Citizen CATE 2024: Extending Totality During the 8 April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse with a Distributed Network of Community Participants

TL;DR

Citizen CATE 2024 engaged community participants across North America to capture high-quality, polarized solar corona data during the 8 April 2024 total solar eclipse, enabling extended observation of coronal dynamics.

Contribution

This project is the first large-scale citizen science effort to capture extended, high-resolution polarimetric data of the solar corona during a total eclipse.

Findings

Captured a 60-minute movie of the solar corona in polarized light.

Engaged 36 community teams across North America for data collection and education.

Produced new datasets for studying coronal heating and evolution.

Abstract

The Citizen CATE 2024 next-generation experiment placed 43 identical telescope and camera setups along the path of totality during the total solar eclipse (TSE) on 8 April 2024 to capture a 60-minute movie of the inner and middle solar corona in polarized visible light. The 2024 TSE path covered a large geographic swath of North America and we recruited and trained 36 teams of community participants ("citizen scientists") representative of the various communities along the path of totality. Afterwards, these teams retained the equipment in their communities for ongoing education and public engagement activities. Participants ranged from students (K12, undergraduate, and graduate), educators, and adult learners to amateur and professional astronomers. In addition to equipment for their communities, CATE 2024 teams received hands-on telescope training, educational and learning materials, and instruction on data analysis techniques. CATE 2024 used high-cadence, high-dynamic-range (HDR) polarimetric observations of the solar corona to characterize the physical processes that shape its heating, structure, and evolution at scales and sensitivities that cannot be studied outside of a TSE. Conventional eclipse observations do not span sufficient time to capture changing coronal topology, but the extended observation from CATE 2024 does. Analysis of the fully calibrated dataset will provide deeper insight and understanding into these critical physical processes. We present an overview of the CATE 2024 project, including how we engaged local communities along the path of totality, and the first look at CATE 2024 data products from the 2024 TSE.