The November 3, 1994 Total Solar Eclipse

The High Altitude Observatory’s expedition to Putre, Chile photographed the eclipse. Their beautiful image inspired us to compute an MHD model of the solar corona for Carrington Rotation 1888 (October 10 – November 6, 1994). To perform the calculation, we used photospheric magnetic field data from Wilcox Solar Observatory.

Eclipse photograph, November 3, 1994, courtesy of HAO

Eclipse image courtesy of HAO, taken at 12:18:25 UT. Heliocentric north is 24 degrees counter-clockwise of vertical. Vertical (top) is geocentric north.

Computed polarization brightness from the MHD simulation

The computed polarization brightness from an MHD simulation of Carrington rotation 1888. The view corresponds to the approximate time of the eclipse (Carrington longitude of 40 degrees) with the same orientation as the eclipse image above.

Blend of the eclipse image with a Yohkoh soft X-ray image

A blending of the eclipse image with a soft X-ray image courtesy of Yohkoh from near the time of the eclipse. Note that the bases of the helmet streamers are visible in the Yohkoh image as well.

Further eclipse-day comparison, including magnetic field lines

Further eclipse-day comparison, including magnetic field lines.

Further images and movies from Carrington rotation 1888 are available on the original CR1888 page.

Acknowledgements

The eclipse photo is courtesy of the High Altitude Observatory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, National Science Foundation. Also, a special thanks to Alice Lecinski of HAO.

The solar X-ray image is from the Yohkoh mission of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Japan. The X-ray telescope was prepared by the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and the University of Tokyo with the support of NASA and ISAS.

Archived comparison, converted from the original 1994 page.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is funded by NASA and NSF. We are grateful to Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) for providing a dedicated allocation at the LaPalma supercomputer and proud to support the North African Telescope Eclipse (NATE) project, led by IAC. We also acknowledge dedicated resources from the ACCESS program and Expanse supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). We thank NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division (NAS) for allocations on the Athena supercomputer that enabled many of the visualizations on this page to be produced rapidly in real-time. We also thank the SDO/HMI team of the Solar Physics Group at Stanford University for their support in providing timely access to HMI vector magnetograph data. Lastly, we are particularly excited to work with the Solar Orbiter PHI team, to conduct the farside assimilation experiment in near-real-time.