A Coral Sea Rehearsal for the Eclipse Megamovie

Hudson, H.S., SSL, UC Berkeley and U Glasgow
Davey, A., Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Ireland, J., NASA/ADNET SYSTEMS
Jones, L., NCAR
McIntosh, S.W., NCAR
Paglierani, R., SSL, UC Berkeley
Pasachoff, J.M., Williams College and Caltech
Peticolas, L., SSL, UC Berkeley
Russell, R., UCAR
Suarez Sola, F., NSO
Sutherland, L., NCAR
Thompson, M.J., NCAR

The "Eclipse on the Coral Sea" - 13 November 2012 - will have
happened already. Our intention is to have used this opportunity
as a trial run for the eclipse in 2017, which features 1.5 hours
of totality across the whole width of the continental US.  Conceived
first and foremost as an education and public outreach activity,
the plan is to assimilate as much eclipse photography as possible,
and to create movie representations of coronal evolution in time.
The movie(s) will cover all ranges of expertise, and at the basic
smartphone or hand-held digital camera level, we expect to have
obtained a huge number of images in the case of good weather
conditions. The capability of modern digital technology to handle
such a data flow is new, and the basic purpose of this and the 2017
Megamove observations is to exploit this capability to facilitate
outreach and public education. The movie in 2017, especially, may
also have important science impact because of the uniqueness of the
corona as seen under eclipse conditions.

In this presentation we will describe our smartphone application
development (see the "Transit of Venus" app for a role model here).
We will also summarize the data acquisition via both it and more
normal Web interfaces.  Although for the Coral Sea event we don't
expect to have a movie product by the time of the AGU, for the 2017
event we do intend to assemble the heterogenous data into a beautiful
movie within a short space of time after the eclipse.  The movie(s)
would have relatively low resolution but would extend to the base
of the corona.  We encourage participation in the 2012 observations,
noting that no total eclipse, prior to 2017, will occur in a region
with good infrastructure for extended observations.

JMP's eclipse work about the eclipses of 2012 is supported by NSF
grant AGS-1047726. The Megamovie project and the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research are sponsored by the National Science Foundation