Dear ALAGE members,

In the following years, South America will experience two Total Solar Eclipses on Jul 02nd, 2019 and Dec 14th, 2020. The totality path will cross Chile and Argentina both times (Figure
​ in attachment​
) and a partial eclipse will be also visible from Antarctica up to Venezuela. It is known that the shadow cast by the moon during a solar eclipse drives dramatic changes in the terrestrial atmospheric properties. Thus, besides the natural potentiality for solar coronal studies, total solar eclipses brings also special opportunities for investigations of the mechanisms of the generation and propagation of ionospheric localized changes and also large-scale effects of these disturbances. Although the aforementioned eclipse paths will cross only South America countries, ionospheric changes will be induced also in the Central and North America, due to the electrons inter-hemispherical transport along the geomagnetic field lines. Interestingly,  these eclipses will provide the first opportunities for investigating  the ionospheric effects induced around the Arecibo Observatory (AO)  Geomagnetic Conjugate Point (located in Argentina) having the World’s most sensitive Incoherent Scatter Radar, the AO-ISR, on the other end of the magnetic field line, for example.

Aiming to promote and expand the international and interdisciplinary scientific collaboration that both Eclipses open up to the ALAGE community and also enhance the Education and Public Outreach (E&PO) associated impact in the Latin America, we plan to start centralizing the information concerning experiments/workshops/events hosted or organized by ALAGE members around the Eclipse events. 

For that, we request from each ALAGE member to send to Alessandra Pacini (from Puerto Rico – apacini@naic.edu), the list of workshops/events your group will host about the events and the list of instruments your group are planning to use during the eclipses, including the following information: 

name of the instrument and scientific goal
lat/long
data time resolution
link to access the data (or email of the person who should be contacted to get the data/collaborate)
E&PO planned activity (if any)

Looking forward to explore the Eclipse opportunities with the ALAGE community,
Ale Pacini