During the dawn of Wednesday, November 14, a spectacular solar eclipse will begin in Australia, which implies that the Moon will move between the Sun and the Earth at a distance and with an alignment that will make “our satellite appear large enough to temporarily block the star’s light “, as described by the European Space Agency (ESA), which thanks to its solar observation satellite Proba-2 will contemplate the show from” a front row seat from its orbit around the Earth ” .
Theeclipse totality– when the Sun is completely dark – will take place tomorrow at 22:11:48 GMT over the South Pacific for four minutes and two seconds. During the whole,the Sun appears to have a white halo, which is nothing more than a fleeting and strange vision of the plasma atmosphere, the corona, which reaches millions of degrees of temperature. In fact, astronomers take advantage of these eclipses to study in detail the corona, which launches torrents of plasma into space, along with solar prominences seen very close to the end of the solar disk.
During tomorrow’s astronomical event, Proba-2 will cross the Moon’s shadow several times, obtaining three partial solar eclipses and their orbits around the Earth. At the time of the total eclipse seen from Australia, however, Proba-2 will see the entire solar disk, offering an ideal opportunity to compare the solar corona as seen from the ground with observations of the Sun from space. The SWAP instrument installed on the satellite will monitor the Sun in ultraviolet light, while the LYRA instrument will measure the energy emitted by the Sun, which will be less intense as the star gets darker.
