Presentation #124.08 in the session First Look at Citizen Science from the 8 April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse.
A significant part of the Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast Initiative (DEB) was to establish a North American, volunteer based, citizen science, white light telescope network to observe the April 8th, 2024, total solar eclipse. The scientific goal of this part of DEB was to measure the acceleration of coronal plasma in the inner corona adding to what the group accomplished in 2017 (Penn et al, 2020, PASP 132). With technological advances in cameras, optics and mounts and by using off-the-shelf capture software, DEB observation equipment costs were less than half of the 2017 site equipment, allowing for the funding provided by NASA and NSF to be spread across more teams than in 2017. The DEB initiative was made up of 88 teams at the time of the eclipse; 73 in the path of totality and 15 outside of the path. This allowed DEB to bring in over 300 citizen science volunteers primarily from high schools, universities, informal astronomy groups, and local community organizations. Training was accomplished via online video, documents and scheduled practices for all but 20 of the teams, further reducing the cost of the project. The 20 teams that received more formal in-person training consisted of youth girl groups that, in addition to participating in DEB, were also part of the Einstein’s Incredible Universe (EIU) project, partially NSF funded in cooperation with the Cosmic Picture and the National Girl’s STEM Collaborative Project.
Developing quality training materials and automating the processes of capturing, processing and uploading the solar images proved to be challenging aspects of the development of the project, and poor weather in the Central and Southwest regions of the US led to less than optimal data collection conditions for many of the teams, but we are anticipating over 60% of the sites acquired useable data during totality, with nearly full coverage across the path of totality. Concurrent to the collection and processing of the eclipse data, plans are being refined to keep the volunteers engaged in follow-on projects with the equipment. While these follow-on projects will continue to provide excellent opportunities for STEM outreach, they are intended to provide scientific quality data for study.