Press Release

Slooh to Livestream the Total Solar Eclipse from Indonesia with On-site Coverage

By SpaceRef Editor
March 1, 2016
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SLOOH is sending Astronomer Paul Cox on a wild expedition to the remote countryside of Indonesia to globally livestream the great spectacle of a total solar eclipse, live on Slooh.com, on March 8th starting at 3:00 PM PST ¦ 6:00 PM EST ¦ 23:00 UTC and ending at 6:00 PM PST ¦ 9:00 PM EST ¦ 02:00 UTC. Cox will be accompanied by a team from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), and he will provide updates of his journey throughout the week on Slooh. In addition to multiple feeds from Indonesia capturing totality, Slooh will have live feeds from several other locations along the eclipse path. The precise location of Slooh’s expeditionary team is being withheld due to security concerns.

Slooh will also feature its new StarShare Camera during the live event, making it possible for anyone in the audience to snap and share photos for FREE during this special eclipse coverage. Slooh is enlisting its fan base to share the images via Twitter and Facebook to call attention to Totality, starting at 7:37 PM EST, when the Moon will completely block out the Sun and enshroud the coverage area in darkness, a celestial moment worthy of a globally synchronous celebration of humanity’s common cause under a shared sky.

In conjunction with appearances at Style Fashion Week during New York Fashion Week and the Wanderlust Yoga Festival in Hawaii, Slooh has been building awareness in advance of the eclipse by encouraging fans to #ShadeUp, as they show they are ready to watch the eclipse by posting photos of themselves wearing eclipse glasses on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

The coverage of the Eclipse will be hosted by Cox and will include a range of special guests including solar expert Professor Lucie Green and Slooh Astronomer Bob Berman. Viewers can ask questions to the panel during the broadcast via the chatroom and using the Twitter hashtag #SloohEclipse.

Of the many worthy periodic celestial events, casual observers and professional astronomers are unanimous that the brief minutes of solar totality surpasses everything else in terms of spectacle and scientific usefulness. Only at totality can prominences be seen leaping like geysers of pink nuclear flame from the solar limb. Only then do the brighter stars emerge, while the Sun’s ultra-hot corona or outer atmosphere splays far across the sky, its pattern of plasma channeled along visually distinctive magnetic field lines. The very shape of the solar corona appears different and distinctive for each eclipse, and largely depends on the stage of its sunspot cycle.

Another unusual aspect of the March 8th eclipse is its challenging path across Indonesia, and other small island nations. Totality, which in this eclipse is unusually short at just over two minutes, crosses over only a tiny area of land in its long journey over a swath of the Pacific. Slooh’s expedition leader and host of the livestream, Paul Cox said, “What makes this eclipse so challenging to observe is the Moon’s shadow only makes landfall in a 100-mile wide track across Indonesia, which also happens to be a stretch of land in a continual state of political turmoil.”

He went on to say “The Moon’s shadow then races eastward across the Pacific Ocean faster than the speed of sound at an astonishing speed around 1,000mph (1,600kph). We’ll also have live views from our partner observatories in Hawaii when their partial solar eclipse commences.”

Main Feed – Feed Courtesy of Slooh

Link – www.slooh.com

Embed – <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://live.slooh.com/live_channel” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

If you embed our livestream, please also include the following copy, linking to Slooh.com:

You can go to Slooh.com to join and watch this live broadcast, snap and share your own photos during the event, chat with audience members and interact with the hosts, and personally control Slooh’s telescopes.

Total Solar Eclipse Time-Lapse

Slooh will provide a time-lapse of eclipse – no Audio but with Slooh watermark – for use on the web and in broadcasts, roughly three hours after the live stream ends. Please leave all watermarks visible, and credit Slooh.com in any scripts or website copy.

Event Timings:

Live Stream starts: 3:00 PM PST ¦ 6:00 PM EST ¦ 23:00 UTC

Live Stream ends : 6:00 PM PST ¦ 9:00 PM EST ¦ 02:00 UTC

Time-lapse Video Created 9:00 PM PST ¦ 12:00 AM EST ¦ 05:00 UTC

Slooh Media Policy:

We own all copyright to the text, images, photographs, video, audio, graphics, user interface, and other content provided on Slooh live broadcasts. At times, we may include additional content from NASA or other official partners to help explain what’s happening in the live image feed. A Slooh watermark will be included on our live feed. Slooh may run a house ad prior, during, or after any broadcast to highlight the Slooh Community. You may embed our feeds into your coverage so long as “Courtesy of Slooh” is located next to the feed with a link back to www.slooh.com. You may not embed Slooh’s coverage in web pages that include footage or links to other live coverage. You may not alter or modify our broadcast in any way, unless provided with written permission to do so.

About Slooh

Slooh connects humanity through communal exploration of the universe. We gather people around live telescopes to see space for themselves and share their diverse perspectives. Since 2003, Slooh’s automated observatories have processed celestial images in real-time for broadcast to the Internet. Slooh members have taken over 4m photos/500,000 FITS images of over 50,000 celestial objects, participated in numerous discoveries with leading astronomical institutions and made over 3,000 submissions to the Minor Planet Center. Slooh’s flagship observatories are situated on Mt. Teide, in partnership with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), and in Chile, in partnership with the Catholic University. Slooh has also broadcast live celestial events from partner observatories in Arizona, Japan, Hawaii, Cypress, Dubai, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and many more. Slooh’s free live broadcasts of potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), comets, transits, eclipses, solar activity etc. feature narration by astronomy experts Paul Cox and Bob Berman and are syndicated to media outlets worldwide. Slooh signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA in March 2014 to “Bring the Universe to Everyone and Help Protect Earth, Too.”

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SpaceRef staff editor.