Simulator to show Americans total solar eclipse 2017

Source: Xinhua| 2017-06-13 06:38:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan
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SAN FRANCISCO, June 12 (Xinhua) -- A simulator from the Eclipse Megamovie Project, a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and Google Inc, was introduced Monday to show Americans what the total solar eclipse in late summer will look like from where they live.

The August 21 total solar eclipse is believed to be one of the most anticipated events in a lifetime.

People in the United States will be able to enter the zipcode or name of their city or town on the project's Internet website and see an animation of how the sun will move across the sky over a three-hour period, sped up 1,000 or 4,000 times and centered on the time of totality, and how much of a bite will be taken out of the sun by the eclipsing moon.

A click will reveal a map of where the visitor lies relative to the path of totality, which will stretch across 11 states in the United States in a band at most 72 miles, or about 115 kilometers, wide. And if the visitor's city is inside the path of totality, the simulator shows the eerily darkening sky that eclipse fanatics travel around the world to experience.

"There are lots of online animations of the 2017 eclipse, but you can't customize them from your city or zipcode like ours," Dan Zevin, who is with the Multiverse project at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, was quoted as saying in a news release. "Our simulation is what one might experience in a planetarium show."

In February, UC Berkeley and Google announced that they were looking for amateur astronomers and photographers to document and memorialize the August 21 total solar eclipse under the Eclipse Megamovie Project. They called for more than a thousand citizen scientists to upload their photos of the solar eclipse to be stitched together into a "megamovie" documenting the path of totality from landfall in Oregon, in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, until the moon's shadow slips over the Atlantic Ocean off South Carolina in the U.S. east coast.

As no one on the ground will see the total eclipse for more than 2 minutes and 40 seconds, depending on how close they are to the center of the path of totality, the images collected by the Megamovie's volunteer team are supposed to be turned into a 90-minute eclipse movie. Their uploads are expected to be about a gigabyte per person, with thousands of people contributing, which adds up to terabytes of data.

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