As well as sitting back and enjoying the spectacle,
here’s how people took part in some citizen science
HOW PEOPLE GOT INVOLVED
CROWDSOURCING
THE CORONA
THE ECLIPSE
MEGAMOVIE PROJECT
eclipsemega.movieTHE AUDIBLE
ECLIPSE
THE ECLIPSE
SOUNDSCAPES PROJECT
eclipsesoundscapes.orgREACTIONS TO
TOTALITY
LIFE RESPONDS
bit.ly/life_respondsPhotographers were able to help
produce a high definition,
time-expanded video of the entire
event. The Eclipse Megamovie
Project was headed-up by the
University of California and Google,
and is citizen science at its most
traditional. Organisers aimed for over
1,000 volunteers to pinpoint their
location on a Google Map, then send
in their photos of totality.
As well as allowing scientists to
study how the Sun’s outer
atmosphere (the corona) changes
over a few hours, it will also be
possible to see how it changes over
seven years when the project returns
during the next US total eclipse on 8
April 2024.Observing an eclipse is often
presumed to be a solely visual
phenomena, but there’s plenty to
listen to during a total solar eclipse.
The Eclipse Soundscapes Project
used an app to allow citizen
scientists to record sounds before,
during, and after the 21 August
eclipse. The project is focused on
capturing people’s reactions for
sociologists, but also to collect data
on the soundscapes of wider
natural environments such as a
change in birdsong. It’s an attempt
to provide evidence to naturalists of
the effect of an eclipse, but it will
also give the blind and visually
impaired an opportunity to
experience a total solar eclipse.While there is anecdotal evidence that
wildlife reacts to the darkness that
totality brings, there’s not much hard
science. On 21 August , citizen
scientists were asked to upload
observations using an app. “The
iNaturalist app is pretty well used
internationally to observe wildlife,”
says Elise Ricard at the California
Academy of Sciences, which led the
project. The team assembled a list of
target plants and animals before the
big day. “We’re asking people to take
at least two, and preferably three,
photographs of plants and animals:
one at least 30 minutes prior to totality- or greatest partial eclipse, depending
on where you are – one within five
minutes, and another 30 minutes
after,” Ricard said.
STUDYING THE
IONOSPHERE
HAMSCI
http://www.hamsci.org/node/122Ham radio enthusiasts helped with an
experiment called HamSCI that
studies the ionosphere, a
little-understood layer of the Earth’s
atmosphere. On the dayside of Earth,
solar radiation creates a strong
ionosphere; on the nightside, it
weakens. The ionosphere weakens
during a total solar eclipse too, but it’s
not known how much of the
ionosphere is affected, or for how
long. Changes to the ionosphere
during the eclipse will affect
radiowave propagation, so the
researchers behind HamSCI wanted
amateur radio enthusiasts to transmit
at various frequencies during the
eclipse, then cross-referenced the
results with automated ionospheric
monitoring networks.SCIENCE