Total solar eclipse 2017: Salem, Oregon

This is the tenth article Seattle Astronomy has done to preview possible places from which to view the total solar eclipse that will cross the United States next August 21. We’ve talked with folks from Madras, Oregon to Columbia, South Carolina and points in between. It’s time to look at the closest viewpoint for Seattle eclipse chasers: The Salem Fairgrounds in Salem, Oregon are just 219 miles from Seattle Astronomy world headquarters, and will be the site of an eclipse viewing party headed by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI.)

Good viewing in Oregon

“Oregon is really advertised as the best place to view the eclipse, and we’re expecting ten million visitors to come down to Oregon for that one-day event,” said Jim Todd, director of space science education at OMSI. “Oregon needs to be ready.”

That latter is something of an understatement. Todd says they expect about ten thousand people to attend the OMSI-sponsored party at the fairgrounds, an event that has support from Rose City Astronomers in Portland, the Oregon Observatory, and NASA, among others. The party will feature science lectures, astronomy-related community groups, and entertainment, including a performance by the Portland Taiko drum ensemble.

Salem is a bit north of the center line of totality, which crosses I-5 about halfway between Oregon’s capitol city and Albany. But the total eclipse will last nearly two minutes at the fairgrounds, and Todd said there will be numerous other viewing points in and near the city, including at Willamette University and Volcano Stadium in Keiser, where the Salem-Keiser Volcanoes baseball team, a class-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants, are planning a Monday morning baseball game for next August 21 that may feature the first “eclipse delay” in the history of organized ball.

“It goes without saying: we can’t do this alone,” Todd said. “We just have to educate the public and make sure they understand what’s involved with the eclipse.”

Western Oregon eclipse map courtesy GreatAmerican Eclipse.com.

They’re doing that through planetarium shows, workshops, and social media to get the word out, especially about about safe viewing of the eclipse during its partial phase. They’ve also been in touch with government officials from the Oregon governor’s office on down to make sure they’re thinking ahead for eclipse day. With huge crowds expected, things could get chaotic, especially if there are clouds around and people have to scramble to find a clear sky for the moment of the eclipse.

“It will likely be hot, it will likely be crazy as far as traffic jams. Airports, hotels, you name it,” Todd warns. “It’s going to be a crazy day. It’s going to be one of those days people are going to remember where they were on that very day when they were looking for the eclipse.”

Rural options

Todd also serves as a co-director of the annual Oregon Star Party, which has set its 2017 event for the days before, of, and after the eclipse.

“We plan to do viewing from Indian Trail Spring in the Ochoco Mountains,” he noted. The site is somewhat south of the center line of the path of totality, and will enjoy about a minute and 27 seconds of total solar eclipse.

One concern about eclipse day is that many people will simply head for similar remote areas and gridlock roads there.

Jim Todd. Photo: LinkedIn.

Todd has seen one other total solar eclipse, that back in 1979. He was a senior in high school and had to wrangle his way around official authority to do it.

“My science teacher was going to keep the class inside,” he recalls with a laugh. He got permission to head to Goldendale, Washington with another family, where they escaped cloudy Portland skies—it was February—and saw the eclipse. Next year may be a bit easier.

“Fortunately for us [the eclipse is] going to be in August, when we have a great chance of clear skies,” Todd noted.

The job fits

Todd is a true space nut. Like many of us, his interest was cemented when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon. He taught himself space science and astronomy, then took an internship at OMSI. He never left; he’s been there 33 years.

“It’s been my way of getting close to NASA by getting close to all of the astronomical events,” he said. “It’s one of the very few jobs where the hobby has actually become the job. I was able to combine my passion with astronomy and space science with the teaching and computers and so on. It was a perfect fit.”

Portland is an astronomy city. Rose City Astronomers is one of the biggest clubs in the country. Proximity to pretty good dark, transparent skies may be one reason for that.

“Portland has a science-minded audience and they love these kind of events,” Todd said. “We like to think, too, that OMSI had a role in that.”

Tickets to the eclipse party at Salem Fairgrounds are $8 and are available now through the OMSI website.

Astronomy reduced to pixel archive science

A University of Oregon professor of physics frets that astronomy is drowning in data that threatens to reduce it to a “pixel archive science.” His solution is something right out of Star Trek.

Dr. Gregory Bothun made a presentation titled, “Big Data, Discovery, and a New Kind of Astronomy: Are We Prepared?” at the February meeting of the Rose City Astronomers at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. Bothun noted that efforts such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey provide the stuff of discovery.

Prof. Gregory Bothun of the University of
Oregon spoke about astronomy’s challenges
with big data to a meeting Feb. 15
of the Rose City Astronomers in Portland.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“The great thing about surveys is that they produce a catalog of calibrated sources which serve the community on a worldwide basis and involve more people in astronomy,” he said, adding that, for this reason, surveys should come before more targeted observations of individual objects.

“We’ve done it the other way around, mostly because of some kind of fetish with large-aperture glass,” Bothun said. “We have spent far more money building large telescopes than we have on building real, useful surveys that serve the community.”

Bothun pointed out that sometimes a big telescope will do a survey, such as Hubble’s ultra-deep-field work, and this leads to tremendous advances.

“Every time an instrument does a calibrated survey, science moves forward much more rapidly than some individual working with some piece of aperture doing a follow-up observation,” Bothun said.

A pipeline problem

While Sloan was useful, Bothun said, it also illuminated a problem. It took eight years to get the survey’s 20 terabytes of data into the hands of scientists.

“We’re not good at pipeline processing of survey data in a timely manner to feed a community,” Bothun said. “We shouldn’t have to wait eight years to go from acquired pixels to reduced data to analysis. It should just happen instantly. To the extent that it doesn’t is the extent that we’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot and turn astronomy into a science that archives pixels.”

The problem is about to get more challenging. A coalition of institutions is building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile. The LSST camera will have 3.2 billion pixels, and at 16 bits per pixel, each image it captures will be a whopping 6.4 gigabytes.

“Try to take a selfie of that and send it to your mom over wifi,” Bothun quipped. The challenge, though, is no laughing matter. It’s difficult to move that much data around, and it’s hard to look at it, too.

What you see is not all you get

“Every pixel in astronomy has a source in it. We need to see every pixel. We’re nowhere close to that,” Bothun said. A short-term answer may be visualization walls, commonly called viz walls. These are banks of high-definition monitors that scientists could use to display and manipulate vast amounts of data in one place. This would be perfect for looking at such large, high-resolution images. If you’re seeing a scaled-down version of a photo, Bothun said, the really interesting stuff may simply get averaged out. In addition, it’s better to look at a entire image at native resolution. This will take some training of our brains, but they’re capable.

“Your brain is a great visualizing machine. It’s a great parallel processing machine,” Bothun said. He said if it wasn’t we couldn’t drive on I-5. Think about how it would be if you tried to consciously track the speed and location of every other vehicle around you on the freeway. It’s not possible.
“Your brain does this automatically,” Bothun said. “It’s about time we we started to do data analysis in a forum that matches your brain’s algorithm.”

This would allow us “to take on extremely challenging problems, which is what leads to discovery in science,” he added.

Star Trek to the rescue

Viz walls may not be enough when it comes to the data from LSST. Its ten-year survey of the universe will generate a mind-boggling 60 petabytes of information. To meet the challenge, Bothun’s office is working on advanced visualization tools, a sort of three-dimensional viz cloud.

“It could be the holodeck,” Bothun said in reference to the virtual reality facility in Star Trek. “That’s how you should think of this.”

In this viz cloud trained humans could look at data in real time, and quickly sort out and discard what isn’t useful. After all, Bothun noted, the scientifically interesting data is usually just a tiny fraction of what is collected, and there’s no good reason to be pack rats with the rest.

“If all we’re going to do is take the raw data set and write it to disk, this is not a useful instrument,” he said of the LSST. “We have to do business differently if we want to optimize discovery.”

Big data is here, and visualization of this sort will help astronomers, but it will go beyond that; It can help in fields from finance and business to medicine, climate change, and counter-terrorism. To make effective use of the information available will require solutions to the pipeline and database challenges.

“All of this is absolutely vital for observational astronomy to continue to progress and continue to engage in discovery,” Bothun concluded.