Solar eclipse, 17 February 2026. Image: ESA/Royal Observatory of Belgium
The eclipse creates favourable conditions for the experiment by highlighting the solar corona.
A group of Italian scientists are set to take advantage of tomorrow’s (12 August) solar eclipse to test a new tool that could shed more light on our understanding of the Sun.
The Circular Slit Spectrometer (CISS), funded by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, is designed to capture the spectrum of the entire solar corona – the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere – in a single photograph. This has been previously impossible.
The device has a circular slit that enables this when placed at a certain distance from the centre of the Sun, explained Principal Investigator Federico Landini of the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin. It offers an upgrade over previous instruments that took hours to scan the corona, when its movements change in minutes.
