The students did all the work, Fowler said. She “got to sit back and enjoy the show.”

Godfrey, who was participating in the project as a summer intern, was at the Fort Laramie site. She and a handful of other students filled the 4-foot-diameter latex balloons with helium, calibrated the radiosondes with a laptop, then downloaded the data with a handheld radio unit as the balloons took flight.

Godfrey will use their data, along with that gathered by other teams, to study how the lowest 10,000 feet of the atmosphere — called the planetary boundary layer — responded to the eclipse.

“I feel lucky to be part of something so big that happened across the country,” she said.

Ian Fleming, a sophomore physics major from Petersburg, Alaska, also helped launch the radiosondes from Fort Laramie. He will compare the data to predictions from computer models, which could help improve the models.

Currently, “simulating winds is tricky at best,” he said.

The data are also being made available to other researchers, Fowler said.

“This was great, real-world, hands-on training for students,” she said. “When they know that someone is going to use their data, they are much more engaged.”