Many across the United States were awed by the spectacles of the Total Solar Eclipse earlier this week, with many watching it on the ground and some in the air.
There were a few that used their time in the days leading up and on the day of it to gather more research about the Eclipse, with many using it to help understand learn more about the sun, or it's corona.
A team of students from Virginia Tech were in Poplar Bluffs, Missouri during the day of the eclipse to launch high-altitude scientific weather balloons.
There were two strings of balloons, with one string of balloons will capture data and livestream video to NASA’s eclipse website.
Virginia Tech research associate Kevin Sterne tells KMOX a second string of weather balloons have payloads carrying undergraduate student experiments to examine the sun's radiation.
"It's a kind of unique experience where in the middle of this whole radiation and heating process, you kinds turn it off completely, kind of like flipping a switch," said Sterne.
One crucial aspect of the study was the timing. If the balloons were released too early, it could reach too high in the atmosphere and burst before the end of the eclipse event.
"We wanted to hit an altitude of 60,000 to 80,000 feet," said Sterne. "In order to get to that altitude, when the eclipse passed, we have launch it an hour and 20 minutes before hand, 60,000-80,000 feet roughly translates to 15-20 minutes of our launch window to hit those altitudes."
While the group's goal isn't necessarily look at the atmospheric data during the eclipse, their goal was to more help out with other scientists in those projects and gather it.
Sterne says as soon as the balloons landed, transfer of the data caught from the balloons were transferred to drives and skimming through the video of 4-5 cameras that are on the balloons as the students drove back to Blacksburg, Virginia.