Blog

Celestial Anniversary

by Hannah Hellman • 2025-04-08

Please join us in celebrating the one year anniversary of the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse!

One year ago, many of us set out to attend a seemingly otherworldly phenomenon. We traveled far and wide and even made last minute adjustments to plans that had been set years prior. Eclipse Megamovie is a special project for many reasons, and you are a huge part of what makes it special. Our project is built around capturing photographs of one singular event that lasts mere minutes, and our volunteers rose to the challenge in ways that have charmed and delighted us to hear about over the last year. We have been deep in the data this year, processing, aligning, and compiling the photographs you submitted. In this letter we’ll share some specifics of our work, as well as some celebrations happening outside of our project.

Most obviously, we continued the Eclipse Megamovie Volunteer Meetings each month. If you’d like to attend these meetings and you are not on one of our listservs, please email us at the email address we share below and let us know! We attended and presented our work at several conferences, including the American Astronomical Society and American Geophysical Union. Additionally, EM2024 metrics and data were added with the help of NASA Heliophysics to NASA’s overall Heliophysics Big Year report.

Data Collection

We formally finished the monumental task of collecting data from our volunteers in the last year, resulting in more than a terabyte of eclipse data. The EM2024 team has finished sorting through the data and confirming crucial metadata (such as latitude, longitude, and local time) that must be accurate, or the results of scientific research will not be reliable. As with many things in science research, data accuracy is key. It is worth spending the extra time with your data, and the results are already promising to be spectacular. The text below is taken from the Year 2 Annual Report, submitted by Principal Investigator Dr. Laura Peticolas:

Kaggle Competition

In November of last year, we launched our first-ever Kaggle Competition. The competition was a success, and we are in communication with winners to get their prizes shipped to them. The competition was established with data from the 2017 dataset, and asked participants to create a Machine Learning model that categorized photographs of total solar eclipses into several different categories. The page for the competition can be found here: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/eclipse-megamovie.

Algorithms and Analysis

To process the nearly two terabytes of data collected from our volunteers, EM2024 Science Co-Investigator Dr. Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros of UC Berkeley created, updated, and tested a pipeline for 2017 and 2024 eclipse images as they are processed with the help of an intern from NASA’s Neurodiversity Network (N3), Lillian Hall. Alignment of photographs from the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse remains a challenge, as there are extra steps that must be taken to orient photographs of the Sun depending on where and when (what local time) they were taken. This is one of many reasons why the accuracy of our data and the metadata with it is crucial. Lillian Hall presented on the Summer 2024 work to the N3 team and interns, the recording of which can be viewed on the N3 website: https://n3.sonoma.edu/internship/projects/2024/.

In 2017, the star Regulus was in most cameras’ fields-of-view when the eclipse photographs were taken, which was used to orient the photographs so that they could be rotated. However, the cameras photographing the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse for EM2024 did not have such a bright star in the field of view. For photographs that were taken with a Sun tracking mount, with accurate knowledge of the location photographed from, it is theoretically possible to rotate the images. However, some volunteers had mounts break or were unable to get them set up in time after abandoning established plans and traveling at the last minute to locations to be able to get to clear skies due to weather. So, we must be particularly careful with the ways we choose to rotate and align these images.

The EM2024 team met with Sonoma State University’s Professor Gill in September to discuss a rotation and alignment method involving Python Code (from Sun Py) to find solar North in the images, permitting rotation and accurate alignment. This method, however, required 100% accuracy in metadata of the photographs (such as time according to the time zone where the photographs were taken and an accurate latitude and longitude). We are still working on developing ways to use Machine Learning to aid in our data analysis, and will continue to give updates as we have them.

What comes next?

• Metadata: Dr. Peticolas and SSU students have been hard at work creating a csv file with accurate metadata for the eclipse dataset. Troy Wilson is finishing the process of ensuring that all the photographs per observatory (camera) have the correct metadata.
• Release Data to the Public: FITS files will be created with the csv files of metadata connected with eclipse photographs, and data will be shared with the scientific (and public) communities.
• Continued image analysis for publication: Building from Year 2’s analysis efforts, Year 3 will focus on characterizing the solar corona using both the 2017 and 2024 eclipse photographs.
• Present on our Participatory Science Program: Hannah Hellman will present our work with volunteer participants at the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences (AAPS) conference in Portland in May: https://participatorysciences.org/conferences/caps-2025/. Ms. Hellman is also continuing to coordinate and facilitate the monthly webinars with participants, writing blogs and disseminating the work and resources created by the EM2024 team.

As we enter the final year of our funding, we want to thank our volunteers and EM2024 community for your continued support and engagement in participatory science.

Dr. Laura Peticolas and the EM2024 Team

Other Eclipse Anniversary Celebrations:

We have offered a summary of our year, but we’d love to hear about your years as well! How did your eclipse experience go? Did you find yourself making any last-minute adjustments to your plans due to weather or other unforeseen circumstances? Has your experience stayed with you? What reflections have come to you over the last 365 days?

Let us know via social media (Instagram, Discord) or through our listservs. If you’d like to be added to a listserv, simply email us at edeon@sonoma.edu and be sure to indicate that it is for the Eclipse Megamovie 2024 Project.