Notes

Cheat 1

Sure, here's a simpler explanation:

Don Liebenberg was on a plane called the Concorde, flying over the Sahara Desert in Africa. From way up high, at 58,000 feet, the passengers could see the Earth's curve. Instead of looking up to see the solar eclipse, they looked at a ring of light on a piece of paper.

On June 30, 1973, Liebenberg and six others saw the longest solar eclipse from a plane for 74 minutes. The Concorde was fast enough to keep up with the darkest part of the eclipse's shadow.

They had cameras on the plane that took really clear pictures of the sun's outer layer, called the corona. Studying this helps us learn how the sun sends out heat and energy. Sometimes, the sun sends out lots of tiny particles that can mess with satellites and our power supply on Earth.

Liebenberg, who is now a teacher, said they needed a really fast plane for this research. The flight became quite famous, and the plane is now in a museum in France. But the flight didn't really change what we know about the sun.

Kevin Leardon, who knows a lot about eclipses, thinks the flight was a big deal but didn't really help much. Jenna Samra, who wants to do a similar flight, thinks it still taught us important stuff.

Since 1925, people have used planes to look at eclipses because it's hard to see them clearly from the ground. They've also used rockets and balloons.

In the 1960s, new jets could fly super fast, and Liebenberg was excited to use them to study the sun. He first thought about using a jet from the US Air Force but ended up using the Concorde. The first Concorde flew in 1969, and later, Liebenberg got to use it for his eclipse research.

Liebenberg got ready for the flight in France, and they put special equipment on the Concorde. They wanted to study what the sun does during an eclipse. The Concorde took off from the Canary Islands and followed the eclipse's shadow over Africa, taking a few pictures of the sun's outer layer.

The team got the first pictures that showed a pattern in the sun's light. The flight was in the news everywhere, but they didn't find out anything really new. They didn't look at a lot of the data because it was too expensive to change it into a digital form.

The Concorde was amazing back then but got too costly and had some safety issues. It stopped flying in 2003, and there hasn't been another plane like it.

Nowadays, chasing eclipses is even more high-tech. Samra, a scientist, is planning to chase an eclipse with a new, advanced plane. She's inspired by the 1973 mission but hopes to find out new things. She wants to see how the sun's magnetic field changes signals, which could help us predict solar events before they happen.

There are many ways to study the sun's corona now, but we still need better pictures to see unique details. Samra tested a special device in 2021 and plans to use it during the 2024 eclipse to study the sun's magnetic field with a special kind of red light. This might help us watch the sun better and maybe even warn us about solar events sooner.

Samra is excited about her upcoming flight during the eclipse. Liebenberg, who has seen a lot in astronomy, is also interested in these new studies, remembering his own special eclipse flight from a long time ago.