Citizen CATE 2024: Extending Eclipse Totality with a Community-Participant Distributed Observing Network

The Citizen CATE 2024 next-generation experiment placed 35+ identical telescope teams along the path of totality during the total solar eclipse (TSE) on April 8th, 2024 to capture a 60-minute movie of the inner solar corona in polarized light. We recruited and trained 35+ teams of community participants (“citizen scientists”) from cities along the eclipse path, who retained the equipment in their communities for future outreach, education, and public engagement activities. The 2024 TSE path covered geographically and demographically diverse regions, including rural, urban, and tribal communities. CATE 2024 prioritized access to scientific enterprise for historically overburdened and underrepresented communities, engaging with participants ranging from students (K12, undergraduate, and graduate) and educators to amateur and professional astronomers. In addition to equipment, CATE 2024 teams received hands-on telescope training, educational and outreach materials, and education on data analysis techniques.

CATE 2024 used high-cadence, high dynamic range (HDR) polarimetric observations of the corona to characterize the physical processes that shape the heating, structure, and evolution of the solar corona at scales that cannot be studied outside of a TSE. The “middle corona” (1.5–3 R_⊙) defines the connectivity between surface magnetic structures and the outflowing solar wind, but the transition between the lower (below 1.5 R_⊙) and upper corona (above 3 R_⊙) magnetic morphology regimes is not well understood. Conventional eclipse observations do not span sufficient time to capture changing coronal topology, but the extended observation from CATE 2024 does, and CATE 2024’s unparalleled dataset of polarized visible light provides deeper insight and understanding into these critical physical processes.

We present an overview of the CATE 2024 project, including its impact within local communities, and first results from TSE 2024, along with a first evaluation of the project’s achievements of its scientific and outreach goals.