Are Man Made Eclipses now possible?

[wklee]

Was The April 8 Eclipse Manmade?

ESA's solar eclipse maker, Proba-3

Hundreds of millions of people will witness next week’s total solar eclipse across North America, and solar physicists from around the globe are flocking to join them. Eclipses offer a brief glimpse of the Sun’s ghostly surrounding atmosphere – the solar corona – normally kept invisible by the...

www.esa.int

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/03/22/solar-eclipse-corona-science/

 

[petrochemist]

Man made eclipses are possible, either by using a disc of some sort to block the sun, or by travelling in a space craft to the shadow of another heavenly body.
Scientific instruments that study the corona have been doing the first of these for many years. The size of the disc for this is critical & will depend on the viewing hardware.

But creating a man made eclipse of the sun with the moon as seen from the earth is never going to practical, for this you are reliant on the natural orbits lining up precisely. Which is what a band of the USA experienced on April 8th.

 

[Yar1971]

As petrochemist wrote, scientific instruments named coronographs are known to scientists for many decades. But they can't rival natural eclipse. If operating on Earth, they cannot extinguish sunlight dispersed in atmosphere, so outer corona is not visible, even if instrument is placed in high mountain observatory. Of course space-operated coronographs don't suffer this problem, You can find images from them (there's couple of sun-observing space probes, monitoring also solar corona).
Another thing is that any coronograph, even with external occulter (like Proba 3 mentioned here) cannot simulate "landscape" phenomenons that happen during real eclipse. This is about the scale: Moon's shadow touching the Earth is usually 100-200km wide on it. No human-built occulter can rival this, right? Even if would be placed on LEO (Low Earth Orbit). That's all about size and geometry.
Regards,
-J.

 

[wklee]

Thanks for your replies!

 

[DeusExMamiya]

Good replies. The key points about the "man-made eclipse" method are that (1) it only works outside the Earth's atmosphere, and (2) it only works on a very small footprint: at most the diameter of the spacecraft telescope that is imaging the Sun, or at least a small area centred on the Sun in the camera's focal plane.

You can see images of this nature (https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html) from the LASCO C2 and C3 cameras on the SOHO spacecraft, which has been operating around Earth's L1 Lagrange point since 1995 (https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/SOHO/SOHO_overview). The images update every 12 minutes.