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Eclipse Megamovie 2024: First Light Analysis

Presentation #124.07 in the session First Look at Citizen Science from the 8 April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse.

Published onJun 19, 2024
Eclipse Megamovie 2024: First Light Analysis

The “Great American Eclipse” in 2017 offered a unique opportunity for members of the public across the entire continental United States to experience the awe-inspiring changes that occur during rare total solar eclipses (TSEs). This event was also the first to involve citizen scientists in an organized structure to obtain scientifically useful images of the Sun’s corona as the eclipse occurred. In 2011, we began the “Eclipse MegaMovie” project for the 2017 total solar eclipse. The goal was to create a video using public photographs of the Sun’s corona as frames, illuminating dynamic changes in the chromosphere and corona. Each frame of the movie would be a photograph of the Sun’s atmosphere (i.e., its chromosphere and corona), starting from a photograph taken from the Oregon coast and ending with a photograph taken from the South Carolina coast. With enough photographs taken along the eclipse’s path of totality, a 90-minute, 30-frames-per-second, movie could be made with each photograph resized and aligned. In such a movie, dynamic changes in the Sun’s atmosphere would be visible. Slow changes in this video would primarily be due to the Sun, Moon, and Earth rotation and/or orbital motions over the 90 minutes. Such movies have been created, but left our team wishing for another chance to implement lessons learned. Now, in 2024, we have been funded by NASA to leverage the lessons learned in 2017 to sharpen both our observational strategies and our scientific goals while engaging our public participants in Heliophysics research with both datasets. As of April 14th, over 120 participants have uploaded a plethora of photographs, including calibration frames. Of these, about 46 participants had clear skies and were able to get all the calibration frames and submit photographs of the solar corona in raw formats with the field of view and exposures requested by the project. In this presentation, we share the first results of HDR images across the path of totality from our analysis with the clear-skies corona dataset.

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