BBC The Sky at Night - Hiding in Starlight (2024) [Documentaries]

Research:
* = Have been modified recently

Archive:

Admin:

BBC The Sky at Night - Hiding in Starlight (2024)

Total solar eclipses, like the one seen last month in North America, allow us to see details of the Sun that can't be seen at any other time. So, this month, The Sky at Night team looks at how scientists are creating eclipses on demand and discovering the secrets that can be revealed hidden in that starlight, including habitable planets like our own.

Maggie Aderin-Pocock travels to Belgium, where the European Space Agency's Proba-3 mission is going through its final testing stages. This groundbreaking mission aims to fly two satellites together in formation, with one satellite acting like the moon during an eclipse, blocking out the central light of the Sun. This allows the other satellite to image the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere as seen during an eclipse. Maggie meets Dr Damien Galano from ESA, who tells her all about the challenges of the mission and what it hopes to achieve. Maggie then goes on to meet satellite operations test engineer Marie Beeckman, who takes her up close to the satellites to find out how the testing is going.

Meanwhile, Pete Lawrence is out and about in Bristol, meeting a team of scientists and amateur astronomers. He discovers how input from the amateurs was crucial to the discovery of two exoplanets colliding, which had caused the dimming of a star.

Finally, Chris Lintott is in Glasgow meeting Professor Beth Biller from Edinburgh University to discover why it is only by creating eclipses of distant stars that we could potentially find exoplanets more like our own.

And as ever, our resident astronomer, Pete Lawrence, guides us through what can be seen this coming month, with a particular focus on the rewards of viewing in daylight - but as always, he reminds us of the need to take care when doing this.

Wikipedia Reference

You want more information on this!…. just click. (Solar eclipse)

Snippet from Wikipedia: Solar eclipse: A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the view of the Sun from a small part of Earth, totally or partially. Such an alignment occurs approximately every six months, during the eclipse season in its new moon phase, when the Moon's orbital plane is closest to the plane of Earth's orbit. In a total eclipse, the disk of the Sun is fully obscured by the Moon. In partial and annular eclipses, only part of the Sun is obscured. Unlike a lunar eclipse, which may be viewed from anywhere on the night side of Earth, a solar eclipse can only be viewed from a relatively small area of the world. As such, although total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth every 18 months on average, they recur at any given place only once every 360 to 410 years.
If the Moon were in a perfectly circular orbit and in the same orbital plane as Earth, there would be total solar eclipses once a month, at every new moon. Instead, because the Moon's orbit is tilted at about 5 degrees to Earth's orbit, its shadow usually misses Earth. Solar (and lunar) eclipses therefore happen only during eclipse seasons, resulting in at least two, and up to five, solar eclipses each year, no more than two of which can be total. Total eclipses are rarer because they require a more precise alignment between the centers of the Sun and Moon, and because the Moon's apparent size in the sky is sometimes too small to fully cover the Sun.

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Trailer

Full Version Available Upon Request
Related Documentary

Full High Definition, Science, Astronomy, Solar Eclipse, Belgium, ESA, Exoplanet, The Sky at Night, Wikipedia (r), BBC, 2024, May 2024, Documentaries

BBC The Sky at Night - Hiding in Starlight (2024)

See Also

Wikipedia Reference

Trailer