Eclipse Megamovie Citizen Science: The Diamond Ring
Abstract
The 2017 North American total eclipse has begun to encourage many outreach and citizen-science activiites. We describe here a part of the Eclipse Megamovie program, in which we deploy a smartphone app to enable anybody with a GPS-equipped smartphone to record correct images of Baily's Beads (the "Diamond Ring" effect) for subsequent analysis. The multiply oversampled recordings of 2nd and 3rd contacts, across and along the track, will provide material for unique movie representations of the astronomical phenomenon. After the fact, this highly oversampled dataset can be used to confirm and/or extend detailed satellite topography of the Moon from Kaguya and LRO. In addition the high angular resolution inherent in the "knife-edge" motion will provide a unique view of the structure of the solar limb itself. The low angular resolution of the smartphone cameras is a handicap, but excellent time resolution and massive oversampling are great advantages. We anticipate public participation in image selection to get the best sequences of last few-millisecond imagery for the science product here, which can follow the known motions of the solar limb due to p-modes and granulation. No comparable database exists, and so the final product of this crowdsourcing will be a public archive of the data and metadata for future studies.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMED21C0792H
- Keywords:
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- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATIONDE: 1902 Community modeling frameworks;
- INFORMATICS