Because SOHO is far away from the Earth and Moon, it always has a good view of the sun, and never sees any eclipses.

    The SOHO spacecraft has a special type of telescope for looking at the corona (called a coronagraph) which blocks out the disk of the sun so that the corona can be seen (just like what happens during an eclipse when the Moon goes in front of the sun).

     But the 'eclipse' that SOHO makes isn't as perfect as an eclipse on Earth so scientists need images of the sun during an eclipse on Earth to find out how they can make their eclipses on the spacecraft better.

    Prof. Pasachoff and his team are making such an image, matching the details of the filter and field of view to one of the SOHO coronagraphs.

The Williams College Eclipse Expedition is set up and training for eclipse day!

    In their "Shantytown" on top of the Mill Condominium (their hotel), they have built a house to block the wind. The wind has been blowing so hard on the island that it is hard to keep anything from shaking. Their wind screens look like a small shack on the roof of the hotel.

They decided to stay on the northside of the island. The southern tip of the island, which will have 30 seconds more of totality, is hard to get to and has an oil refinery that puts a lot of smoke into the air. So, the experiments will be done in a shorter amount of time.