About Eclipse Camera Sobre el eclipse 2020
Eclipse Camera was an experimental project that allowed citizen scientists to use their mobile phones to capture photographs and video of total solar eclipses. We developed two applications, one for the August 2017 eclipse (Eclipse Megamovie) and a revised version (Eclipse Camera) for the July 2019 event. Our team at Ideum shared photos and stories from our 2017 eclipse trip to Western Nebraska and their follow up trip to Junin, Argentina in 2019. Following the 2019 solar eclipse, the project made the software open source and released it on Github.
We are not developing any software for the upcoming April 8, 2024 eclipse over North America. However, the SunSketcher project is building on our earlier efforts and they are creating a new and exciting way for citizen scientists to participate in the 2024 eclipse:
The size of the Sun is currently known to an accuracy of about 50 km. The observations that you and a million other SunSketchers will take on eclipse day with your smartphones will be used to hugely improve on this, revealing the size – and, more importantly, the overall shape – of the Sun to an accuracy of about a few km.
Additionally, the Eclipse Megamovie project continues, and it provides opportunities for photographers to participate in the April 2024 total solar eclipse. This project was originally funded by Google; the 2024 project has support from NASA.
For this project, at least 100 trained volunteers will take photographs of the total solar eclipse, using cameras on equatorial mounts to compensate for Earth’s rotation. Afterward, the project will provide over 1,200 eclipse photos to scientists and the public. Eclipse Megamovie 2024 will challenge volunteer photographers and data analysts to participate in an image-processing competition to uncover plasma flows and jets in the images. Eclipse Megamovie 2024 will also compare observations of the eclipse with results from the 2017 Eclipse Megamovie.
We encourage you to participate in these two exciting initiatives. The Ideum team is going to be an active participant in both projects, and we will share photographs from the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse that will occur over our studios in Corrales, New Mexico. In addition, our team will be based in Fredericksburg, Texas for the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. We will continue to post information about these events as it develops.
