How volunteers built the first calibrated white-light eclipse dataset from 58,837 images

NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project is an initiative aimed at combining amateur photographs from many locations into a continuous composite time-lapse sequence. Volunteers were recruited to capture the total eclipse at different places in the United States. A total eclipse occurs when the Moon blocks out the Sun’s bright surface, revealing the corona. The corona, which is the Sun’s outer atmosphere, is usually invisible due to the overwhelming brightness of its surface.

An eclipse typically lasts for 2–4 minutes at a single location and moves across the country. As a result, different observers can see it at different times. 58,837 photographs were taken at 143 volunteer-led observatories. Out of these, only 28 observatories had the resources to create fully calibrated Level 3 images. These images were combined to create over 1.5 hours of continuous corona observations. This is the first-ever white-light eclipse data set with calibration frames, making it a significant milestone in eclipse research.

This data set includes data at three different processing levels, from raw data to calibrated data, presented in the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) format. These images are open to the public in a centralized searchable database. These images, gathered by volunteers, set a new model of distributed observational astronomy. This dataset will improve understanding of coronal dynamics, which will help us predict events such as solar storms and geomagnetic disturbances.