While the eclipse will only be partially visible in Louisville, it can be experienced in its totality in a band about 100 miles wide from Mexico to Newfoundland, including most of southern Indiana like Paoli and Seymour, less than an hour away.Ěý

“This will be so close to us in Louisville,” said Gerard Williger, professor of physics and astronomy, who is teaching the class. “Those who experience a total solar eclipse will remember it forever. It’s completely different from a partial eclipse: The temperature drops, birds go quiet, the wind dies down and a few bright stars and planets become visible.”

is entirely online and worth one college credit. The next time a total solar eclipse will occur this close to Louisville will be on Oct. 17, 2153.

“The course is unusual in that it does not fulfill a degree requirement, but rather is a free elective, like a golf or tennis class,” Williger said. “The goal is to inform people about this once-in-a-lifetime eclipse, and is not meant to take much time.”

“Special Topics: The Great North American Eclipse of 2024,” begins Jan. 8, 2024. The eclipse will be April 8, and the final class April 15. Lectures will be recorded for flexible viewing.

Visit theĚýĚýfor information on pricing and how to enroll. UofL employees may use their tuition remission benefit for the class.

Topics include the sun and the solar system; eclipses in art, literature, folklore, film, music and television; the celestial sphere and exoplanets.

Cities outside theĚý, like Louisville, will experience a partial solar eclipse and see a crescent-shaped sun.Ěý

°Őłó±đĚýĚýis gearing up for crowds for the event and is offering five free viewing sites for eclipse-watchers. A festival is planned for the day before.ĚýĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚý, also within driving distance from Louisville, are planning for eclipse tourists.

For further information, contact Williger atĚýgwilliger@louisville.eduĚýor (502) 852-0821.Ěý

A machinery monitoring technology startup backed by University of Louisville astrophysics research and founded by a UofL alumnus has been acquired.

Gerard Williger and two colleagues at the at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), in Preston, England, presented the research last month at a virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.Ěý

Williger, a fellow at the institute, is a co-advisor with UCLan’s Roger Clowes to UCLan PhD student Alexia Lopez. They are investigating Lopez’s discovery of an arc of galaxies in distant space they have named the Giant Arc.Ěý

Spanning 3.3 billion light years, the Giant Arc might be an indicator that scientists need to expand the size of what is considered a representative segment of all of space in the . This guiding principle holds that one portion of the cosmos is effectively the same as the rest, so findings from that segment apply to all of space.

“The Cosmological Principle tells us one part of the universe is pretty much the same as another part of the universe,” Williger said. “The Giant Arc is three times bigger than anything we’ve seen before. So maybe that principle has to have its size upgraded. How big is big enough to say this is an average piece of the universe?”

An published June 10 in Science News quoted Lopez as saying the discovery, if true, adds to a growing body of similar research that “would overturn cosmology as we know it.”

The arc was discovered by analyzing data from the .Ěý

The UofL is part of the ground-based team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) program, which launched in spring 2018 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.Ěý

The mission is to identify Earth-like planets revolving around nearby stars, with the UofL team helping verify results and figuring out the characteristics of the discovered planets.

The program has identified 20-some planets in its first year. AccordingĚý, citing a study in that includes a “rocky super-Earth” and two “sub-Neptunes.”

These three help fill inĚýour understanding of how planets form, the article said, because they’re somewhere in between planets like Earth — rocky and small — andĚýNeptune — gaseous and big.

“There’s kind of a gap in examples between these two,” saidĚýDr. John Kielkopf, a professor of physics and astronomy at UofL and member of the TESS team.

The TESS satellite will search about 85 percent of the sky for planets over two years. The images will be somewhat low-resolution and cover huge sections of sky, so there will be some blending of stars with one another.Ěý

The data and management for the TESS program are led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The ground-based partners, including UofL and its Moore Observatory, in Crestwood, Kentucky, will help check the information collected by the satellite, and expand on it.

“The data come back to us, and we analyze it to measure the transit events precisely, or in some cases to show that the event does not happen, or is mimicked by some other event,” Kielkopf said.Ěý“Our measurements improve on the precision of the satellite, and are used to find the radius of the planets and the exact times at which they pass in front of the star.Ěý

Dr. Karen Collins, who is leading the TESS follow-up program through Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, helped develop the software behind this research as part of her doctoral studies in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UofL. The software she developed is now widely used for studying planet candidates identified by the Kepler satellite and for TESS followup.

In addition to UofL’s Moore Observatory, university researchers and students will work with UofL’s telescopes at the Mt. Lemmon (Arizona) and Mt. Kent (Australia) observatories. The telescopes will use photometry and spectroscopy to measure the brightness of the star and speed of the planet’s orbit, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland.

.Ěý

Apollo 11’s mission 50 years ago remains a defining moment in human history and kick started a robust pipeline of space exploration well beyond the moon. Many UofL Cardinals have been on the front lines of that exploration.

Louisville is just over 600 miles from NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, and 900 miles from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but the university is closely tied to numerous space-based research projects nonetheless. It of course helps that we have a Department of Physics and Astronomy filled with ambitious researchers like Benne Holwerda, who recently won time with the famous Hubble Space Telescope for research – a coveted award for those chasing the biggest questions posed by the universe.

Holwerda is using this opportunity to dive into three research projects that study the role of dust in the energy of two small galaxies.

His work is simply the tip of the iceberg of UofL’s space research. There’s also the work of Dr. Timothy Dowling, director of the atmospheric science program. Dowling, the only planetary scientist in Kentucky, has researched the length of a day on Saturn – a question that has stumped scientists for hundreds of years. Using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to measure waves in the atmosphere, Dowling and his team came up with 10 hours and 34 minutes. Another group of NASA researchers recently confirmed the accuracy of that timeframe.

“To have that confirmed is icing on the cake,” Dowling .

Dowling has also served as a researcher for the NASA Voyager II mission that photographed and mapped the surface of Uranus, and is the lead architect for theĚýĚýused by NASA and researchers around the world to model the weather on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Ěý

Currently, he is currently working on a new project involving Mars. As part of this research, Dowling received $2 million in (non-UofL-related) grants over 30 years to study planetary atmospheric dynamics. His latest research explores cubesats to monitor weather and forecasting on Mars to support the future boots-on-the-ground astronauts to the planet.

“The field of operational forecasting for Mars is just emerging, and will grow as we get closer to putting astronauts on the surface. This is all just in the early planning stages,” Dowling said.

Speaking of the forecast, Dowling’s colleague, , is working with Clemson atmospheric physics professor Jens Oberheide on a NASA-funded project to better predict the weather in space. The research is important, according to Du-Caines, to more clearly predict when storms or bad weather above the earth’s atmosphere might impact GPS, power grids, suborbital flights or satellites.

Gerry Williger, associate professor of physics and astronomy, has been on sabbatical for the past year conducting research at Konkoly Observatory in Budapest Hungary. His work is supported by a Fulbright Research Fellowship and examines the formation of stars in a distant galaxy.

Also, the University of Louisville joined a ground-based team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) program last year. The goal is to identify 50 Earth-like planets revolving around nearby stars.

The satellite will search about 85 percent of the sky for planets over two years. The images will be somewhat low-resolution and cover huge sections of sky, so there will be some blurring of stars.

“There will be millions of stars observed by TESS,” said Dr. John Kielkopf, professor of Physics and Astronomy. “It will be a matter of which ones have planets that we can detect.”

The ground-based partners include University of Southern Queensland in the Southern hemisphere, and in the Northern hemisphere, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and .

Students and alums shoot for the stars

Faculty aren’t the only Cardinals shooting for the stars. at UofL studying gravitational lensing around galaxies. She is working on a two-year grant from NASA Kentucky alongside two co-principle investigators at UofL – Kielkopf and Holwerda. She also has support from Dr. Lou Strolger, who works for the NASA-related agency called Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

“By observing the gravitational lensing phenomenon, we can make significant progress on the hunt for dark matter, and improve our understanding on the formation of galaxies like our own,” she said.ĚýĚý

, a double major in Physics and Atmospheric Science, landed an internship at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, last summer. There she worked with the TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) Student Collaboration analyzing and calibrating data for the TEMPO satellite.

Carrico has also been selected for the NASA Pathways program through NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. This will allow her to complete three internship rotations with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, with the possibility of transitioning directly to employment with NASA upon graduation. Her internships will take her into different areas of the work taking place at the Center, increasing the breadth of her training.Ěý

“The Pathways spot still feels very surreal to me. It is something that I have worked very hard for and I am really excited for the opportunity,” said Carrico. “I was always interested in NASA and saw it as a place where there was no limit to what I could do or explore. After my first year at UofL, I started to research NASA internships more because it seemed like a great way for me to gain valuable experience and explore new areas of my studies.”

UofL’s proximity to space extends beyond NASA’s public sector work and into Elon Musk’s much-publicized SpaceX private sector work. Last year, alum Austin Marshall, 12S, 13GS, was part of the SpaceX team that launched Falcon Heavy — and Musk’s Tesla — into space.

Marshall, who graduated from the J.B. Speed School of Engineering with an industrial engineering degree, is the mate­rial flow planner for SpaceX. His job is essentially logistics, making sure all the parts and pieces needed to build the rockets are right where they should be, when they should be there.

“Right now building a rocket takes a long time,” Marshall said. “SpaceX wants to make it a really quick process, like an assembly line. … Our number one goal for the year is to put people in space.”

UofL’s space odysseys are certainly nothing new. The “To boldly go …” cover of UofL Magazine in the summer of 2004 highlighted UofL’s space work, noting that UofL scientists have been working with NASA for decades. That was the same year Kentucky and NASA established a partnership to develop new technologies to help bolster the moon/Mars initiative.

Celebrating Apollo 11

We’d be remiss with all this space talk if we didn’t mention the christened on the northwest corner of the Belknap campus in 2001. The original Rauch Memorial Planetarium opened in 1962 and served the community for 36 years until it was razed in 1998.

The Gheens Science Hall & Rauch Planetarium will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing with free screenings of “Apollo 11” July 20. The documentary will be shown at 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. No reservations are needed.

, a Hite Art Institute professor, is creating “,” a “collaborative, experimental exhibition that examines the meeting point between photography, landscape and astronomy.”

Carothers has pulled a team of 17 photographers together to shoot the eclipse, with at least one in each of the 12 states in which the eclipse passes with totality. They’ll use a new technique called slow scan photography, which captures reality in a slow scanning motion across a scene, offering a new twist on the traditional long exposure. The culminating images of the eclipse willĚýbe made of nearly 4,000 to 5,000 photographs.

The “Overshadowed” images will be on display at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts, 100 E. Main St., Sept.Ěý22 through Oct. 28.

The opening reception for the show, which is part of the , is 5-6 p.m. Oct. 6 during the First Friday Gallery Hop.

Carothers co-created the project with British photographer , a pioneer of the slow scan technique. As a UofL Liberal Studies visiting scholar, he’ll give a talk titled “Space, Place and Time,” from 4-5 p.m. Oct. 2 in the Chao Auditorium of Ekstrom Library. The lecture will overview his 30 years of experimenting with photography and video and will include work on the total solar eclipse and the aurora borealis.Ěý

On Monday, Carothers and McClave will be in South Carolina to shoot the eclipse as it departsĚýAmerican soil and heads out over the Atlantic Ocean.

Others from UofL are involved in “Overshadowed” as well:

• Photography professor Mitch Eckert and incoming MFA photography candidate Zed Saeed will cover different locations in Kentucky.
• UofLĚýAstronomy Professor Benne Holwerda, who is the resident astronomer at Kentucky Dam, will contributeĚýfrom that location.
• John Jaynes, UofL’sĚýAssistant Director of Sponsored Program Development and an astronomy and photography buff,Ěýwill shoot from a pontoon in the Land Between the Lakes.
• Several Hite photo alumni will be stationed in other states: Kelsi Wermuth in Oregon, Mary Yates in Illinois, Laura Arrot Hartford in Tennessee and Jimmy Devore in North Carolina.

“For me, this is like a grand performance,” Carothers said. “Each photographer will soonĚýbeĚýconnected byĚýforcesĚýmuch greater than time and landscape. I do have at least oneĚýphotographer positioned in every eclipse state …Ěýbut when it comes to thinking about this rareĚýoccurrence,Ěýstate lines are merelyĚýman made boundaries.”

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