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CAIRO — Nine-year-old budding astronomer Seth Lynch traveled to Williford, Arkansas, to view the solar eclipse with his dad Jonathan, mom Kendra, and siblings Hannah, Caleb, and Sarah, plus grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins: eighteen in all.

Lynch and astronomer Randy Rhea met when he attended a partial eclipse viewing last October at the Pebble Hill Learning Center, and have been in contact since then. Santa brought Lynch a Celestron NexStar 130SLT telescope, and Lynch has been honing his astrophotography skills. He took this photograph of the eclipse at totality while mom followed his instructions on how to track the Sun with the hand controller. Lynch’s mom wrote Rhea: “Seth got after me when I was getting behind. Words, and even pictures, cannot do justice to the beauty and majesty of the experience. The eclipse even tricked the streetlights during totality. One scientist came all the way from Taiwan to view totality.”

Notice the “cloud” around the Sun in Lynch’s photograph. At totality, the Moon covers the entire bright surface of the Sun, and the Sun’s atmosphere (corona) becomes visible. The Sun’s corona is actually much hotter than the solar surface, which is why the corona is white (white hot) rather than yellow. However, the corona is tenuous and therefore dimmer than the Sun’s surface. Coronal material is ejected by the Sun and travels millions of miles into space as it dissipates into the solar wind. It is this solar wind that pushes a comet’s tail away from the Sun. Seth’s photograph also reveals the filamentary nature of the corona.

Photographs of the total eclipse taken with cell phones show the corona. However, Lynch’s photograph also shows solar prominences. Solar prominences are large loops of plasma (atoms and electrons stripped of their bond). Prominences are anchored to the surface but loop around strong magnetic fields, rising hundreds of thousands of miles from the Sun.

Prominences rise above sunspots. Lynch’s photograph of the eclipse before totality shows sunspots. During periods of heavy solar activity, if you have keen eyes, you can see sunspots using only the safety glasses you used for the eclipse. Sunspots appear as very small speckles of black on the Sun. A telescope with a solar filter reveals larger spots in more detail, often in groups.

Before the eclipse, Rhea saw a headline “Your map of the path of totality is wrong, experts say.” This type of half-truth news prevails in media’s click-grabbing coverage of science today. The Sun is a ball of seething gas, so its exact “surface” is somewhat variable. This results in an uncertainty of a few seconds in the length of totality. Turn that idea into the “path is wrong” and media gets more clicks.

Where can you get accurate coverage of astronomy. Right here in the Times-Enterprise, of course. Or ask Lynch.

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