The total solar eclipse will be a scientific opportunity. NASA is leading a National Eclipse Ballooning Project which will include two SUNY schools. One of those schools is SUNY Oswego, where two students from the school will participate in the eclipse research.

For some students, this isn’t their first rodeo releasing weather balloons during an eclipse. A small group traveled to New Mexico in of the fall of 2023 to study the annular eclipse. For the upcoming total solar eclipse, the students will launch weather balloons in their own backyard.

What You Need To Know

  • NASA is leading a National Eclipse Ballooning Project, which will include two SUNY schools

  • SUNY Oswego and SUNY Albany are two of 55 groups across the country conducting weather balloon research on April 8

  • There’s a team with the project, working to educate school aged students, and spread awareness of the April 8 eclipse

“Along the path, we expect to see these oscillations in air motion due to the eclipse. So again, a once in a lifetime opportunity for NASA to collect this data that will be supported by the balloons that we are launching every hour,” said Dr. Katelyn Barber, an assistant professor at SUNY Oswego.

Every hour, for 30 hours, students will be releasing a weather balloon to collect data about the atmosphere surrounding the total solar eclipse.

“It's gonna be interesting to see, you know, what we get for observations at the surface what we get for observations throughout the different levels of the atmosphere before during, and after the Eclipse,” said Bradley Jacobs, a meteorology major at SUNY Oswego. “We have backup setups, so that if one of our launches fail, we have another one kind of ready to go. We can get up like 5, 10 minutes or so should we need to get another one up.”

SUNY Oswego and SUNY Albany are two of 55 groups across the country conducting weather balloon research on April 8.

“As part of this process I get to learn about like how the actual thing is happening like so, like how the eclipse is actually affecting the atmosphere and also like that how the temperature how the pressure how the humidity is getting affected,” said Shaheen Chowdhury, physics major, SUNY Oswego.

Students expect research findings to be vastly different in all 55 locations.

“We can compare as a project as a whole with how the other 54 teams did throughout their locations with various elevations, various climates. We're doing this right on one of the Great Lakes, so it's probably gonna be vastly different than what Watertown is going to get on the eastern portion of the lake,” said Jacobs. “A once in a lifetime opportunity, especially for Upstate New York. We're hoping for the best of weather.”

“It's gonna be a very very exciting event considering this hasn’t happened in such a very long time. And we’re lucky enough to have it happen right over Oswego. A lot of people are going to come from long distances and its going to be, I think it's going to be a little bit of an emotional in a good way an emotional event to be seen,” said Aurora Fitzgerald, broadcasting and mass communication major, SUNY Oswego.

Anyone can experience the science of the phenomenon.

“The eclipse is a citizen science event, meaning anyone can participate. Any observations that you collect, how the temperature seems to drop across your skin because, again, that lack of solar radiation, listening how the birds respond, how bees respond, things that everyone can actually take observations of,” said Barber.