Kelsey Perrett

We woke up to thunder the day of the eclipse, and loaded our equipment in the interludes when skull pounding downpours leavened to sheets of drizzle. Our significant others and friends and family along for the journey watched weather radars on their phones, and tried to mop up our damp spirits with optimistic reports, though all forecasts contained clouds. Still, we geared up and drove an hour and a half south toward totality.

Our destination was the Lower Hamburg Conservation area, a sliver of wildlife refuge tucked between the Missouri River and a vast cornfield owned by the Beans, a family of former popcorn farmers. From the levee that formed the border between the public and private lands, it was nothing but corn and sky as far as the eye could see, punctuated by a weatherbeaten barn and silo that had been left dilapidated by flooding in 2009.

We´d stumbled on the property by luck, driving through the heartland for hours with the Eclipse Soundscapes app open to assess the eclipse percentage and duration in various cornfields. We also had to test our cell service, to ensure we could deliver a Facebook Live broadcast we’d promised our headquarters at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. On the levee between John Bean´s cornfield and the Lower Hamburg Recreation Area, signal was strong, the eclipse percentage was 100%, and we would experience over a minute of totality. Or rather, we would if the clouds ever cleared.

The clouds had little interest in the eclipse. They were unwilling to reroute their commute, and as high as we set our hopes, they couldn’t reach the cloud cover enough to break it. We donned eclipse glasses and looked into the spot where the sun should have been. The dark abyss only stared back.

It wasn’t the first time the project met a hurdle. In the few short months since Eclipse Soundscapes´conception, we’d jumped hurdles, pivoted to avoid barriers, re-pivoted away from corners, and often, stood obstinately in the way until walls moved for us. When Apple denied our app from the App Store, just three weeks before the eclipse, we hung our heads only long enough to put our noses to the grindstone. We crafted appeals, coded new features, and re-submitted three times before the reviewers relented. With the immovable deadline of celestial trajectories always looming, we spent late nights and weekends alone working, yet we always worked together.

So Monday in that cornfield, we refused to take on the dark mood of the sky. Instead, we opened up the Eclipse Soundscapes app to use it exactly as it was intended: an experience for people who cannot see the eclipse. We would hear the audio narration while the eclipse unfurled behind a private curtain of cloud, and we would listen and feel the world change around us. If we had learned anything from the people with visually impairments who we had worked with throughout the course of this project, it was that the universe does favors for no one, and you work with the tools you’ve got, and the positivity of your experience in this world directly correlates to your attitude.

Then, several minutes before the eclipse, the clouds began to part. Or rather, they seemed to retreat towards the horizon, the center of the sky becoming lighter and lighter even as ground grew dark in the shadow of the moon. “This is the full eclipse, when the moon´s black disk completely covers the sun…” began NCAM´s Brian Gould, the voice of the Eclipse Soundscapes app. And there in the sky, we saw it all.

For several moments, the moon was indistinguishable as a sphere. From behind protective lenses, it was only the tongue of a vast dark swath, lapping away the last orange wisps of the sun. A swarm of swallows flitted by and into the trees lining the river. A dark layer of twilight followed them, and for a fraction of a second, the sun went out entirely.

Then, it re-emerged as a spectral ring. John Bean´s cornfields went dark except for a violet sunset bleeding in reverse from every horizon. The wind ceased rustling the dry stalks. The ring in the sky glowed for an abbreviated minute before a hot pink string of Baily´s Beads pushed out from the righthand curvature. And just as the light hit our eyes, a diamond emerged from the top of the sun, it´s gleam refracting in the clouds and raining down in a brilliant shimmer.

As the shadows lifted from the Earth, a flock of pelicans rose from the riverbanks in arrow formation and coasted in a wide circle before disappearing from sight. From the far side of the river, an owl whistled a few confused notes. People began stringing words together in arrangements more closely resembling sentences.

In about 63 seconds, we had witnessed all the phenomena we had spent months educating others about. But we’d also come to understand the incomparable awe which keeps otherwise sane people travelling the world in search of the next eclipse.

Even after a champagne celebration, our Principal Investigator Dr. Winter woke up at 4 am like a kid on Christmas, and checked the downloads of the Eclipse Soundscapes app. At 57,477 downloads, we had smashed our target. And as we basked in the afterglow of totality, the emails rolled in.

“I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to have been able to share in this experience,” one user wrote. “Being visually challenged, this app was beyond my imagination.”

“Like everyone else there, I was counting down to totality, and when it happened, everyone, myself included, was blown away,” wrote another.

“The caring, intelligence, and creativity that went into this innovation are immensely impressive, and the sheer joy and excitement it gave me are beyond words,” read another email. “Thank you, thank you for making this possible.”

These emails fill us with more joy than our fans will ever know, and all we can say is no, thank you.

When we asked people to listen to the soundscapes of the eclipse with our app and with their own ears and audio equipment, we were encouraging a form of mindfulness. There is a meditative quality that comes with active listening and experiencing the world through sound. The ego quiets, the senses heighten, the present moment shines through, and all that is left…

is gratitude.

Now that you’ve read all about the Soundscapes Project, you may be asking yourself: how does this apply to me? And that’s great! We love people who ask questions! The thing is, you don’t have to an astrophysicist, a diehard eclipse chaser, or a person with a visual disability to enjoy Eclipse Soundscapes. In fact, we think the more people our project reaches, the stronger it is. Here are three reasons you might want to pay attention to what we’re doing:

YOU CARE ABOUT INCLUSIVITY

One of the main objectives of the Eclipse Soundscapes Project is to bring this exciting astronomical event to the blind and visually impaired community. We want everyone to get as excited about astrophysics as we do, but the tools to make science accessible have not always existed. That’s why we’ve created an app with illustrative audio descriptions, which will be delivered in real time as the eclipse progresses, and an interactive “rumble map” which will allow users to explore the physical qualities of an eclipse through touch and sound. These tools are not only valuable to individuals who are blind and visually impaired, but to people of all different learning and communication styles. By providing these oft-excluded groups with the right tools to learn about astrophysics, we aim to strengthen science by reaching a larger, more diverse population.

YOU CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT

There is no better time than now to get people interested in preserving our fascinating planet, and the more we know about our ecosystems, the better we can protect them. Eclipse Soundscapes is working with partners such as the National Park Service to collect high quality audio recordings in wildlife areas across the country. With these recordings, we hope to learn more about how and why animal behaviors change with the variations in light and temperature caused by a solar eclipse. After the eclipse, Eclipse Soundscapes will host these recordings alongside the recordings of citizen scientists to provide an open source database of sounds for researchers and educators to study.

YOU CARE ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

Are you an audio engineer? An app developer? A self-proclaimed video game nerd? When we set out to create our app, there were a lot of hurdles. But instead of setting the bar lower, our team innovated to create an app with some pretty exciting advancements in accessibility technology. We’re especially proud of our Rumble Map, which uses a technology called “FM Synthesis” to mimic a haptic response in a smartphone. The Rumble Map reads a grayscale value under the user’s finger, scales it from 0-1, and then adjusts the volume of a low frequency tone to produce vibrations in a phone’s speakers with a strength relative to the brightness of that section. The tool, created in collaboration between our audio engineer Miles Gordon and iOS developer Arlindo Goncalves, is based on the haptic response usually experienced in gaming and virtual reality platforms. Accessibility reviewers who tested the app say they’ve “never seen anything like it.” It’s a technology worthy of a patent, but that would go against our belief that science is for everybody. In fact, our entire project will be free and open source so other tech geeks can improve upon our innovations.

Of course, there are many other reasons to care about Eclipse Soundscapes. What’s yours? Tweet us at @EclipseSoundUDL to tell us why YOU are excited.

On Saturday, August 19, NASA scientists took a break from reaching into the depths of  space and instead reached out to the citizens of suburban Nebraska to promote eclipse knowledge and safety at the Arrows to Aerospace Parade.

This year’s annual parade in Bellevue, Nebraska, just south of Omaha, was organized by the Bellevue-Offutt Kiwanis to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nebraska’s statehood. However, when Bellevue Public Schools teacher Santha Walters learned the parade would coincide with the week of the August 21 “Great American Eclipse,” she enlisted NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center scientist Dr. Jack Ireland and Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory scientist Dr. Henry “Trae” Winter to participate in the event.

“I realized the eclipse would be in the middle of the afternoon on a school day,” Ms. Walters said. “I thought, if we’re going to have all these kids, we’re going to use this as a learning opportunity.”

Ms. Walters pitched the idea to her superintendent as a weeklong string of activities to include the entire community. “Every child with resources is going to travel to totality on Monday,” she said. “Not everybody can take the day off work to experience the eclipse with their child. So I wanted to create something for those kids, to bring the eclipse to them and make them feel as if they are part of this community. This is something people are going to remember for the rest of their lives.”

Dr. Ireland and Dr. Winter spent the week in Bellevue, speaking to the general public on eclipse mechanics and safety and to seventh and eighth grade students about the importance of a STEAM education. “You could just see in their faces they thought ‘this is really cool, we have a real-life scientist here,’” Ms. Walters said.

Saturday’s parade was the final event of “Eclipse Event Bellevue 2017” before the grand finale of the eclipse, and thousands of Nebraskans and visitors poured out onto Lincoln Road to watch. While organizations of all stripes participated in the march, an underlying space and aeronautics theme had clearly established itself, from Star Wars costumes to eclipse t-shirts.

“We’re all so excited to have the eclipse right in our own backyard,” said Bellevue Mayor Rita Sanders, who plans to watch the eclipse from a leadership center in Aurora, Nebraska.

The parade culminated in Washington Park, where Dr. Ireland and Dr. Winter disembarked from their NASA-themed silver convertible to join their team at an eclipse information booth. The team came equipped with informational flyers, NASA stickers, demonstrations of the popular Eclipse Soundscapes app, and of course, free eclipse glasses.

The NASA approved eclipse glasses were a hot commodity. Popular vendors such as Amazon had run out of reputable viewing glasses in the weeks before the eclipse, and many booth visitors reported being unable to find them for a reasonable price. Luckily, the group from NASA and the Smithsonian had come prepared with over 5,000 pair, which they gave away to an eager line of parade-goers stretching back nearly a block.

Though the booth’s guests were excited to score free glasses, many were equally thrilled to meet two real-life astrophysicists. “I was amazed at how many people were at the parade and how many waited in line to talk to Jack and me about the eclipse,” Dr. Winter said. “We got really well thought out and specific questions and I loved talking to everyone who came by our booth.”

“It’s cool because they are obviously really smart and know a lot,” said one Bellevue High School student, who walked alongside the Dr. Ireland and Dr. Winter in the parade. “But they are also regular people, and easy to talk to.”

Another enthusiastic visitor was a nine year old girl from Bellevue, who hopes to become an astronaut on Mars one day. She is excited to experience her first total solar eclipse.

“I’ve only only seen one before, and it was amazing,” Dr. Ireland told her. “It’s the most spectacular thing I’ve seen in the skies by far.”

Armed with her eclipse glasses and a beaming smile, she titled her head towards the sky and prepared to be amazed.

The concepts of light and shadow are crucial to how most of us understand a solar eclipse. But what if you had never seen the light of the sun before? What if an accident or a genetic condition impeded your ability to perceive the shadows of nightfall? For 1.3 million Americans who are blind, and many more who are visually impaired, experiencing the wonder of a total solar eclipse may seem like a pipedream. The Eclipse Soundscapes Project wants to change that.

The Eclipse Soundscapes Project, sponsored by NASA’s Heliophysics Education Consortium, will allow both sighted and non-sighted users to experience the “Great American Eclipse” of August 21, 2017 through sound — by recording changes in natural and urban soundscapes during the eclipse, and through illustrative audio descriptions (provided by WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, or NCAM) so that people who are blind and visually impaired can enjoy a narration of the eclipse in real time. The Eclipse Soundscapes app also includes an interactive “rumble map,” so users can explore the physical properties of an eclipse through vibrational feedback in their smartphones.

“The archetypal image of an astronomer is somebody with their eye to a telescope looking out to the stars — that automatically leaves out the segment of the population who are blind and visually impaired,” said Dr. Henry “Trae” Winter, the project’s founder and principal investigator. “But science works for everyone, no matter who you are. Giving people who have been traditionally excluded from the astronomy and astrophysics enterprise a tool to explore science on their own terms is giving them an experience which means a lot to me.”

Audio is an ideal way for blind and visually impaired users to experience an eclipse, not only because there is some anecdotal evidence of soundscapes changing during a total eclipse, but because blind and visually impaired individuals naturally develop instincts to navigate the world with auditory information.

“The audio takes a visual concept and brings it into one of the ways that we experience the world without sight,” said Dr. Wanda Diaz Merced, a blind astrophysicist consulting on the project. “Audio is the fastest and most straightforward way to provide an experience that we hope will awe people.”

Exploring the eclipse with the Eclipse Soundscape app may even give visually impaired individuals a leg up on their sighted peers when it comes to eclipse knowledge. NCAM developed the audio descriptions of the eclipse with methods usually designated for educational materials such as textbooks. The details of the description are “dictated by the context of the image, not necessarily its complexity or visual interest,” said Bryan Gould, director of Accessible Learning and Assessment Technologies at NCAM. “Since the Eclipse Soundscapes project has specific educational goals for each phase of the eclipse, this image description includes scientific and technical terms and their definitions.”

With this additional information, those listening may contribute something new to a discussion of the eclipse with their sighted peers. The “rumble map” also allows for a detailed up-close exploration of the sun and moon, where a user may find elements that a person viewing the eclipse wouldn’t notice.

The goal is to have a multitude of tools, so visually impaired individuals can interact with the eclipse independently and on their own terms. “Disabled people are as different from one another as abled people are,” Dr. Diaz-Merced said. “Actually, we are more different from one another. I need to be able to bring my own strategies to anything I do. Not coping strategies, but my own strategies.”

While Eclipse Soundscapes is primarily focused on the blind and visually impaired community, the audio and tactile tools used in the project could benefit anyone who learns or communicates through non-visual measures. After the August 21 eclipse, the Eclipse Soundscapes team plans to expand the prototype into an interactive and immersive multi-sensory museum exhibit. The multi-sensory information adds to the experience for visual people, Dr. Winter said, “but allows for different ways to engage people who are visually impaired, or deaf, or neuroatypical.” However you collect information about the world around you, the hope is that you thoroughly enjoy the experience of learning something new.

The Egyptian death mask was inconceivably ornate, so intricate that one could study it for hours and still find new details. But because the mask was under glass, a blind person could not touch it, could not run her fingers across the beads and engravings and smooth crevasses of the face. She could only raise her fingers to the braille plaque and read: Egyptian death mask.

That troubled astrophysicist Dr. Henry “Trae” Winter. But what troubled him more was the realization that his own recently installed exhibit — a visually striking solar wall — was even less accessible. He began brainstorming how he could share his love of science with the blind and visually impaired community, and joined the “Tactile Sun” project, which creates tangible images of the sun using 3D printers.

Some months later, he visited his congenitally blind friend Chancey Fleet at work at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Talking Book and Braille Library, and gifted her a braille book about the August 21, 2017 “Great American Eclipse.” Winter was surprised when Fleet finished the book and admitted she still didn’t entirely understand an eclipse. As someone who had never seen light, or shadows, or even a map of the United States, she was missing the visual concepts most of us unthinkingly use to understand such events.

So Winter shifted gears, and told an anecdote of the “false dawn chorus,” an eclipse phenomenon in which light-sensitive creatures such as crickets become confused when the moon blocks out the sun. When sunlight re-emerges, the creatures believe it to be dawn, and initiate their morning chirping. Fleet not only understood, but got excited, and Winter realized that soundscapes were the key to unlocking the eclipse for the blind and visually impaired community.

Winter got started immediately on the Eclipse Soundscapes Project. “Not only would it be a way to engage the visually impaired community in a way that’s accessible, a way they can relate to along with their sighted peers, but there might also be some science as well,” Winter said.

The Eclipse Soundscapes app, which will be released at the beginning of August, will include illustrated audio descriptions of the eclipse in real time, recordings of the changing environmental sounds during the eclipse, and an interactive “rumble map” app that will allow users to visualize the eclipse through touch. You can read more about it on our About the Project Page.

So why is Winter, a sighted person, so determined to bring astrophysics to the visually impaired community? “Science only works if it’s for everybody,” he said. “I really hope we build tools that inspire and make possible the tools of the future. There’s a saying: ‘I can only see further because I’m on the shoulders of giants.’ Scientists know that their work is made possible by those who came before, and will be advanced by those who come after. We’re all part of chain. But I hope to be a useful link in building the future.”