Humans are lucky to live on a planet whose sun and moon appear, from our perspective on the ground, the same size in the sky. Every year and a half, on average, our gray satellite slides in front of our friendly neighborhood star, completely blocking its light somewhere on Earth: voilà, total eclipse.
One such event will occur on April 8, 2024. This total eclipse will move across North America from Mexico to Canada, passing through parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York State, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine in between.
Millions of people in the U.S. will see the eclipse. But they can do more than just watch: they can participate. Because the eclipse will darken the doors of so many, it is a perfect opportunity for a form of inclusive, open-to-anybody research sometimes called “citizen science.” Below are four NASA-funded projects that eclipse chasers can sign up for in order to contribute to earthlings’ understanding of both the nearest star and our home planet.
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SunSketcher
The SunSketcher app lets eclipse viewers do science on autopilot—which will help researchers pin down the sun’s precise shape—and get some artistic results in the process.
The sun’s shape may seem straightforward—a sphere!—but that answer leaves out some nuance. “It’s almost circular but not quite,” says Gordon Emslie, SunSketcher project lead and a professor at Western Kentucky University. Instead our star is actually a little squished, or oblate. Scientists can currently map the particulars of that oblateness on a 50-kilometer scale, but the goal of SunSketcher is to bring that measurement to within something more like a few kilometers…
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