Anyone who views a total solar eclipse from within the path of totality focuses on the sun's majestic corona. This is the only time it can be seen and photographed with the naked eye.
But another layer, the chromosphere, is also visible during a total eclipse. between the sunOn the surface of our planet – the photosphere – and the corona, the chromosphere is a layer of extremely hot gas (plasma), through which jets and plumes of plasma flow on their way into space.
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But there is a problem. “Solar physicists don't know how much mass leaves the Sun,” said Laura Peticolas of Sonoma State University in California, who leads the NASA-funded study. Megamove 2024 eclipse Project to Space.com. “A total solar eclipse provides information to the solar community that cannot be provided in any other way.”
Eclipse Megamovie 2024 is focused on creating an open source dataset to help solar physicists solve a fundamental problem in plasma dynamics during the total eclipse on April 8. Plasma moves from the Sun's photosphere into space, but it is impossible to know the extent of NASA's space use. Solar Dynamics Observatory. It uses an occultator to block out the sun's bright disk, but to ensure none of the sunlight damages the optics, it must block the achromatic envelope and lower the corona. But this is where the action happens. “There is an area that we cannot see well using NASA satellites in visible light,” Petikolas said. “We have the opportunity to calculate the density of the plasma as it moves outward by capturing scattered visible white light.”
This can only be captured during a total solar eclipse. About 100 trained citizen scientists — all of whom have their own DSLR camera and have been given an equatorial mount (to compensate for Earth's rotation) — will produce about 1,200 images of the corona and chromosphere. In addition to producing new data for scientists, the results will be compared to the same project from 2017 during the last aggregate Solar eclipse in the United States
He was Powered by Google It relied on 2,000 smartphone owners who downloaded an app to capture and upload more than 34,000 images of the eclipsed sun. This effort to produce a video compiled from images collected by citizen scientists along the trail was a great success, but was not as scientifically valuable as had been hoped. “We didn't ask people to have an equatorial mount, so the sun moved into the field of view on their photos,” Peticolas said. “We gave them four different exposure times to use as an example, and we thought people would change that, but mostly they didn't.” Peticolas hoped there would be at least 90 different exposures in thousands of images, which is what experienced eclipse photographers get during a totality. “That didn't happen, so we didn't have the data density we needed to make really good images,” Peticolas said. Despite this, scientists eventually found evidence of a plasma plume in our data, but things need to change by 2024.
Now, with better equipment – and with 100 people taking and uploading much higher quality images at 50 different exposures – Eclipse Megamovie 2024 will hopefully achieve something even more detailed – and more dramatic.
This time, there will be more images and a greater variety in exposure times. In addition, the Sun is approaching – or perhaps already reaching – solar maximum, which means processed images that are more visually impressive than in 2017. Solar maximum – the peak of the Sun's magnetic activity in 11 years Solar cycle — is critical because citizen scientists are likely to capture more activity in the corona and chromosphere than in 2017. “In 2017, we didn't have the variety of exposure times to get a high-dynamic-range image of the corona,” Petikolas said. , which hopes to obtain all kinds of images from an additional 2,000 volunteers using DSLR cameras as well as from 100 trained photographers. “This time we will.”
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