Eclipse Tracking
Tracking an Eclipse in Holmestrand, Norway
By Erik Duhs Nilsen
PASCO's representative in Norway was able to use PASPORT to document a solar eclipse, and then share a DataStudio workbook of the eclipse with all of Norway's secondary school students.
NORWAY -- Early in the morning of May 31, 2003, Norway experienced the greatest
solar eclipse since 1954. Taking into account uncertain prospects for weather in
Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Inslands, Norway was probably the best area in
the world to witness this eclipse.
The whole family, including my wife Mette,
my daughter Eline (18) and her boyfriend Anders (19) were prepared to set the
alarm clock at 0430 Saturday morning to watch the eclipse.
Since I am the
PASCO representative in Norway, I always carry a bag of PASPORT equipment with
me. We discussed the possibility to set up the equipment and collect some data
with Eline and Anders (they are both science students). We choose two sensors:
light and temperature. They were both connected to a laptop and a DataStudio
file was created. No calibration was done, and the sample period was set to 1
every 30 seconds.
Everybody was very excited when the eclipse reached the maximum. To watch the
light and temperature drop in a graph, live as it happened, added extra
excitement, especially because we knew that the max would be reached at 0541,
and we could actually see that it was correct by watching the graph starting to
incline again after that datapoint.
We also tried to take pictures of the
eclipse, but that was not 
easy, so instead we found some good ones on the web,
and used them as illustrations in the workbook that was created later that
day.
Monday morning the workbook was e-mailed to all the secondary schools in
Norway using PASCO datalogging equipment. A fantastic event was documented with
more than just pictures, and ready to be discussed and analyzed by teachers and
students around the country!
