

Copyright 2006 by Space Daily, Distributed United Press International

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