Americans Prepare for Great Solar Eclipse Of 2. CBS Pittsburgh. PITTSBURGH KDKAAP Millions of Americans are getting ready to watch the spill some of its secrets, maybe even reveal a few hidden truths of the cosmos. And you can get in on the act next week if you are in the right place for the best solar eclipse in the U. S. in nearly a century. A total solar eclipse occurs Aug. United States, starting in Oregon and sweeping across the country to South Carolina. It will be the first full solar eclipse in nearly a century to stretch from sea to shining sea. Astronomers are going full blast to pry even more science from the mysterious ball of gas thats vital to Earth. Theyll look from the ground, using telescopes, cameras, binoculars and whatever else works. Get help planning your next trip with travel ideas, destination reviews, videos, travel tips and industry news. Share this Rating. Title The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 2008 5. Want to share IMDbs rating on your own site Use the HTML below. Watch the latest Featured Videos on CBSNews. View more videos on CBS News, featuring the latest indepth coverage from our news team. And by fully take control, I mean it lets drivers totally just screw around behind the wheel. According to Audi, drivers can even watch TV. Creative Nonfiction 65 is dedicated to discovering unexplored harmonies between science and religion. Whether considering the spiritual potential of Google search. Watch The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh Online ArtTheyll look from the International Space Station and a fleet of 1. And in between, theyll fly three planes and launch more than 7. We expect a boatload of science from this one, said Jay Pasachoff, a Williams College astronomer who has traveled to 6. BEST TIMES TO SEE THE SOLAR ECLIPSE IN THE PITTSBURGH AREA Photo Credit KDKAScientists will focus on the sun, but they will also examine what happens to Earths weather, to space weather, and to animals and plants on Earth as the moon totally blocks out the sun. The moons shadow will sweep along a narrow path, from Oregon to South Carolina. Between NASA and the National Science Foundation, the federal government is spending about 7. Mondays eclipse. One of the NASA projects has students launching the high altitude balloons to provide live footage from the edge of space during the eclipse. But its not just the professionals or students. NASA has a list of various experiments everyday people can do. Millions of people can walk out on their porch in their slippers and collect world class data, said Matt Penn, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Penn is chief scientist for a National Science Foundation funded movie project nicknamed Citizen CATE. More than 2. 00 volunteers have been trained and given special small telescopes and tripods to observe the sun at 6. The thousands of images from the citizen scientists will be combined for a movie of the usually hard to see suns edge. Mike Conley, a Salem, Oregon, stock trader whose backyard is studded with telescopes, jumped at the chance to be part of the science team. Who knows Maybe a great secret will come of this, the mysteries of the sun will be revealed, because were doing something thats never been done before and were getting data thats never been seen before, he said. A big discovery will come and everybody will say, Hey, we were part of thatYou dont need to have telescopes to help out. You can use the i. Naturalist app via the California Academy of Sciences and note the reaction of animals and plants around you. Fantasy Island Season 4 Episode 10. You can go to a zoo, like the Nashville Zoo, where they are asking people to keep track of what the animals are doing. The University of California, Berkeley, is seeking photos and video for its Eclipse Megamovie 2. Even with all the high tech, high flying instruments now available, when it comes to understanding much of the suns mysteries, nothing beats an eclipse, said Williams Colleges Pasachoff. Thats because the sun is so bright that even satellites and special probes cant gaze straight at the sun just to glimpse the outer crown, or corona. Satellites create artificial eclipses to blot out the sun, but they cant do it as well as the moon, he said. The corona is what astronomers really focus on during an eclipse. Its the suns outer atmosphere where space weather originates, where jutting loops of red glowing plasma lash out and where the magnetic field shows fluctuations. The temperature in the outer atmosphere is more than 1 million degrees hotter than it is on the surface of the sun and scientists want to figure out why. Its ironic that weve learned most about the sun when its disk is hidden from view, said Fred Mr. Eclipse Espenak, a retired NASA astronomer who specialized in eclipses for the space agency. And they learn other things, too. Helium the second most abundant element in the universe wasnt discovered on Earth until its chemical spectrum was spotted during an eclipse in 1. Espenak said. But that discovery is eclipsed by what an eclipse did for Albert Einstein and physics. Einstein was a little known scientist in 1. It explains the motion of planets, black holes and the bending of light from distant galaxies. Einstein couldnt prove it but said one way to do so was to show that light from a distant star bends during an eclipse. During a 1. 91. 9 eclipse, Arthur Eddington observed the right amount of bending, something that couldnt be done without the moons shadow eclipsing the sun. It marked a complete change in the understanding of the universe, said Mark Littmann of the University of Tennessee, a former planetarium director. Bang. Right there. MORE ABOUT THE SOLAR ECLIPSE FROM CBS NEWS What is a solar eclipseIts when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun. The darkness is the Moons shadow. When the sun is about halfway or 34 of the way covered, if you have a shade tree around and you look at the sunlight filtering down through the leaves of the shade tree and look down on the ground, you will see crescents on the ground, cause the leaves act like pinhole cameras, said retired NASA astrophysicist Fred Espenak, who is known as Mr. Eclipse. Just before totality, the sky starts getting dark, and you get one bright bead on the edge of the suns disk thats called the diamond ring effect. And then the Sun, its disk, is completely covered, and the corona is revealed in all its glory. Espenak has witnessed 2. So it should come as no surprise that he lives in the Arizona desert, far from city lights, in a development called Sky Village, where residents all have their own observatories. The name for an eclipse chaser like Espenak is Umbraphile or lover of shadows. Copyright 2. CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.