Amateur radio is often a hobby on a normal day. During a solar eclipse, it's part of a NASA research study.
On the fifth floor of the University of Scranton's Loyola Science Center, professors, students and citizens turned dials, pressed buttons and checked frequencies.
They chatted with other hams across the country who live under and on either side of the eclipse's path of totality.
The ham radio operators collected data on how Monday's solar eclipse impacted the earth’s ionosphere, a part of the earth's upper atmosphere. Ham radio operators communicate through signals that reflect off that electrified layer. The project is led by University of Scranton Professor Nathaniel Frissell, Ph.D., and involved university students and citizen scientists both locally and across the country.
"All of our radio signals, they pass through the upper atmosphere before they come back down to the ground," said Frissell, a professor in the physics and engineering department. "And the eclipse affects the upper atmosphere and the signals as they go through it."
Frissell stood on an outside deck on the fifth floor of the Loyola Science Science just after 3:23 — 95% totality in Scranton. The sky darkened, like a storm was rolling in, and the temperature dropped. Occasionally the clouds would move and glimpses of the blocked out sun, just a sliver behind the moon, would appear.
Frissell received a grant from NASA to hold two Solar Eclipse QSO Space Parties. QSO is ham-speak for when one radio operator talks to another.
"We hope to have some sort of better understanding of the upper atmosphere ... than we did before," said Frissell. "We're looking for a lot of little details."
Jonathan Rizzo used a Navy radio transmitter to study the bottom layer of the ionosphere. The Ph.D. candidate from Pittston is a member of the local Murgas Amateur Radio Club.
Rizzo was looking for a peak in the data.
"Which is the ionosphere responding to the moon shadow," he said.
That shadow creates a temporary night and changes the atmosphere.
"Which actually allows the signal to propagate better," he said.
Frissell said the citizen scientists involved in the project give it additional energy and really creates a community.
"I know for me and for the students, it makes us feel like we're part of something much bigger than just us," he said.
At ground level, the university’s astronomy club set up a telescope with a solar filter over the top. It works like a mega set of solar eclipse glasses. They planned to live stream the eclipse but it was too cloudy.
Robert Spalletta, Ph.D., is a professor of physics and engineering. He’s the club’s advisor.
"It's a really great confirmation of where we are in the universe," he said of Monday's celestial event.
Eclipses happen yearly but rarely in places where there are large populations, Spalletta said. They usually happen over water.
"I think that it's a great lesson for all of us … spending time to try to understand our world and our environment is really important," he said.
