Observers who plan to watch the total solar eclipse in April next year can use a new NASA-funded app to record valuable data about the Sun. Using a free app from SunSketcher, citizen scientists can help advance heliophysics research by capturing as many images of the Sun as possible just before and after the solar eclipse. Those images will help in recording data on a bright, broken ring of sunlight known as Baily’s beads, which shines through mountains and valleys on the edge of the Moon just before and after eclipses.”There are so many ways to participate in NASA science, especially as we enter the Heliophysics Big Year,” space physicist Elizabeth MacDonald, the heliophysics citizen science lead at NASA, said. “We’re so excited to watch these and our many other projects come to life.”
SunSketcher’s app is being developed by a team of students and professors at Western Kentucky University (WKU) and is the newest of five projects to receive funding from NASA this year to collect science data from the next total solar eclipse. “Our goal is to get a bunch of people – millions of people, hopefully – in the path of the eclipse to use our app and get a few pictures of the Sun as the eclipse happens and as the eclipse ends,” Starr May, a computer science major at WKU working on the app, said.