How We Do It

Our program, plus a separate transmission of just the telescope images of the eclipse, will be sent from a satellite truck in Yiwu, China, to a communication satellite, SinoSat-1. The satellite will amplify and retransmit the signals to an earth station in Guangdong Province in Southeast China. From there, the signals will be uplinked to a satellite over the Pacific Ocean, then downlinked to an earth station in Napa, California. The last uplink is to a satellite over the Americas. TV stations, the Exploratorium and other museums, and a server farm will receive transmissions from the satellite. The server farm will encode our program for Webcasting and send it to servers worldwide that will make the program available to Internet viewers. The server farm will also encode the program for streaming into Second Life.

©2008 Exploratorium