Exploratorium Brings Eclipse OnlineExploratorium Brings Eclipse Online

"To see a total solar eclipse, you have to be in just the right spot." That's the explanation the Exploratorium, a San Francisco interactive science museum, gives on its Web site about how the moon appears to block the entire face of the sun.

But Thursday, you won't have to be in any particular spot to see an eclipse. Instead, a team from the museum will be in Zambia to capture video images of the eclipse with specially equipped telescopes and will send a live video feed back home to the Exploratorium and more than 100 other institutions via satellite. The museum also will stream the images online. To see it, log on to www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse; show time is 9:10-9:15 a.m. Eastern time.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is sponsoring the event, as it did two years ago when an Exploratorium team traveled to Turkey to capture an eclipse there. Thursday's show includes a 30-minute video link with astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms, who are aboard the International Space Station. They'll talk about how the sun affects life in space. For example, solar flares and huge bubbles of gas threaded with magnetic field lines that are ejected from the sun, called coronal mass ejections, can produce radiation bursts that affect everything from communications with Earth to the health and safety of the astronauts themselves.

The Exploratorium will open its doors at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time for a program featuring hands-on demonstrations, talks by astronomers, southern African music, and an appearance by astronaut Yvonne Cagle, who'll be going to the space station in the fall.