![]() “It’s existence has been known for some time,” she explains, “but nobody had observed and photographed it because it’s near the end of the visible spectrum-borderline infrared-and the technology wasn’t available.” In her study of the sun’s elements, Habbal has investigated several spectral lines of iron. “We couldn’t take a shower during the day because the water was literally boiling,” she says. “We never went there at night because we didn’t know what would be lurking,” she adds.ĭuring the Syria 1999 eclipse at ʻAyn Dīwār, a village at the border with Turkey and Iraq, the temperature reached 120☏ on the concrete roof of a government building where Habbal’s team had set up their tents and equipment. We called it the toilet with a view,” Habbal says, laughing. “There weren’t enough tarps, so our pit toilets were open on the side facing the savannah. The eclipse site was on the banks of a river filled with hippos, so guides constructed showers using inverted buckets filled with river water. When they reached a checkpoint and opened a window for the guard, a swarm of tsetse flies flew into the jeep. On the way to the Zambia, Africa, site in 2001, at the end of the rainy season, Habbal’s party drove for eight hours through Kafue National Park on a road filled with deep, muddy potholes. She’s grateful for the animals’ excellent hearing-just five yards from the group, the rhinos stopped and turned around when the guide tapped on the wooden handle of his rifle. I thought that was the end of us,” she exclaims. Habbal flirted with danger in South Africa when three rhinos charged her walking party. In India, however, the 42-second event was spectacular, says Habbal, “with streamers seemingly shooting out to infinity.” A snowstorm obliterated any chance of seeing the eclipse. “The clouds parted just minutes before the eclipse,” she says, relieved, “and conditions were perfect during totality.” In China, a taxi collided with her bus, the team was left without food for 24 hours, and driving rain threatened to sink the scientific undertaking. Working in diverse locations, Habbal has learned to expect surprises. “We pitched our sleeping tents on the sand,” says Habbal, “but the cooks pitched their tent on two aluminum bed frames raised above the sand-because they knew there were scorpions.” The sensitive equipment was set up in a tent with a portable AC unit and a large window flap that could be opened for viewing. In 2008 that requirement took Habbal, her team and their 800 pounds of specialized cameras, telescopes and other equipment to China’s Gobi Desert. To see the corona, viewers must be within this band. Each creates a shadow band barely a few hundred kilometers wide across Earth’s surface. Total solar eclipses occur every year and a half. “It protects us but can get pushed around by a gust of wind, exposing us to rain, or in this case, to energetic particles in the solar wind that zap instrumentation and disrupt communications.” “Our magnetic field is like an umbrella,” Habbal explains. These ionized elements fly off into space on the solar wind, a phenomenon that affects astronauts, space stations and shuttles, communication satellites and even the earth’s magnetic field. The intense heat strips elements of their electrons, ionizing them. For reasons scientists have not yet discovered, the corona is much hotter than the sun’s disk, reaching temperatures of a million-plus degrees. ![]() She and her team travel to remote parts of the planet to study the sun’s corona-its outer atmosphere, which is only visible on Earth when the moon blocks 100 percent of the sun’s light. That’s because Habbal, a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa astronomer, conducts her research during the brief span of a total solar eclipse. In all of 2008 she had just one minute and forty-nine seconds to complete her field experiments. The clock ticks quickly for the Institute for Astronomy’s Shadia Habbal. A 2006 expedition takes eclipse watchers to Libya’s WawAnNamous, or Valley of the Mosquitos
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