April 8, 2024 Volunteer Participants NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project The nation rushed to photograph the eclipse using the latest and greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the sun’s corona.

Now, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released a remarkable new dataset resulting from this effort. This is the first ever white-light solar eclipse dataset with a calibration frame spanning more than 1.5 hours of cumulative observations of the solar corona. This data contains a total of 52,469 photos uploaded by project volunteers and is currently publicly available. https://eclipsemegamovie.org/database. This data includes contributions from 143 unique volunteer-led mobile “observatories.” This “observatory” is a camera-wielding group of people tasked with taking precise images of the eclipse, taking special measures to enable the painstaking adjustments needed to reveal how the corona changes from one person’s perspective to the next. Researchers around the world can now use these observations to identify solar jets as they leave the Sun’s surface and study how solar plumes grow and develop. The general public can also view and download all of this data, making it very accessible and searchable by observatory name and location.

“Thank you for all you do and all you do for us,” said Eclipse Megamovie volunteer Jesse McKenna. “All members of the group are incredibly supportive of each other, and the people running things are always clearly grateful to everyone who has contributed to the project.”

The file contains three different processing levels of data, from raw (level 1) to conditioned (level 3) data in a format called FITS (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, sufficient calibration frames, and enough unique exposure times to produce calibrated Level 3 images.

The Eclipse Megamovie team at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley, and collaborators at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, along with EdEon STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning programmer Troy Wilson, began working together to build this database long before the eclipse. But importantly, Eclipse Megamovie 2024 is made possible thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who set out in the path of the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, with their cameras, patience, and curiosity.