[EMP2012] Poster

[Hugh Hudson]

Dear all

I need to give Paul Cally a title for the poster, so that it can be announced in the program. So here is my first thought for title and abstract. The content of the poster would probably include what we discussed on Wednesday, but it will take some time to develop that and so the abstract here probably needs to be a bit vague. We'd have "Team" authorship here, I suggest, but we would need to find volunteers to hang around the poster on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday for best effect.

I'd like to send something to Paul over the weekend so that he will have it Monday morning in Australia; thus please respond in the next couple of days.

Hugh

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"A Movie of the Coral Sea Eclipse: Practicing for 2017"

The Eclipse Megamovie Team

A total eclipse in 2017 will traverse the full breadth of the United States and last for an hour and a half. We plan to organize a large effort to acquire and reprocess many still images of the corona into a "Megamovie," or rather a series of them depending upon the quality of the input data. This effort aims mainly at public outreach, and we intend to sponsor activities to enlist schools in the eclipse path among other amateur participants. The movies may also have scientific content, since many kinds of coronal variability do occur within this time scale. Whereas true variability is sometimes difficult to detect on these time scales (see, e.g., the recent multii-site results from Habbal et al., 2011, and Pasachoff et al., 2011), a lucky sighting of a CME or other transient could occur at any time (e.g., the 1860 eclipse described by Eddy, 1974, as possibly the first CME sighting). Since the eclipse corona extends to the very surface of the Sun, such a sighting would have clear scientific value and should be documented well if at all possible.

For the Coral Sea eclipse our team would like to carry out a first rehearsal of our plans for 2017. This effort will include multiple outreach activities, instruction on eclipse observation for inexperienced observers, the establishment of Internet-based tools for data transfer, the acquisition of as many eclipse images as possible (with their metadata), and finally the processing of these images into movie format. Among the Web-based tools we are working to provide an app for smartphones, with the idea that at almost any amateur snapshot can contribute at least to a record of Baily's Beads. This app will instruct and guide observers, and help to record the metadata for their images.