New Volunteer Data from 143 Observatories Unveils the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse
On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project across the United States raced to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest and greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the solar corona.
Today, the Eclipse Megamovie team released the remarkable new dataset resulting from this effort: the first-ever white-light eclipse dataset with calibration images, covering more than a cumulative hour and a half of observations of the solar corona. This data, which includes a total of 52,469 photographs uploaded by project volunteers, is now available: https://eclipsemegamovie.org/database. The data includes contributions from 143 unique, mobile, volunteer-run “observatories” – people with cameras tasked with taking precise images of the eclipse, taking additional measurements to enable the careful calibration required to reveal how the corona changes from one view to the next. Researchers around the world can now use these observations to identify solar jets leaving the Sun’s surface and study the growth and development of solar plumes. The public can also view and download all of this data, which is highly accessible and searchable by observatory name and location.
“Thank you for everything you do and have done for us,” said Eclipse Megamovie volunteer Jessi McKenna. “Everyone in the group has been incredibly supportive of each other. And those running things are still visibly grateful to everyone who contributed to the project.”
The files include data at three different levels of processing, from raw data (level 1) to calibrated data (level 3), in a format called FITS, or Flexible Image Transport System. This is the standard astronomical data format used by NASA and the International Astronomical Union. Of the 143 unique observatories involved, 28 had clear skies, enough calibration frames, and enough unique exposure times to create calibrated Level 3 images.
The Eclipse Megamovie team from Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley and collaborators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center began working together well before the eclipse to build this database, in collaboration with EdEon STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) learning programmer Troy Wilson. But above all, Eclipse Megamovie 2024 was made possible thanks to hundreds of volunteers who traveled the path of the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 with their cameras, their patience and their curiosity.
