Berkeley and Google are making a crowdsourced “Megamovie” on the August total solar eclipse

Google and the University of California, Berkeley are calling out to citizen scientists, astronomers, photography enthusiasts and the general public to collaborate on a massive project that will image the August solar eclipse on an unprecedented scale.

A person on any point on the ground can only see the upcoming total solar eclipse for a maximum of two minutes and forty seconds. Even someone following the eclipse on a plane can at most see four to five minutes of the eclipse as the shadow of the Moon moves along the ground at a breathtaking 2414 kilometres per hour.

The various layers of the sun that can be studied during the total solar eclipse.

The Eclipse Megamovie Project is looking for over a thousand volunteers to photograph the August total solar eclipse in high quality, and upload them on the web site. The images will then be stitched together into one movie, documenting the path of the eclipse across America, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. The collected imagery will be converted into a 90 minute movie, unlike anything seen before. The resulting movie will have scientific applications as well, and can be studied by researchers to unlock the secrets of the Sun.

The path of the eclipse. Image: Eclipse Megamovie Project

The volunteers will be trained by the Eclipse Megamovie Project. The general public can participate by downloading a smartphone app that is being developed. The smartphone app will capture timecoded photos of the eclipse that will be uploaded to a central database. These images will be re-purposed for a second, lower resolution movie. The project also hopes to archive images from all sources for future reference. Both the movies will be scientifically useful.

 

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