Eclipse Megamovie Mobile Total Solar Eclipse 2017

Use your smartphone or DSLR camera to help astronomers track and photograph the next total solar eclipse across the USA this August, 2017. Learn about the phases of the solar eclipse, from first contact when the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun, until fourth contact at the end of the solar eclipse.

Camera filters and smartphone telephoto lenses help you photograph the solar eclipse. New features are coming soon that will guide positioning of your cell phone camera to get the best pictures of the sun during the solar eclipse.

A map feature tracks the path of totality to help you understand when and where to best see the total solar eclipse.

Eclipse Megamovie Project is a citizen-science project, and Eclipse Megamovie Mobile is an in-the-field tool that allows photographers around the world to participate with solar scientists by sharing their pictures and data captured during the total solar eclipse.

Ideum and the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley have partnered on this nationwide citizen-science project. The goal is to help you view and photograph this incredible solar system event from Oregon to Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina.

When you use your camera to photograph the August 2017 total solar eclipse, the images, time, and location data will be sent to the project team at UC Berkeley to help them create a massive dataset of solar eclipse observations.

This vast photographic archive will provide fertile ground from which researchers and citizen scientists alike can make future discoveries and explore the sun’s corona for years to come. The “Megamovie” itself will be created by stitching together a subset of these photographs to show the progression of the total solar eclipse over time as it crosses the US from coast to coast.

Led by Google, the Eclipse Megamovie Project (https://eclipsemega.movie) will add a new dimension to our studies of the sun’s faint outer atmosphere – the corona. Corona is Latin for, “crown,” but in astronomy, it is an aura of plasma that explodes and arches out the Sun. The plasma corona extends millions of kilometers into space from the Sun and is easiest to see during a total solar eclipse or with a coronagraph.

Taking good photos of astronomical events like eclipses, requires a steady hand and precise control of exposure time and sensitivity. Eclipse Megamovie Mobile helps you capture tack-sharp photos of the solar eclipse with your smartphone and provides information about mounting your phone on a tripod, adding an external lens, or using a DSLR camera.

The app also gives you a map and information about the best route from your location to the solar eclipse’s path of totality. A countdown clock tells you exactly how much time you have until the total solar eclipse.

Use your phone or other digital camera to take great pictures of the solar eclipse. If you use a DSLR camera to capture images of the total solar eclipse, those images may become part of a stunning crowd-sourced solar eclipse Megamovie created by Google.

In our solar system, a lunar eclipse occurs when Earth is in-between the Moon and Sun, where Earth casts a shadow on the Moon, curtaining it into the darkness of the universe. A solar eclipse occurs when the Sun is obscured by the Moon during its orbit around Earth. In other words, a solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, covering all or a portion of the Sun when viewing it from Earth.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon completely obscures the Sun’s surface or photosphere and cuts off all direct rays of sunlight from the observer, revealing the Sun’s corona, which looks like a diamond wedding ring. Partial eclipses occur when only part of the Moon or Sun is occluded during the eclipse.

August 21, 2017 is the first solar eclipse visible in the USA since 1979—and the first time a total solar eclipse has been exclusively visible in the continental US since 1776.