The Eclipse Megamovie Project (2017)

TL;DR

The Eclipse Megamovie Project collected and created a public database of eclipse photography during the 2017 total solar eclipse, engaging volunteers and institutions to produce a large outreach and data resource.

Contribution

It is the first large-scale public database of eclipse images created through volunteer participation during a total solar eclipse.

Findings

Engaged hundreds of volunteers in eclipse photography

Supported by major institutions like Google and UC Berkeley

Produced the first comprehensive public eclipse movie database

Abstract

The total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, crossed the whole width of North America, the first occasion for this during the modern age of consumer electronics. Accordingly, it became a great opportunity to engage the public and to enlist volunteer observers with relatively high-level equipment; our program ("Eclipse Megamovie") took advantage of this as a means of creating a first-ever public database of such eclipse photography. This resulted in a large outreach program, involving many hundreds of individuals, supported almost entirely on a volunteer basis and with the institutional help of Google, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and the University of California, Berkeley. The project home page is \url{http://eclipsemegamovie.org}, which contains the movie itself. We hope that our comments here will help with planning for similar activities in the total eclipse of April 8, 2024.