City youngsters all set for China trip to study solar eclipse

Srinivas Laxman | TNN

Mumbai: Ten star-crazed Mumbai youngsters, five of them physics and computer science students of Mumbai university, are all set for a trip to China where they will study the solar eclipse on July 22.

All of these “spaced-out’’ youths will study the sun under the banner of Helios Astronomy Group, a seven-year-old organisation. Chintamani Pai, a member of the group, told TOI that the focus of their research would be to study the solar corona and the “flash spectrum’’. The minimum cost of the project has been pegged at Rs 8 lakh.

The students will use equipment from the Western Regional Instrumentation Centre located on the university’s Kalina campus. Pai said the group had been divided into three units. The first will conduct the experiments, the second will provide computer and electronics support—that is handle data and deal with image-processing and trouble-shooting—and the third will handle the logistics. “Through our reserach, we hope tolearn more about the sun’s characterestics, solar flares and solar corona,’’ Pai said. Team leader Jatin Rathod said the group would study the eclipse from Wuhan, about 400 km west of Shanghai. “We have chose a remote place like Wuhan as there will be a few people and that way, we will be able to concentrate on work,’’ he said.

If the team is unable to make it to China, it will watch the eclipse from a North-eastern state, either in Arunachal Pradesh or Meghalaya. The solar eclipse will be visible from a narrow corridor spanning northern India, eastern Nepal, northern Bangladesh, Bhutan, the northern tip of Myanmar, central China and the Pacific Ocean. In India, the eclipse will be total in Surat, Varanasi and Patna and will last for six minutes—the longest in the 21st century